PING!
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
PING!
Simply banning all Muslims from airplanes would do the job.
I don't want to see moslems banned from flying. I wouldn't mind seeing lots of them in the west-or at least the USA-purchase airline tickets. One way tickets to the moslem country of their preference.
So what happens if Muslims decide in the name of Allah and Jihad to take up Christian names and dress and just for Jihad purposes religion?
Lipstick too? They've already banned my face moisturer, my contact conditioning solution and cleaner, my contact soaking solution, my hair gel, my hair spray, my shampoo, my hair conditioning lotion, my deodorant (and this is truly a necessity in a confined space with people who don't shower on a daily basis), and my bottled water. When is enough, enough!
Yes, one last one-way flight to their cess-pit of a home country would be fine with me, as long as the pilot, crew and all the passengers are Muslim, too. I'd even chip in for their tickets.
I would let them (muslims) fly confined in a cage on board of cargo planes. As they are murderous subhumans they should not be allowed on passenger planes.
My plan would eliminate 99 percent of them, and the remaining scum could be easily identified.
The airlines work over granny and grandpa, while letting young, ME males trot right on through security. This is ridiculous, and an horrendous waste of taxpayer funds.
Forcing a person to leave his eyedrops in his checked luggage, when he's a 9th generation American, and a WW11 Vet to boot, is absurd.
Include women in that!
Would anyone fly regularly if white people were never sceened at all?
Anyone can be a threat.
An innocent can be used as a mule unknowingly to carry explosives. White people from California became islamo facists.
Americans have caused airliners to crash by murdering the pilots. It happened in 1987 in California.
You have to check everyone. Sorry.
Time for that 'golden oldie' from 2001:
"Strangers On My Flight"
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!
I wasn't aware we all had accurate, honest, & verifiable religious affiliation ID cards.
B.S.
If Islamic society can't keep its mad dogs from jumping the fence and eating the neighbors' kids, the neighbors can be expected to deal with the problem with whatever means are needed. It's already a life-or-death situation, so whining about collateral damage will fall on deaf ears.
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