How SHOULD it be done?
We complain, we rant, we vent, sometimes we even whine. But only occasionally do I see rational, calm, unemotional descriptions of how air travel screening SHOULD be done to both give us an acceptable level of security and protect our individual liberties, not to mention make the process quick, efficient, easy, and painless.
So here's my thought - with all of the frequent fliers here, from all around the world, we should be able to come up with a group-think design for air travel screening, from booking to exiting the airport at your destination.
Open source works for computer software. In fact, one of the most impregnable pieces of encryption software on the market, TrueCrypt, is open source, and the FBI tried for two years to break it without success. Why wouldn't it work for other forms of security as well?
So give me your ideas. I'm not really interested in hearing complaints about current procedures, or descriptions of what is currently wrong, all I really want to hear is, how SHOULD it be done?
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Not being a frequent flier, my own ideas are rather vague and possibly incorrect due to insufficient information, but here goes:
* Airlines should be given direct access to DoD and DHS no-fly lists. No tickets should be sold to anyone on these lists. No persons on these list should be employed by any business which has access to the airport or planes.
* A system should be developed to allow those whose names are similar to someone on a no-fly list to verify their identity to the airline so they can book their flights and get jobs.
* All cargo should be screened the same as luggage and pax.
* "Sterile" areas in the airports should be kept to a minimum size. Smaller area to protect means fewer opportunities for bad guys to get into it.
* Procedures and policies should be standardized across all airports in the US, and open for public inspection.
* Surveillance of all public areas of the airport should be publicly accessible, both to allow pax to judge crowd levels and avoid bottlenecks, and to provide oversight in the event of officials violating policies, or even in the event of pax violating policies. Everything public should be fully documented.
* Nothing private should be documented. Pax should be required to show ID only once - at the gate.
* BPs should be standardized across all airlines, allowing automated access to non-critical sterile areas such as airline clubs, food courts, etc. If the BPs all have a standard barcode on them, then the barcode readers should be sufficient security for non-critical areas. Barcodes also make possible tracking of individualized BPs; instead of a person looking at a piece of paper to see if it has today's date on it, disposable bar codes can be issued for each BP and the readers can tell when that BP has entered the sterile area. Yes, that lets Big Brother track you, but it does so in a non-invasive manner that provides a genuine security benefit.
That's all I can think of right now.