Posted on 08/12/2006 11:02:43 AM PDT by GMMAC
Flying blind:
Airport screeners treat everyone the same. They shouldn't
David Frum
National Post
Saturday, August 12, 2006
So now we're to ban lipsticks and hand sanitizers from airplanes? The success of British security services in stopping a terrorist plot has unleashed all the most perverse and unavailing instincts of transportation safety authorities.
They already banned nail scissors after 9/11. They require passengers to remove shoes in perpetual remembrance of Richard Reid's attempt to smuggle explosives on to a plane in his trainers. Now once again they will impose a massively costly new rule on all passengers in order to protect them from the violence of a few.
And make no mistake: If made permanent and universal, the rule will be massively costly. Four billion people travel by air every year. Four billion people go through passenger screening. If we conservatively assume that the average air passenger's time is worth $50 an hour, then every minute we add to the screening process costs passengers $3.35-billion per year. Ten extra minutes is $33.5-billion. Twenty minutes: $67-billion. The fact that the costs fall directly on the passenger rather than upon the industry or the public treasury does not make them any less real.
Compare, please, how we do airline security to the way in which the British authorities do real security. Did they kick open the door of every house in London to search for terrorists? Obviously not. Did they wiretap every British home, send agents into every church, synagogue, Christian Science reading room, and Quaker meeting house in the land? Again, no. They focused enforcement resources where they were most likely to get results, identified a threat -- and pounced.
It's possible to do something similar to protect airline safety. It's possible, for example, to take four or five basic pieces of information about somebody (such as name, address, phone number, date of birth) and match them against the commercial databases used by mortgage companies and credit card issuers to arrive at a surprisingly sophisticated terrorist risk profile of each passenger.
If, for example, you are a 38-year-old-woman, married and the mother of three, who has lived at the same address for nine years, has travelled to Barbados with her three children at Christmas for the past three years and is about to go again: Well, you present a fairly low risk. Airline security might still ask you to walk through a metal detector just to be on the safe side, but it should not waste too much time on you beyond that.
Another approach: Perhaps if you fly often from New York to London, you might be willing to volunteer a whole mass of information to British Airways in return for a "trusted traveller" card that will allow you to walk on the plane with minimal fuss. Your name might be Omar Abdullah, but if they know that you are 57 years old, director of the Middle East collection at the Metropolitan Museum, own an apartment in Manhattan and a brokerage account at Merrill Lynch, carry a Visa card with a $50,000 limit, fly to London six times a year with tickets paid for by the museum, and so on and so on ... well, they can pretty confidently let you on the plane with minimal formalities.
Please notice that neither program -- neither risk profiling nor trusted traveller -- would make any use of information about ethnicity or religion. They would not in any sense of the term be "racial profiling." Please note as well that both would use only information that the individual himself had voluntarily provided either directly to the airline or to other commercial entities -- no government coercion would be involved.
Yet both these approaches have been effectively banned in the United States; the first by the U.S. Congress, the second by informal pressures placed upon the airlines by the Transportation Safety Agency.
Why? Congress and the TSA have surrendered to pressure from advocacy groups who fear that if we concentrate enforcement resources where they will do the most good, we will end up concentrating them upon unattached young Muslim men. Very few Muslims are Islamic terrorists, but all Islamic terrorists are Muslim. Our prescreening process may be ethnically neutral, but the results will not be.
But isn't that precisely the way security is supposed to work?
The British police are excruciatingly fair-minded: At their press conference this week, they stressed that the suspects are "British Asians," strenuously avoiding mention of the words "Muslim" or "Islamic." Yet even they manage somehow to reconcile themselves to dealing with terrorism by narrowing their attention to the most likely potential terrorists. Why can't aviation security do likewise?
You will have plenty of time to ponder that question as you stand in the long, long, long lines that will stretch all through this travelling summer.
dfrum@aei.org
© National Post 2006
Let 'em. If we're at the point that they can't openly be a muslim, we've taken a HUGE step towards eliminating the threat.
All Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists appear to be Muslims.
"And you are a serious threat to liberty! If you think any of these measures make you safe, you don't have a clue about the real world of terrorism!"
OH PLEASE! Dear god take a way a nail clipper and your liberty is gone with it????
I am no expert on security. Are you?
We are at war. People want us to die. And if the experts think certain things need to be done based on the information they have, that neither you or I are privy too likely because of intelligence methods, I am for it. This isnt going to be forever. We are in the midsts of war with islamo facist that will stop at nothing and do anything to kill people on airliners again.
They have failed to do so since 9-11. Something IS working. And I still have my liberties by the way.
The fact that you have to pull an isolated incident out of your butt from 1987 proves the point against you. Sure, Imam Moktar could find whitey to deliver his plane bomb, but that doesn't mean we should pretend we're stupid and ignore the trend. We don't have unlimited time and resources to make a flight cabin as sterile as an operating room, and put every single person through a ridiculous security gauntlet. That is a tyranny unto itself. Good grief.
You have a pretty low definition of tyranny.
True. You have to conduct standard screening for everyone. And for YMMs, they need to be more carefully screened and scrutinized as recent history proves that they are the most significant threat. Security screening policies will change accordingly if we see that threat change.
Essentially, doing what El Al does would be smarter.
This is America, dude - yes we have a low threshold for tyranny, which this clearly is. Your government would rather stop you from carrying a water bottle on a plane than use common sense. It is the tyranny of political correctness.
That pic gets a belly laugh from me every time.
This makes too much sense, thus can never happen. Of course, this article can't let go of political correctness. I would include as the most essential item of information: muslim or non-muslim?
It is a perfect solution to deal with aliases, too. If your name is not in the database, you get a mug-shot and fingerprinted, and you don't fly that day. If you are an alien and throw a hissy fit, you are expelled immediately with prejudice, no matter how big your bank account or how important you think you are.
Too simple?
For whatever it's worth, I think the cost of "accomodating" our clear enemies in the United States alone is closer to $trillion annualy. Of course, no such analysis can be permitted by the clueless. When it becomes unavoidable to see, the draconian measures will necessarily be worse. Much worse.
I agree. And screeners are going to listen to that "spider sense" most of the time and check.
"This is America, dude - yes we have a low threshold for tyranny, which this clearly is. Your government would rather stop you from carrying a water bottle on a plane than use common sense. It is the tyranny of political correctness."
It is America, and our freedom to travel remains intact despite the terrorists worst efforts because we are on top of their game.
We are in a red alert right now, restrictions will relax. They dont know if the attempted attack is over yet.
That reminds me of the last time I flew, except it was an old lady. And then it was my two boys, who were 8 and 6 at the time.
Stupid SOBs.
And if the so-called experts don't think??? You presume that the folks who have risen to the level of authority that can make these decisions are security "experts." It is a very very dangerous whenever you deal with the US government to assume that someone rose to a position of authority on the basis of anything other than serving time and doing what was required to keep his boss happy - which often has little to do with the professional requirements of the position he/she holds.
I can just see it....airport kiosks with priests for 'express conversions' complete with a complimentary pork barbecue sandwich. Eat every bite, or no boarding pass for you! :^)
No US passenger aircraft has been hijacked or destroyed by islamo facists since 9-11. Somthing tells me they certainly have tried and that the methods used so far have stopped them.
Is it inconvient? A pain? costly? yes.
I dont know if there is a political philosophy to airport security that works better then another. In the end you have to do the same things.
I consider being thourough conservative.
"You have a pretty low definition of tyranny."
In a free society, it should be set very low. What part of free don't you understand.
Then we both cant say a damn thing one way or the other because we dont know what the experts are looking at.
The only thing we both know for sure is that our airliners have not been destroyed since 9-11. That fact recognized means that at least SOME of the experts are right.
"In a free society, it should be set very low. What part of free don't you understand."
It IS low. I happen to not be suicidal when climbing on board an airliner.
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