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LIVE MOSAIC Town Hall (Archived): www.airborne-live.net

Tue, Jan 28, 2003

TSA Helped Favored Screener Applicants Get High Scores: Report

It's tough, when your boss is insisting loudly and publicly, that you have to hire the right kind of people (as opposed to merely the best people, opening up the process to everyone).

The recruiting team for the TSA was aware of the agency's officially-voiced desire to recruit as many minorities and women as possible. The problem was, at least from the numerous witness reports we received, the applicant pool wasn't cooperating. The TSA's required mix of applicants didn't show up at the door, so we're figuring that the deck had to be somehow stacked, to achieve the TSA's published, desired result.

Well, now the AP reports that, "Four baggage screeners at LaGuardia Airport said they were given answers to questions on a certification test moments before they took the exam, Newsday reported Sunday."

The screeners in the story were not identified, likely because they feel as secure about being whistleblowers as do some Iraqi nuclear scientists; so we cannot verify if they were indeed members of the favored classes of applicants -- but what other motivation would there be?

TSA Denies Everything

To no one's surprise, Mark Hatfield, a TSA spokesman, said the alleged screeners were lying. "That absolutely would not be done," Hatfield told Newsday.

So far, it's four against one. If the TSA would release information about its applicant pool's demographics, its screen-the-screener process, and the criteria it used to flunk so many non-special-group applicants, perhaps their position would be more credible -- assuming we could trust the numbers they'd give us, in the first place.

Make up your own mind.

It comes down to, "Whom do you believe?" Does one believe the screeners, who presumably have nothing to gain, and a lot to lose, by independently exposing what they see as crooked dealings; or should we believe the TSA, which, while touting its 'balanced' results, apparently pulled every trick in the book to achieve them, and refuses to discuss methodology, or even the broadest parameters of the applicant pool and the screening/testing methods?

Interestingly, a Boeing spokesman (Boeing administered the test, once the TSA determined who might be eligible to take it), told Newsday, "I consider it unlikely that an instructor would have reviewed every question in advance of the test." [Besides, scores were never made available to the applicants -- so no one ever knew if he actually did more-poorly than the 'desired' applicant, anyway --ed.]

FMI: www.tsa.gov

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Debugging Information
ColdFusion Server Enterprise 2023,0,16,330828
Template /ANNTicker.cfm
Time Stamp 02-Dec-25 09:09 AM
Locale English (US)
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)
Remote IP 10.0.20.1
Host Name 10.0.20.1


