Everyone empty your pockets?
Stopping only those who fit a terrorist `profile' might make the skies safer
Delta Airlines pilot Dennis Dolan recalls it happening at Newark, but the scene could be at any of the nation's 429 commercial airports. A harried young mother, struggling to steer her three fractious youngsters through security, was pulled aside, searched, and made to empty her carry-on bags and the backpacks of her now bawling kids. Says Dolan, head of the Airline Pilots Association's security task force: "We've got to inject some common sense into the screening system."
The young mother Dolan spotted would almost certainly not have been stopped and searched in Europe--where the security gantlet is considered more rigorous than the egalitarian system favored in the United States. Since September 11, there have been hundreds of similar horror stories at U.S. airports: elderly and infirm passengers, sometimes frail and confused, spilling out the contents of their pockets and purses at airport checkpoints; even pilots and flight attendants aren't exempt. The question is, does treating everyone as a potential suspect make air travel safer?
High profile. Critics say there is a better way. Domestic airport security could be significantly improved by adopting methods pioneered by the Israeli airline El Al and adapted for use at European airports, which have decades of experience defending against terrorist attacks. Their systems are designed to identify high-threat passengers--those who fit a particular profile--and subject them to intense scrutiny, while speeding low- and no-risk fliers through the security zone.
The tools include computer databases containing watch lists provided by Interpol and other law enforcement agencies. Passenger scrutiny may include considerations of race, ethnicity, and other personal factors--the kind of profiling that the United States has been loath to adopt. Fliers who voluntarily undergo rigorous background checks can obtain "trusted traveler" cards, used in Israel and now being tested in Europe. The cards are safeguarded with biometric information and permit holders to bypass high-level security checkpoints. This in turn leaves screeners more time to concentrate on passengers deemed high risk.
The European system places greater emphasis on human interaction with passengers than on X-ray machines and metal detectors because terrorists--including the September 11 hijackers and the alleged shoe bomber Richard Reid--may not be carrying prohibited or metallic items. Ferreting them out, believes security consultant Joel Feldschuh, a former CEO of El Al, "is more art than science." Probing questions by skilled interviewers trained in psychology and interrogation techniques are far more effective in detecting jittery hijackers than the American ticket agents' perfunctory "did you pack your own bags?"
Instead of zeroing in on those who fit the high-risk profile, U.S. domestic airports treat each passenger as an equal threat, throwing in random checks in hopes of keeping the villains off balance. Some safety experts regard this model as badly flawed. "If you treat everyone as a potential terrorist, you get to a system of averages, and the bad guys love that," says Lior Zouker, president of Amsterdam-based ICTS International, whose company operates screening at some 100 European airports and identified alleged shoe bomber Reid to French police as a suspicious flier. "They are excellent at collecting information, analyzing it, and trying to get to the soft underbelly of the system."
Search me. In the United States, where civil liberties and personal privacy are deeply ingrained and constitutionally enshrined, the flying public has long traded security for convenience, preferring that airport checks be passively and democratically applied. But 9/11 reopened the question of how many of their civil liberties travelers are willing to give up in return for heightened security.
More aggressive measures tolerated in other countries would be invasive and controversial here--none more so than the politically sensitive issue of profiling. Despite all of the hijackers' being Middle Eastern Arabs, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has said he believes a young Muslim male and a 70-year-old white American woman should be given equal attention at the security gate. Federal guidelines forbid screeners to consider race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, clothing, facial hair, language, accent, and other markers. Targeting someone for extra attention solely because of his appearance is a likely violation of federal civil rights law. In the absence of other incriminating evidence such as a threat or a weapon, body and baggage searches must be entirely random.
The legal hurdles don't necessarily rule out adapting the European model here. Rand Corp. security expert Brian Jenkins says airline databases should focus on three basic pieces of information: Is the passenger a terrorism suspect or wanted for a major crime? Is he in the country legally? If so, has his visa expired? "That doesn't shred the Constitution," he argues.
But many believe the antiprofiling rules are folly. "We're using a peacetime, constitutionally pristine, politically correct check so as not to offend people," says David Stempler, who heads the Air Travelers Association. "We are at war and we don't have that luxury." Daniel Pipes, head of the Middle East Forum, likens the nondiscrimination policy to forcing police who are hunting a tall male criminal to give equal attention to short women. "Government regulations demand a dumbness and a pretense not to know what everyone else knows," he says. "Hijackers come overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, from the ranks of militant Islam."
The Jackal. Still, profiling isn't a magic solution, either. "Terrorists identify the profile and do things to obviate it," says Jenkins. Case in point Palestinian groups in the 1970s recruited Western operatives like Venezuelan Ilich Ramirez Sanchez--better known as Carlos the Jackal--after the Israelis began eliminating their ethnic Middle Eastern commanders.
Some of the September 11 hijackers actually fit the profile--known al Qaeda members seized one of the four planes--and still beat the system. Some three weeks before the hijackings, the names of two al Qaeda members known to have entered the United States were placed on federal watch lists, and the FBI began a nationwide hunt. But the names, and that of a third al Qaeda suspect, weren't given to the airlines. The three sailed undetected through a routine CAPPS check--the government-approved Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System operated domestically by the airlines--then hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 out of Washington's Dulles International Airport and flew it into the Pentagon.
CAPPS analyzes travel-transaction information for suspicious patterns like fliers buying one-way tickets and paying cash. Before the attack, the database carried only travel information, but it now reportedly contains several hundred names of known terrorists and associates or suspicious individuals. Federal authorities want to expand domestic computer screening to include information such as criminal, financial, demographic, travel, and other personal history. But that would require privacy laws to be amended, and civil libertarians--already suspicious that the "trusted traveler" cards now being tested will lead to a national identity card--are voicing concerns.
No matter how tough the defenses, the system will only be as good as its weakest link--a fact illustrated by purported shoe bomber Reid. In his case, the screening system at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris worked perfectly. Reid was twice identified as a likely threat--but was allowed onto the aircraft anyway by airline personnel.
X-ray vision
Eyes Only
Late last week, the security follies continued with new concerns over embarrassing personal searches.
REVEALING First, after thousands of complaints that male screeners were groping female passengers and flight attendants, federal officials ordered same-sex pat-downs. Now the feds worry that new low-emission X-ray machines being tested on volunteers may reveal more than suspicious objects. The machines, which can peer through clothing and clearly reveal the passengers' private parts, "raise tremendous privacy issues," says FAA chief Jane Garvey.
This story appears in the April 1, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.