The price of insecurity

07-02-2002

Several weeks ago at a conference of travel editors, the head of security for United Airlines demonstrated the Taser stun gun his airline wants to add to cockpit equipment. The device fires short darts attached to fine wires that will deliver a jolt of electricity designed to disable anyone trying to break into the cockpit. As a means of fending off potential hijackers, he explained, electric shock offers significant advantages over a gun or an ax.

After he had answered a slew of questions about the Taser, I ventured to ask one about airline security I'd long been wondering about.

Over the 14 years since a bomb smuggled onto Pan Am Flight 103 destroyed it over Lockerbie, Scotland, every passenger who has boarded a commercial airliner has been asked the luggage questions: "Has anyone unknown to you asked you to carry an item on this flight?" "Have any of the items you are traveling with been out of your immediate control since you packed them?"

I was curious. Of the hundreds of millions of passengers who have flown United during this time, how many have answered in the affirmative?

He shook his head. Every now and then, a confused passenger might have said yes, but he couldn't think of a single incident where this procedure detected any bombs or other creditable security risk.

Of course, the baggage interrogation must have been effective. As long as those questions have been asked, no commercial airliner in North America or Europe has been destroyed by a bomb.

Just as the passenger-screening procedures that began in the mid-1970s had virtually eliminated cases of hijacked planes, increased airport vigilance had eliminated airline violence.

Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, that is.

Since that horrific day, airport security procedures around the world have been ramped up to unprecedented levels. Airline passengers and their carry-on bags are being scrutinized to a degree that would have been unthinkable 10 months ago. Checked luggage is being spot-searched and cross-referenced against passenger manifests. The list of regulations, taboos, screenings, searches, checks and counterchecks grows daily. For example, passengers are no longer permitted to carry open beverage containers through security.

And no one -- not babies, grandmothers in wheelchairs or even airline pilots -- is above suspicion. Several weeks ago, for example, former Vice President Al Gore was twice pulled out of boarding lines and given a full security check, his body scanned and patted down, his briefcase emptied and his underwear examined. Nothing amiss was detected.

Neither is any hint of a security breach considered too trivial or accidental. Airports these days are shut down and dozens of departures delayed should any security alarms be raised. Flights are diverted if any passenger fails to follow the rules.

On June 24, an American Airlines flight from Newburgh, N.Y., to Chicago was diverted midflight to Detroit because the paperwork authorizing a federal postal inspector to bring his gun had been mishandled, even though he was otherwise fully credentialed and before boarding had advised airline personnel that he was armed.

On the other hand, according to the first undercover tests conducted by the Transport Security Administration at 32 airports, screeners failed to detect fake weapons, guns, dynamite and bombs 24 percent of the time. At three airports, Cincinnati, Jacksonville and Las Vegas, the error rate was more than 50 percent.

Actually, that's an improvement. Rather than trying to get tricky, TSA agents were told to pack their simulated weapons the way normal passengers might pack their bags, rather than in tests conducted in February, before the TSA was formed. Those tests attempted to simulate how a terrorist might try to bypass security. The overall failure rate of that test was nearly 60 percent.

No word on how many legitimate threats screeners actually detected during that time, but the absence of headline incidents seem to indicate that no one with nefarious intentions penetrated the security curtain. Good thing, too, because statistics indicate they would have been successful one time out of four.

By this November, the TSA plans to have interviewed, hired, run security clearances and trained about 45,000 of its own screeners who will then take over airport security. Two months after that, Congress expects the airlines to be able to physically check or electronically scan every piece of luggage loaded onto commercial aircraft for bombs.

Both goals are ambitious, to say the least.

In addition to being extraordinarily difficult to carry out, maintaining these protections will be enormously expensive and, for airline passengers, maddeningly disruptive and probably unnerving.

What's worse, no expert expects that these procedures will provide absolute protection.

Like the first security checkpoints and the luggage questions, the new security procedures will work perfectly. Until they don't.

No sane citizen would question the importance of preventing similar atrocities. Yet the sad reality is that as long as geopolitical insanity exists, other atrocities will be committed, no matter how many protections we have. We pray they won't be of the scale or consequence of having planes simultaneously hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, but we must prepare ourselves for the tragedy that will someday come.

Constructing supposedly impervious barriers won't work forever, especially when they also erode the freedom and equanimity of those who build them.

By all means, let's take prudent, common sense precautions. But it is a grave error to presume that everyone is a potential terrorist. Transforming ourselves into a nation of fearful, suspicious paranoids is too high a price to pay for a modicum of false security. If that happens, the forces of terrorism will have prevailed beyond their wildest hopes.

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