Better Security? Why Not Implemented?
 

I am really curious. Many of those who seem to frequent this forum seem to have a mindset that the government, for some reason, could be doing more effective screening, using some other method, but for some reason refuses to implement truly effective screening.

So, please enlighten me. (And all of us.) Why do you think that the government won't implement what you believe to be more effective screening (i.e., things which will really catch potential risks, and at the same time be convenient enough to use without inconveniencing lots of frequent business travelers)?

Is it cost? Conspiracy? Lack of knowledge? Manufacturing delays in getting better machines? Entrenched bureaucracy? Incompetence?

If there is something that you think is better than what they are currently using and doing, WHY aren't they adopting it, in your opinion? (whether it's more puffers, ETD machines, human intelligence, Ahura FirstDefender, etc., etc.)

(While I fully expect to get the answer, multiple times, that they are just too stupid, I am actually hoping for some more in-depth analysis than that. But if that is the only reason you can come up with, feel free to voice that one too.)

While everyone has been talking about passenger profiling and looking for suspicious behavior I do wonder what would happen if everyone enacted El Al style security. For one thing, air travel would likely grind to a halt. There simply isn't enough capacity to question everyone passing through an airport.

Then what about just the "suspicious" ones? That raises more problems. How would the people on this board who don't use driver's licenses because there is too much information on them respond if they were given an in depth screening with a lot of probing personal questions? I'm sure various civil liberty organizations will likely get involved as well, not to mention that there will be accusations of racisms sooner or later (sooner most likely).

The only real solution is to stop these people before they even get to the airport. But I think in the meantime what little ability to detect "suspicious" individuals there was has been further degraded by spending time looking for contraband toothpaste.

Oh, it's obviously a conspiracy. :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

See, in case you hadn't noticed, the government just wants to find a way to invade our privacy for no reason. If they keep security lax at airports they can do all sorts of terrible things that will eventually lead to black helicopters hovering overhead...

PUHLEEZE.

Here's my $.02 for a combination of powerful civil "service" unions and bureaucratic inertia.

That's very presumptuous.

But anyway, my $0.02 is that the government is doing the best it can. I can't demonstrate how anything they're doing has been unsuccessful since there have been no incidents.

But, is the lack of incidents because of these absurd measures or just because it is statistically very difficult to actually carry out a bombing/hijack etc.?

I fail to see how these measure ADD to security.
- Shoe carnival (recently admitted to be a waste of time)
- ID check (proven time and again to be merely revenue protection)
- Unlocked checked baggage (I can see some need, but get better CTX machines - but I'll live with this)
- Laptops out of bags (Bart did give us an explanation which I can quasi-buy but I still think it's ridiculous. But I'll live with this too)
- Suit jacket removal (what do you hope to see in my suit jacket - X-rays can't show you explosives, and metal will be picked up by the WTMD)
- Liquid/gel ban (no need to comment - you've seen plenty of my responses on this in the last week)


Some of these have pre-dated this administration - my criticism is not restricted to this government alone.

The thing that frustrates me most is that non-events are sensationalized (predictably near election times) with a clear result of terrorizing the people and then instituting some asinine procedures which don't add any value to security. We have turned into a society that runs and cowers at the sound of any loud noise and I don't identify well with that feeling.

In short, my beef is not that the government is not instituting measures - it's that these measures are doing nothing to increase aviation safety.

Well, you asked for my opinion and here it is. I know you will not agree with it but last time I looked, this was a free country. And my only point is, I want to be able to keep making that comment in the future.

Okay, I'll play.

Part of it is because they're required to be reactive, not proactive. As much as I despise Mary Schiavo, I think she got this right -- TSA reacts to immediate threats and doesn't invest significant R&D in potential threats.

Just using the binary explosive threat as an example. What happened? Instead of increasing puffer and ETD testing, they actually decreased it by moving all shoes onto the x-ray belt. What else did this accomplish? It clogged up the x-ray while the screeners have the difficult task of identifying gels and liquids.

Why would they do this? The X-ray manufacturers say the machines will not show well hidden explosives and the demo on CNN was convincing -- the explosives were utterly invisible -- certainly not what the TSA showed in their news conference yesterday.

My theory is that the public demands that they do something, anything. Even if the TSA knows the right answer, be that technology, profiling, training, whatever, it will take so long to deploy that they can't react to the threat, so they do something which makes people feel good about what the TSA is doing, even though the improvement in security is not provable, or actually decreases.

If we're really serious about the threat, then we need to be really serious about the threat -- if that means we have to ETD every freaking bag and shoe, so be it. That would be a dramatic increase in security. If we really think that liquids and gels are a threat, then we need to eliminate them until we have a way to test them. If we have to hand-search every bag, eliminate every exception, so be it.

However, it does not appear that we're serious about it. We have exceptions, we sell liquids airside, we let FAs carry liquids, wel allow liquids with babies, even though we know that babies are used by terrorists, we know that such items are easily secreted in various places on the body. Banning liquids is a huge inconvenience, but if our intelligence says they're a risk, then we need to ban them. Period. And we need to have inspections to ensure we capture them.

