The private firm in charge of security at San Francisco International Airport cheated to pass tests aimed at ensuring it could stop terrorists from smuggling weapons onto flights, a former employee contends.

The allegations have prompted a federal probe into security at SFO, a spokesman for the U.S. Transportation Security Administration said.

In a wrongful-firing lawsuit filed Friday in San Francisco Superior Court, Gene Bencomo, 39, a former supervisor for Covenant Aviation Security, said the company devised an elaborate system to alert security checkpoints when undercover federal auditors, called decoys, arrived at the airport last year to conduct unannounced tests.

Posing as passengers, the decoys try to take dummy bombs, unloaded guns and other contraband through the airport's security checkpoints. But the lawsuit said Covenant tracked the decoys via closed-circuit television cameras and tipped off workers at security gates to expect a test. [via the San Francisco Chronicle]

Looking back ten years from now, how much of this administration's policy will be seen as window dressing or simple wastes of time and money? Worse, how many will we realize did nothing but provide a false sense of security, allowing us to let our guard down?