Epic security fail
I see that they've found the guy who shut down Newark Liberty Airport for hours while they searched for him (he'd long since left, of course. Charging him with Defiant Trespass (which can carry a fine of $500 and 30 days in jail). And Senator Lautenberg (D - Undead) wants him more harshly punished, for the crime of shutting the airport down. But he didn't do that - that's the fault of the people who designed and implemented the system. That's the fail - that a guy can cross the rope unnoticed, be noticed by a passer-by, and all the security bosses can do is use their nuclear option. This guy should have been quietly intercepted, checked out, and been told to "move along". Instead, we get the bureaucratic equivalent of hand-waving freakoutery.
The crime here isn't that a man ducked under a guide rope to smooch with his sweetie in a secure area, nor even that a security guard was away from his post to monitor this. It's that the missing security guard (called away for another purpose apparently, not absent from his post without reason) was a point failure and there was NO backup (security monitors weren't working, and there was no deense in depth).
It looks like the scapegoats are going to be Jiang and the guard Hernandez; given that Jiang is a foreign national and he has a US Senator pissed at him, he's in for a world of hurt. Hernandez is being backed by his union - while I'm not the world's biggest fan of unions, this is a case where I'm glad there is one, for his sake.
Security Theatre will claim 2 more victims (possibly destroying one person's life - there's ALL KINDS of ways Senator Lautenberg can influence the system to screw up Jiang's ability to live and work in the US by picking up the phone to Immigration); and I doubt the systemic failures will be addressed.
Hope Jiang knows enough to get a lawyer and can afford a good one...