The Transportation Security Administration wants to move forward with its plan to issue “secure” identification cards to airport, railway and maritime workers, even though a test of the system revealed significant problems with its security and general operation, without fixing the problems first.

Consider first that many of the card readers for the Transportation Workers Identity Credential system will have to operate in maritime environments, being exposed to salt water. Fresh water is bad enough for electronics, but once it’s dry, it’s usually okay. Not so with salt water. This stuff destroys electronics. TSA has no idea if it will have readers that are designed to work in this environment.

And this is only one of several significant problems exposed in a Government Accountability Office report (PDF) released last week.

“Rapidly moving forward with implementation of the TWIC program without developing and testing solutions to identified problems to ensure that they work effectively could lead to further problems, increased costs, and program delays without achieving the program’s intended goals,” the report said.

Wait, the TSA is going to waste our money on a “security” solution they don’t even know works yet?

In August, the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General’s office released its own report on the security of the TWIC program, noting that “significant security weaknesses . . . may threaten the confidentiality, integrity and availability of sensitive TWIC data.”

One of those security weaknesses, GAO noted, is the fact that lost and stolen identity cards don’t get revoked before the cardholder gets a replacement card. Oops! Now you may be thinking that this is no big deal, because the cards have a biometric component, but just suppose the biometric readers aren’t working because they’re soaked through with salt water, or because they were built on crappy pork-barrel contracts rather than the best quality work available. Suddenly that lost or stolen card gets you into a supposedly secured area of a seaport, rail yard or airport.

And the testing that TSA did do wasn’t much testing at all, far less than had been planned for the program.

TSA enrolled just 1,700 workers, instead of the planned 75,000 for the test, at a total of 28 port, airport, rail, maritime exchange, truck stop and U.S. Postal Service facilities, according to GAO. TSA experienced a lack of volunteers and technical difficulties in enrolling workers, leading to a small testing population, which will make it problematic for TSA to scale up to enrolling and issuing cards to 750,000 workers at 3,500 facilities.

Although TSA acknowledged challenges to its implementing the TWIC program, it plans no further testing. — Government Computer News

Oh, did I mention waste of money?

“The program has been plagued by cost overruns and missed deadlines,” Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Daniel Inouye of Hawaii said in response to the report. “I continue to be troubled by the lack of a comprehensive management plan — a plan that is more than a year overdue to Congress.”

The report also found that poor planning and lack of effective oversight by TSA resulted in a doubling of contract costs, Inouye said. “The report’s findings make it all the more important the Commerce Committee continue to conduct strong oversight over the implementation of the program,” he said. “I am troubled by the cost estimates developed by the Department of Homeland Security and will closely monitor the costs of this program.”

A study by an independent contractor last year concluded that the cost for nationwide implementation of TWIC could range from $1.1 billion to almost $2 billion. — National Journal’s Technology Daily

Even so, TSA wants to start enrolling workers by the end of the year. Everyone will be subject to background checks and watchlist screening before they receive one of these poorly secured ID cards, and will need to have the card in order to keep their jobs.

TSA head Kip Hawley said that everything was going to be fine, just fine. “Massive changes have happened here,” Hawley told the Associated Press. “We have a good acquisitions team and a good process.”

The biggest change, though, was the addition of more bureaucrats to “augment the existing team with the critical skills needed to implement TWIC,” wrote Homeland Security inter-governmental liaison Steven J. Pecinovsky in his response to the GAO report. Having people who know what they’re doing from the beginning, of course, never occurred to anyone.