It’s not just airports. ‘Insiders’ can make any facility vulnerable. The murderer who shot up the school in Florida was an ‘insider’—he knew the layout, the procedure for fire drills, etc. Someone who works at a sports venue, or a movie theater, or any place where large numbers of people can be found can use “that insider knowledge” to inflict the maximum damage. Background checks can help, but if it’s the first time the person has decided to go crazy, what can anyone do?
Yup. Anyone who knows the ins and outs of a facility, such as a water treatment plant or, God forbid, a nuclear power plant (and I think they get a much more intensive background investigation than the average airport worker does) can use that knowledge to do some damage.
I’ve been screaming for years that the U.S.’s critical infrastructure is wide-open vulnerable to serious attack. And that’s not to mention that terrorists can simply park outside an airport and fire off a MANPAD (man-portable... and can we still say “man”?... anti-aircraft missile) at planes taking off or landing. And then there are drones these days.
Yeesh. The threat matrix keeps growing and those guys are going to constantly probe air transportation for weaknesses and then exploit them. One of my anti-terror instructors back in the day always referred back to that old saying: “They only have to succeed once while we have to succeed every single time in defending against them.”
Like I said: It’s not a matter of “if,” but of “when.”