A New Hole in LAX Security?

Everyone who flies knows the security rituals at LAX, the body scans and the patdowns. But NBC LA has learned that airport authorities are looking into what may be a serious weakness that could compromise all these security checks and give a troublemaker or terrorist a direct path to the tarmac and other sensitive areas.

LAX fined for ongoing security lapse. Read update here.

It involves a special high-tech variety of security doors, known as "ACAMS doors."

"ACAMS" stands for “Access Control and Alarm Monitoring Systems.” These doors are located in ticketing and gate areas all over the airport. They allow access to “sterile areas” – that is, places like the tarmac that are supposed to be off limits to all but security-cleared airport personnel.

For activation, the doors require a security card and a pin number – except when they’re malfunctioning. And according to inside sources at the airport, that has been happening a lot over the past two months, and security authorities don’t know exactly why.

ACAMS doors are supposed to be locked until a cleared employee swipes his security badge through an electronic pad and punches in a pin number. But for some reason, our sources tell us, such doors throughout the airport are not staying locked, and anybody, whether cleared or not, can pass through them, and right into secured zones.

Our sources said the problem got so bad in recent days that several doors failed, exposing an entire side of the airport to potential security breaches. None was reported.

Airport security officials are discussing ways to cure the problem, which appears to involve defective software, according to our sources. But so far, they apparently haven’t come up with a solution.

In one recent instance, some passengers walked through one of the malfunctioning doors and wound up on the tarmac, sources said.

Official concern about the doors comes in the wake of a serious security breach a week ago, when a Nigerian-American student with an expired boarding pass managed to get through a security screening undetected.

The ACAMS doors did not figure in this episode. But inside sources told NBC LA that the door problem appears to be part of a larger pattern of security breaches and breakdowns at LAX that have been going on for some time.

In fact, the security issues uncovered by NBC LA extend beyond the ACAMS doors to simple “restricted access” doors, with no electronic controls on them. During our investigation an NBC LA producer pushed right through one of them into another off-limits part of the airport.

In a written statement, the LAX airport police declared, “Airport Construction will produce scheduled and unscheduled ACAM interruptions. Los Angeles Airport Police is aware of this. To ensure uninterrupted security, Airport Police deploys Officers to monitor all affected ACAM doors. These are routine procedures for scheduled and unscheduled outages. In all cases, security at Los Angeles World Airports is maintained.”