Execution Time

Total Time Avg Time Count Template
132 ms 132 ms 1 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/Application.cfc | onRequest(/ANNTicker.cfm) ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/Application.cfc
131 ms 131 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/parsed/main.textpost.cfm
62 ms 62 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/model/main/actTextPost.cfm
52 ms 52 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/model/main/qryTextPost.cfm
5 ms 5 ms 1 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/Application.cfc | onRequestStart(/ANNTicker.cfm) ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/Application.cfc
3 ms 3 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/model/main/actWidgets.cfm
3 ms 3 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/layout/dspBannerAds.cfm
3 ms 3 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/layout/dspWidgets.cfm
2 ms 2 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/display/dspTextPost.cfm
1 ms 1 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fusebox.init.cfm
1 ms 1 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/model/main/qryAnnouncements.cfm
1 ms 1 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/model/main/qryWidVideo.cfm
1 ms 1 ms 1 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/fuseboxApplication.cfc | compileRequest(main.textpost, CFC: fckeditor.fb551.fusebox5.myFusebox) ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/fuseboxApplication.cfc
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/CustomTags/bph/QuerySim.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/cftags/sharelinks.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/model/comments/actDisqus.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/model/main/actFooter.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/model/main/qryAudio.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/model/main/qryNewscats.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/comments/dspDisqus.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/display/dspAnnouncements.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/layout/dspNewscats.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/layout/dspSidebar.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/layout/layAnnNew.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/layout/widgets/widget_234BannerZone.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/layout/widgets/widget_admin.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/layout/widgets/widget_flashAd.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/layout/widgets/widget_podcasts.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/layout/widgets/widget_search.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/layout/widgets/widget_today.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/view/layout/widgets/widget_topvideos.cfm
0 ms 0 ms 1 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/Application.cfc | onRequestEnd(/ANNTicker.cfm) ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/Application.cfc
0 ms 0 ms 13 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/components/utils.cfc | RandomNumber() ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/components/utils.cfc
0 ms 0 ms 1 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/components/utils.cfc | tagstripper() ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/components/utils.cfc
0 ms 0 ms 1 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/fuseboxAction.cfc | getAccess() ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/fuseboxAction.cfc
0 ms 0 ms 1 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/fuseboxApplication.cfc | expandFuseboxPath(parsed/) ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/fuseboxApplication.cfc
0 ms 0 ms 2 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/fuseboxApplication.cfc | getCoreToAppRootPath() ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/fuseboxApplication.cfc
0 ms 0 ms 1 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/fuseboxApplication.cfc | getVersion() ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/fuseboxApplication.cfc
0 ms 0 ms 1 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/fuseboxEvent.cfc | init([complex value], [complex value], CFC: fckeditor.fb551.fusebox5.myFusebox) ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/fuseboxEvent.cfc
0 ms 0 ms 2 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/myFusebox.cfc | getMyself() ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/myFusebox.cfc
0 ms 0 ms 1 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/myFusebox.cfc | getSelf() ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/myFusebox.cfc
0 ms 0 ms 1 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/myFusebox.cfc | init(fusebox, [complex value], [complex value]) ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/myFusebox.cfc
0 ms 0 ms 1 CFC[ C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/myFusebox.cfc | trace(Fusebox, Request completed) ] from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/clients/aero-news.net/fb551/fusebox5/myFusebox.cfc
3 ms  STARTUP, PARSING, COMPILING, LOADING, & SHUTDOWN
140 ms  TOTAL EXECUTION TIME
red = over 250 ms average execution time


SQL Queries

post (Datasource=AeroNews, Time=51ms, Records=1) in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\clients\aero-news.net\model\main\qryTextPost.cfm @ 09:09:47.047
SELECT
	cb.ContentBlockID as id,
	cb.ContentBlockName as title,
	cb.Display,
	ct.DisplayTemplate,
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FROM
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WHERE
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Query Parameter Value(s) -
Parameter #1(CF_SQL_varchar) = A3C9A86D-2C1F-42B0-95D7-E40E78046A21

GetAnnouncements (Datasource=AeroNews, Time=0ms, Records=1, Cached Query) in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\clients\aero-news.net\model\main\qryAnnouncements.cfm @ 09:09:47.047
SELECT HTMLContent
FROM ContentBlockLive
WHERE ContentBlockKey = 'ANNOUNCE' 
	AND Status = 60 
	AND ((Display <{ts '2025-12-02 09:00:00'} OR Display IS NULL) 
	AND (Expire > {ts '2025-12-02 09:00:00'} OR Expire IS NULL))
qryAudio (Datasource=AeroNews, Time=0ms, Records=0, Cached Query) in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\clients\aero-news.net\model\main\qryAudio.cfm @ 09:09:47.047
SELECT NewID() as id,
	CAST(episodesid AS VARCHAR(38)) as myid,
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	ApprovedDate as published,
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	podcastsid as categoryid,
	CAST('audio' AS char(8)) as mytype,
	ApprovedDate as GroupDate,
	SPACE(2) AS previewimage,
	0 AS sortorder
FROM episodes
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	AND ApprovedDate <{ts '2025-12-02 09:00:00'} ANd ApprovedDate > {ts '2025-11-28 09:00:00'} 

Order By published DESC, sortorder DESC
qryWidVideo (Datasource=AeroNews, Time=0ms, Records=3, Cached Query) in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\clients\aero-news.net\model\main\qryWidVideo.cfm @ 09:09:47.047
SELECT TOP 3
videoId as id, 
	convert(varchar(38), videoId) as myid, 
	title, 
	CAST(description AS Varchar(2000)) as description, 
	Cast(teaser AS Varchar(800))as teaser,
	published,
	filelocation, 
	categoryid,
	CAST('video' AS char(8)) as mytype,
	published as GroupDate,
	previewimage,
	0 AS sortorder
	
