Nearly 1,000 security badges have been missing from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport over the past two years, NBC News reported on Tuesday.
Even though the badges give people access to runways and boarding gates, among others areas, officials at the airport told NBC that the issue is not "a significant security threat."
"Badges are deactivated as soon as they are reported lost or stolen," the Atlanta airport said in a statement. "Secured areas of the airport can only be accessed with a valid badge and PIN, and each badge has a photo of the employee on it. Due to these safeguards, we do not believe that lost or stolen badges pose a significant security threat to the airport."
Nearly 60,000 people work at the airport and it is believed that 1,400 security tags cannot be located.
Because there is no way to tell how long after a badge is actually missing its owner will report the issue, security experts outside of the airport beg to differ with what the Atlanta officials said.
"It's very, very serious. Without question," Larry Wansley, who headed corporate security for American Airlines until 2004, told NBC.
Experts went on to say that a stolen security badge would make it easier for potential intruders and threats to blend in at almost any part of the airport.
"Anytime you can acquire uniforms, badges any official sort of indication of authority that's a huge problem, that's a huge threat," Jeffrey Price, an aviation security professor at Metropolitan State University in Denver, told NBC.
The statistics and information on the lost badges was discovered when NBC affiliate NBC-DFW investigated the issue of "unaccounted" security tags in airports across the country. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport was the only airport that responded when ask for exact numbers-- the Transportation Security Administration quickly stepped in and stopped any other airport from disclosing the information.