And if the threat is real, who cares about the business traveler, or the time testing takes, so long as the testing is appropriate? We'd all rather avoid being blown up, but what's going on today isn't making us safer than we were a week ago when we "didn't know" about the threat.

The lip-service, inconsistency and lack of improved security is very frustrating.

Anyway, TSA is a bureaurocracy and they have spent billions of dollars on a system that is not better than a private contractor could do. I would like to see security privatized and devote the bulk of the TSA budget to improved intelligence gathering.

My recommendations?

- Embrace technology, including puffers, etd, backscatter x-ray, ct scanning, spectoscopy, whatever. And actually use these devices in the screening process.

- Force Trusted Traveler on the TSA and on every major airport and make the bar to get in high enough to make civil libertarians cringe. Perhaps make the threshold only people who have been flying 80+ flights a year for more than 20 years. <g>

Sorry, I fail to see how this is presumptuous.

And, never fear, we may disagree on airport security, but not on free speech. Voltaire comes to mind -- I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

I thought it was presumptuous to assume that all of us needed educating :)

^

Looking over this list of measures the TSA has taken to "keep us safe," they all have one thing in common: They cost the goverment NOTHING to implement! The only direct costs are borne by the travelling public, in terms of time lost, articles stolen, and personal freedoms restricted.

I don't have the complete picture, but I have heard it repeated more than once that one gaping hole in airline security is the lack of screening of commercial cargo on passenger planes. It simply isn't being done, and it probably would require hundreds of millions of dollars to do. Is it any wonder, then, that the goverment has to do SOMETHING, so they do the things that are quick, easy, and free (to them) to do?

Here's another question: If commercial cargo on passenger planes is really a risk, why doesn't the government ban that, too?

Same question could be asked of the liquid ban. Being in the risk management business, I am very well aware that if something presents a hazard, you never let it through. The fact that flight crew are allowed to carry liquids through (you don't see FAs being allowed to carry machetes through security do you?) gives the lie to the actual threat presented.

This is about power and reminding people of who is actually in charge. If it were about security, more effort would go into the technology of screening and there would be less effort spent trying to convince a scared public that the more inconvenienced everyone is, the safer they are.

$$$

On the other hand, there were experiments where screeners looked for suspicious behavior, such as sweating, clenched fists, inability to answer questions like "how did [pro sports team] do today?" when that team did not play today, etc.. They didn't catch any terrorists, but did catch some smugglers, people with stolen airline tickets, etc. in secondary searches. Video of some of the 9/11 terrorists indicate that many of them would have been noticed as being "suspicious" if screeners were trained to note suspicious behavior.

Note that this was not ethnic-based profiling.

Potentially, everything is a risk, from cargo to candy bars. That's why security is a system of overlapping rings, designed to mitigate most reasonable risks. But there is one key reason the focus remains where it is.

Al Queda and it's constituent "affiliates" have demonstrated many times an institutional mindset to keep attacking the same ways until their method is effective. It's proven, not theoretical.

As a result, our security systems pay special attention to their demonstrated methods and how to counter them.

I know you (speaking collectively) don't like the result of that, but it's real and true, and won't change anytime soon. Nor should it. The methods developed are effective in countering the specific form of threat, until a higher order of technology can replace it.

Where has this been proven? Sure, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," I can understand that terrorists will happily keep using the same security holes. But WHO says that al-Qaeda is not looking to explore weaknesses we're ignoring right now? (It's also quite debatable that what we're doing effectively addresses even the demonstrated threats you're so worried about).

This sort of thinking leads only to reactionary, "fighting the last war" strategies while leaving completely unaddressed gaping holes in security that are plainly visible to even a toddler.


Red-teaming is one big way that we could pro-actively address security vulnerabilities. Simply paying attention to intel and security analysts who point out potential threats that have not been and are not being addressed is another. Neither are reactionary, unlike the current window-dressing measures that demonstrably do not significantly improve security over the previous situation.

Please go back and review every Al Queda attack against US interests.

You will discover that they return to techniques and targets over and over again in almost every case.

Countering that is not fighting the last war, as least week fairly clearly demonstrated. It is averting the next one.

Red teaming is, to my understanding, conducted. But since we now have the intelligence and surveillance assets in place to clandestinely discover upcoming plans, in spite of the New York Times, it makes more sense to focus the majority of our effort on what we know is being planned, rather than what is theoretically possible. With a real but lesser effort given over to to the most serious potential but unexploited risks.

REALLY? How about 9/11? The worst terrorist attack on US soil, hands down, took advantage of the fact that prevoius hijackings were just that. Where had al-Qaeda carried out such an attack before? Authorities outright IGNORED the suggestion that terrorists might turn planes into guided missiles. We got stuck in the "last war" phenomenon right there and were caught with our pants down, and look what happened.


Then surely this extensive red teaming came up with the fact that liquid bombs could be brought onboard prior to the UK incident hit the press? Then WHY didn't we see any measures at all--and I mean any at all--prior to the knee-jerk water ban? What about the several documented times that teams have smuggled bomb parts past security, clearly demonstrating how flawed it is? Yet we get a water ban rather than addressing the findings of these teams.