FROM Videos
WHERE active = 1 AND approved = 1 AND published <{ts '2025-12-02 09:00:00'} 
ORDER BY published DESC
widgetsorted (Datasource=, Time=2ms, Records=6) in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\clients\aero-news.net\model\main\actWidgets.cfm @ 09:09:47.047
SELECT *
	FROM qryWidgets
	WHERE wname IN('flashAd','today','search','podcasts','topvideos','adsection234')
	ORDER By sortorder
NewsCategories (Datasource=AeroNews, Time=0ms, Records=7, Cached Query) in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\clients\aero-news.net\model\main\qryNewscats.cfm @ 09:09:47.047
SELECT 
			ContentTypeName, ContentTypeCode
		FROM ContentType 
		WHERE CategoryCode = 'NEWS' AND CONTENTTYPECODE <> 'ATRVNW'
		ORDER BY ContentTypeName
NewsCategories2 (Datasource=AeroNews, Time=0ms, Records=8, Cached Query) in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\clients\aero-news.net\model\main\qryNewscats.cfm @ 09:09:47.047
SELECT 
			ContentTypeName, ContentTypeCode
		FROM ContentType 
		WHERE CategoryCode = 'NEWS'
		ORDER BY ContentTypeName


Scope Variables

CGI Variables:
AUTH_PASSWORD=
AUTH_TYPE=
AUTH_USER=
CERT_COOKIE=
CERT_FLAGS=
CERT_ISSUER=
CERT_KEYSIZE=
CERT_SECRETKEYSIZE=
CERT_SERIALNUMBER=
CERT_SERVER_ISSUER=
CERT_SERVER_SUBJECT=
CERT_SUBJECT=
CF_TEMPLATE_PATH=C:\inetpub\wwwroot\clients\aero-news.net\AnnTicker.cfm
CONTENT_LENGTH=0
CONTENT_TYPE=
CONTEXT_PATH=
GATEWAY_INTERFACE=CGI/1.1
HTTPS=off
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HTTP_ACCEPT=*/*
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HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE=
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HTTP_COOKIE=CFTOKEN=de0a23d9d499a6d3-B9F70407-B636-1854-5685C9C410379A23; JSESSIONID=0ABE36A5F0AB91A542B26C910D9359A8.cfusion; CFID=5185311
HTTP_HOST=www.aero-news.net
HTTP_REFERER=
HTTP_URL=/ANNTicker.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=A3C9A86D-2C1F-42B0-95D7-E40E78046A21
HTTP_USER_AGENT=Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)
LOCAL_ADDR=10.0.20.10
PATH_INFO=
PATH_TRANSLATED=C:\inetpub\wwwroot\clients\aero-news.net\AnnTicker.cfm
QUERY_STRING=do=main.textpost&id=A3C9A86D-2C1F-42B0-95D7-E40E78046A21
REMOTE_ADDR=10.0.20.1
REMOTE_HOST=10.0.20.1
REMOTE_USER=
REQUEST_METHOD=GET
SCRIPT_NAME=/ANNTicker.cfm
SERVER_NAME=www.aero-news.net
SERVER_PORT=80
SERVER_PORT_SECURE=0
SERVER_PROTOCOL=HTTP/1.1
SERVER_SOFTWARE=Microsoft-IIS/10.0
WEB_SERVER_API=
Cookie Variables:
CFID=5185311
CFTOKEN=de0a23d9d499a6d3-B9F70407-B636-1854-5685C9C410379A23
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Session Variables:
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urltoken=CFID=5185311&CFTOKEN=de0a23d9d499a6d3-B9F70407-B636-1854-5685C9C410379A23&jsessionid=0ABE36A5F0AB91A542B26C910D9359A8.cfusion
URL Parameters:
do=main.textpost
id=A3C9A86D-2C1F-42B0-95D7-E40E78046A21
Debug Rendering Time: 18 ms