It was during Kip Hawley’s tenure as director of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration that a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences set out to evaluate the approach to risk analysis being taken by the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security more generally. The committee’s conclusions were pretty grim: not only could the committee find no risk analysis capabilities in the agencies that were adequate to support the decisions that the agencies had made, but it couldn’t even figure out how the DHS was defining “risk.”

Hawley’s new memoir of his time in office, Permanent Emergency, written with Nathan Means, substantially corroborates the NAS committee’s findings. Although the book repeatedly declares that “risk management” is a central concern, it is never clear what that means. Insofar as one can begin to grasp a possible meaning, it appears to justify the committee’s observation that little attention has been paid “to the features of the risk problem that are fundamental.”

High among those neglected features is a consideration of probabilities. For example, at no point does Hawley, in his laudable desire to make airlines safer from terrorism, suggest that he has tried to answer the fundamental question, how safe are we? At present rates, a passenger’s chance of boarding an airliner that is subsequently attacked by terrorists is one in something like 20 or 30 million. (See “Screening Tests for Terrorism,” p. 26.) Maybe for some that’s not safe enough, but it’s where the conversation should start.

There is also an amazing neglect of costs, except very occasionally to note that one security measure was more expensive than another. But the key issue in risk analysis is not simply to compare costs, but to determine whether a security measure reduces risk—the likelihood and/​or the consequences of an attack—enough to justify its cost. The book is innocent of such analyses, which would, of course, require a coherent definition and assessment of risk.

In addition, Hawley constantly and tendentiously exaggerates the likely consequences of planned, but foiled, terrorist attacks. Like earlier irresponsible alarmists, he proclaims without explanation that our “survival” is at stake, insists without supplying coherent evidence that al-Qaeda networks currently exist in the United States, and engages in the familiar ploy in which an “al-Qaeda-inspired” terrorist group in one sentence becomes an “al-Qaeda-linked” group in the next.

He also consistently exaggerates the capacities of the terrorists, never finding them to be less than “innovative,” “adaptive,” and “quick moving.” These qualities, he says, require the TSA to be “lightning-fast” in connecting thought to action (lots of luck on that one). And all terrorist bomb makers seem to be “masterminds,” even though the underwear bomb deployed to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner in 2009 suffered from a couple of rather unmasterly design flaws according to Hawley: it could not be detonated and was too small to destroy the aircraft.

He is also alarmed at the danger presented by terrorist bombs using hydrogen peroxide. He does, however, note in passing that even world-class laboratories are able to get this explosive mixture right only one time in three. This difficulty might help explain why no terrorist (however innovative, adaptive, masterly, and quick moving) has been able successfully to detonate even a simple bomb in the United States since 2001 and why, except for the four bombs set off in London in 2005, neither has any in the United Kingdom.

Bureaucracy and security | The book provides a glimpse of the chaos that attended the hasty scramble to set up the TSA in the years immediately after 2001. Hawley seems to be less impressed by the agency’s obscene waste of taxpayer money than by the success of the frantic efforts to meet absurd deadlines. In the process, what was created, he admits, was merely “an amped-up version of the previous system, one in which government employees simply replaced private contractors.”

The book does have quite a bit of detail. We learn, for example, what Hawley had for breakfast on the day he was asked to become TSA chief. And there are a number of little personal vignettes along with discussions of bureaucratic infighting. He also proudly says he applied “network theory” and “complexity theory” to the workings of the TSA. This apparently means he worked to give screeners more “autonomy and improvisatory ability” at their “chokepoint”—qualities that, however, do not seem to be in great evidence in the lines I’ve stood in.

Although the operations of the massive intelligence system that has burgeoned since 9/11 have been extensively discussed in a far more important book, Top Secret America by Dana Priest and William Arkin, Hawley does provide some arresting insights into its workings. He talks of the lengthy and frequent briefings in which barrages of intelligence, relayed in “story-time” fashion, only “rarely result in action.”

On the morning of his last day in office, shortly before Barack Obama’s inauguration, he dutifully waded through intelligence reports in quest of possible “threat streams.” At the time, intelligence “had already highlighted threats to mass transit”—although, of course, none of those ever materialized. One of the reports particularly caught his eye: the corpses of four young men recently found at a small, remote “training camp” in Algeria, possibly killed by poison or by “some sort of biochemical accident.” This set Hawley to wondering, “had they maybe been practicing for today on the [M]all?” This creative, if rather extravagant, exercise in dot-connecting is, says Hawley, a “perfect metaphor for how I had spent nearly the last four years of my life.” That would be, of course, at taxpayers’ expense.

The 9/11 Commission, as Hawley points out repeatedly, blames the 2001 disaster on a “failure of imagination.” The problem now seems to be a surfeit.

As it happens, the Algerian corpse “threat” (a word that seems to have become a synonym for “lead”) was only one of hundreds that Hawley examined on his last morning at the TSA, and the FBI reportedly sifts through over 5,000 of them each day. With the swelling intelligence apparatus pitchforking ever more “threats” onto the haystack to be pawed through by people paid to be imaginative, we will always be in an “emergency.” The title of Hawley’s book, then, is not—as might at first appear—an oxymoron.