Air Safety Theatre – Act II

With the capture of the latest shoe bombing nut, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab onboard a Delta flight to Detroit from Amsterdam, the Air Safety Bullshiite Theatre has moved into Act II.  In previous posts, we deconstructed the utter and complete failure of the TSA to find their ass with both hands and a roadmap.

In the name of ‘preventing terrorism’ the TSA is now pushing for full-body scanners that allow the security folks to see if you trim your Secret Garden, without asking you to disrobe, ostensibly to see if you’re packing hard to detect explosives in your underwear.  Looking further into the sound and fury, the real failure of the TSA or any of the other affiliated agencies, like the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security or even the local rent-a-cops, isn’t the technology, it’s the actual willingness to succeed.

The whole shoe bomber-terrorism game is set up so the terrorists only have to win once out of 100 tries, while the security folks have to win 100 times out of 100 to keep us safe.  The failure isn’t the game itself, as the game has always favoured the bad guys, but in how the good guys play the game.  Since 9/11 the security services have not played to win, as the game is a people game and not a technology game.  Technology can’t win a people game and terrorism is, once you boil it down, a people game:  One person getting around several dozen other people with something destructive.

Here’s the problem:  We know how to stop the bad guys getting on aircraft, but we don’t have the will to do what is needed to stop them.  El Al, the Israeli national airline, has an excellent record in preventing loons from getting on their aircraft.  They start their security screening the minute you buy a ticket or get out of the cab at the airport.  You get asked questions, lots of questions, repeatedly and forcefully by highly trained and well-paid security officers who are concerned with keeping their flights safe and nothing more:  They use people to solve a people problem.

El Al does passenger profiling.  They take anyone who looks or sounds like a potential threat aside for a serious grilling, inspecting and patting-down.  If that means someone with a Palestinian-sounding name, then that is what happens and El Al has taken significant heat for it.  El Al’s response is always the same:  If you don’t like it, don’t fly our airline.  Now, I’m not saying racial profiling is right, morally, but statistically, the math says racial profiling is very effective in keeping loons off aircraft.  Statistically, very few Mormons want to blow up airplanes for religious reasons.  Profiling is a moral conundrum that I can’t answer with any degree of comfort.

The other steps El Al takes to keep their aircraft safe include stringent background security checks and actual monitoring of anyone who goes near the aircraft, including fuellers, ramp rats, groomers and maintenance workers.  Is every piece of cargo on that aircraft inspected?  Yes, as well as x-rayed until it glows in the dark.  El Al does security they way it does because they know it works:  They use people to solve a people problem. 

So can we make flying safe?  Most certainly we can.  Hire suspicious, grumpy people to constantly question why someone is near an aircraft, what is going on the aircraft, or into the aircraft.  Give them the power of police officers, pay them a very good wage and make them Federal employees.  Let them loose and tell the airlines they’re paying half the cost.  It will mean pissing off the airlines who will moan about government getting in the face of private business, but do you want to fly safely or not?

If the price of an airline ticket has to go up, then the price of an airline ticket has to go up, but it goes up for all the airlines, across the board.  Guess what?  Passengers can look at the in-your-face stringent security and say “Yep, I’m paying for this as part of my taxes and my ticket.  It sucks, but that’s the price.”  And yes, it will have economic effects.  Not as many people will be flying, or be willing to pay the price to fly, which is not necessarily a bad thing when you look at the larger picture. 

If, and assuming the American fixation on technology solutions to people problems holds true, the back-scatter imaging stations will be all over airports sooner rather than later.  This means some poor TSA hump making $10 a hour will be locked in a private room staring at freakishly hued images of your more or less naked body every time you fly somewhere.  Yes, it will be a great job when the Hawaiian Tropic All-Girl Beach Volleyball Team is flying to Cleveland, but that’s a once a year deal.   

Will it be exciting, stimulating and sexy work?  Go look around any shopping mall and see if there are more than one out of a hundred fellow shoppers you’d actually want to see naked.  I will suggest that there are probably more people that you would gladly pay money to not see naked.

The TSA could always hire online one-handed typists who could really enjoy that kind of work, but that is a very small subset of a very small subset.  A combination of the outstanding restraining orders and the inability to leave their parents’ basement would preclude most of the possible candidates from applying for the job.  Alternatively, we could outsource the real-time image review to a call centre in Uttar Pradesh, where nobody will be stimulated by the naked image of Aunt Hazel, unless she breaks into a Bollywood dance number.

Which leaves us exactly where?  A technological solution to a problem with people who want to blow up aircraft, which would be exactly no solution. 

The reason they’re pushing for a technology solution is money of course.  It’s hard to make outrageous amounts of money with a people solution to a people problem.  Pushing ‘magic’ technology means you can charge outrageous amounts of money for it and, with the right level of paranoia in the air, the government will buy it. regardless of the cost, in the name of keeping us safe. 

It doesn’t solve the problem of air safety, but makes for good theatre.