Thanks to Richard Reed, we take off our shoes and now we dump all our liquids before we board the aircraft. If this goes on, we may well end up checking our clothing and going through security in paper pajamas.

Next up? Body cavity searches. There are no dangerous objects (or rather far too many objects can be benign or dangerous), there are only dangerous people.

Our current security screening process fails horribly.

Here are some ways we could improve security.

1. Recognize that the terrorist is under severe mental and emotional strain. He fears being caught during the screening process and he is planning to kill himself and many others within a few hours.
2. Profiling – get over it. We need to face up to the fact that the vast majority of the people who fit the profile are innocent and should be treated with respect but also that the vast majority of terrorists (although not all) do fit the profile. We should look harder at young Muslim men than we do at 80-year-old grandmothers.
3. Variability. It is a well known fact that predictability is a security vulnerability for two reasons. First, the terrorists can learn the system, become comfortable with it and develop ways to defeat it. Second, since every passenger goes through the same mill, the screeners become conditioned to see things that aren’t really problems. We would have greater security if we minimally screened 80% of the passengers, thoroughly screened 20% selected at random as well as anybody who looks suspicious.
4. A large part of any security process is knowing who to trust, not just who not to trust. We could, with a reasonable effort, be able to certify most of the traveling American public and redirect them through a minimal and efficient screening process.
5. Make the public part of the solution, not the problem. We’ve spent five years, billions of dollars and millions of hours keeping sharp and pointy objects off planes. This is definitely a case of closing the barn door after the horse has gone. Hijacking a passenger plane with box cutters became an ineffective strategy early in the morning of 9/11. The passengers and surviving crew of United 93 recognized the threat and fought back causing the terrorist strike against the Capitol Building to fail. Since 9/11, all passengers that have gotten out of line have been quickly subdued by the other passengers, crew and air-marshals. It’s a felony to bring tear-gas or pepper-spray on board an aircraft. Would we perhaps be safer of they handed it out to the passengers at the gate?

In short, our model for getting into the airport should be based on our model for getting into the country (customs and immigration) rather than an impossible attempt to screen for any potentially dangerous weapons.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 18th, 2006 at 10:23 pm and is filed under 2_Center. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.