In April, Kip Hawley [1], the head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), invited me to Washington for a meeting. Despite some serious trepidation, I accepted. And it was a good meeting. Most of it was off the record, but he asked me how the TSA could overcome its negative image. I told him to be more transparent, and stop ducking the hard questions. He said that he wanted to do that. He did enjoy writing a guest blog post [2] for Aviation Daily, but having a blog himself didn't work within the bureaucracy. What else could he do?
This interview, conducted in May and June via e-mail, was one of my suggestions.
“Interview with Kip Hawley [3]”
Being a former Fed herself, Bunny often takes me to task for some of my more outrageous “anti-government” stances, and the difficulty faced by Federal law enforcement in protecting our country.
But … it's the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) … security theater at it's finest [4]! A target even easier than shooting fish in a barrel [5].
And to his credit, Kip Hawley even mentions as much in this interview, which I think is well worth reading.
(I had thought of titling this entry “Interview with a Vampire” but thought that might be a bit too much. I would have done “Interview with a [DELETED-Vampire-DELETED] Fed” but adding HTML (HyperText Markup Language) to the title would render my RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed [6] invalid. I only mention this because I really liked the idea.)
[1] http://www.tsa.gov/who_we_are/people/bios/kip_hawley_bio.shtm
[2] http://aviationweek.typepad.com/airports/2007/03/guest_blog_tsas.html
[3] http://www.schneier.com/interview-hawley.html
[4] http://www.google.com/search?q=TSA+security+theater
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(season_6)#Shooting_Fish_in_a_