A Man On A Big Mission
Kip Hawley's fast and furious plan to beef up airport security
Even before there was a Transportation Security Administration, Kip Hawley had his hands in it. Shortly after 9/11, Hawley, a former Department of Transportation official turned software executive, was picked to lead a group of government employees and business leaders brought in to help create the new airport screener force. One of their ideas was to invite officials from Disney World to brief TSA's architects on how to deal with long lines.
TSA will need that sort of expertise in the days to come. An estimated 8.75 million people will take to the skies this holiday season. Many will see changes in security--changes engineered by Hawley, who's now the head of TSA. Hawley was behind the recent decision to allow passengers to carry small scissors on board, but he's far from done. He has vowed to increase the variability of the screening process, increase intelligence gathering, and generally shake things up. In just five months at the helm, Hawley has acquired a host of admirers and an imposing group of critics.
Ripples. A Massachusetts native, Hawley, 52, lacks the military or law enforcement background of TSA's former chiefs. He's a cerebral Brown University graduate fascinated by The Logic of Failure, a German business management tome focused on how small changes ripple through organizations. In a recent speech, Hawley said he was embracing more "flexible thinking" at TSA.
Not everyone, however, is a fan of such thinking, or even agrees on what it is. And so Hawley's announcement that he was taking small scissors and tools off the list of prohibited items immediately drew fire from lawmakers like Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who introduced a bill to reverse the changes.
Unfazed, Hawley is pressing on. Now he wants to expand a program in which screeners monitor fliers for signs of agitation, like subtle facial tics, which might indicate a passenger is concealing a weapon or intends to cause some other kind of trouble. "Passengers with illegitimate, violent agendas don't act normally when passing through checkpoints," says Rafi Ron, a former security director at Israel's Ben-Gurion Airport, "if you know what to look for."
TSA screeners with special training will also check for false documents that may allow passengers traveling under aliases to circumvent terrorist watch lists. Measures like these have proved successful in a pilot program at Boston's Logan Airport and are being gradually phased in elsewhere across the nation.
At Hawley's direction, TSA personnel are already moving away from their traditional screener posts and employing more of what New York University Prof. Paul Light calls "the curb-to-cockpit model." This holiday season, roaming TSA officials, some working undercover, will watch travelers "from the moment they step out of a vehicle to the moment they leave the premises," Light says. Hundreds of explosives-detection dogs will also be on duty.
Such changes, Hawley hopes, will help address TSA's dismal employee morale. He also wants to allow talented screeners to move up to more prestigious air marshal posts. In mid-December, Hawley had TSA officials patrolling rail and bus stations as part of experimental "viper teams" that might eventually be deployed more widely. Officials in Philadelphia and Houston said they would have liked more notice that the feds were coming. But, hey, Kip Hawley is a man in a hurry.
This story appears in the December 26, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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