Flying Blind
So now we're to ban lipsticks and hand sanitizers from airplanes? The success of British security services in stopping a terrorist plot has unleashed all the most perverse and unavailing instincts of transportation safety authorities.
They already banned nail scissors after 9/11. They require passengers to remove shoes in perpetual remembrance of Richard Reid's attempt to smuggle explosives on to a plane in his trainers. Now once again they will impose a massively costly new rule on all passengers in order to protect them from the violence of a few.
And make no mistake: If made permanent and universal, the rule will be massively costly. Four billion people travel by air every year. Four billion people go through passenger screening. If we conservatively assume that the average air passenger's time is worth $50 an hour, then every minute we add to the screening process costs passengers $3.35-billion per year. Ten extra minutes is $33.5-billion. Twenty minutes: $67-billion. The fact that the costs fall directly on the passenger rather than upon the industry or the public treasury does not make them any less real.
Compare, please, how we do airline security to the way in which the British authorities do real security. Did they kick open the door of every house in London to search for terrorists? Obviously not. Did they wiretap every British home, send agents into every church, synagogue, Christian Science reading room, and Quaker meeting house in the land? Again, no. They focused enforcement resources where they were most likely to get results, identified a threat--and pounced.
It's possible to do something similar to protect airline safety. It's possible, for example, to take four or five basic pieces of information about somebody (such as name, address, phone number, date of birth) and match them against the commercial databases used by mortgage companies and credit card issuers to arrive at a surprisingly sophisticated terrorist risk profile of each passenger.
If, for example, you are a 38-year-old-woman, married and the mother of three, who has lived at the same address for nine years, has travelled to Barbados with her three children at Christmas for the past three years and is about to go again: Well, you present a fairly low risk. Airline security might still ask you to walk through a metal detector just to be on the safe side, but it should not waste too much time on you beyond that.
Another approach: Perhaps if you fly often from New York to London, you might be willing to volunteer a whole mass of information to British Airways in return for a "trusted traveller" card that will allow you to walk on the plane with minimal fuss. Your name might be Omar Abdullah, but if they know that you are 57 years old, director of the Middle East collection at the Metropolitan Museum, own an apartment in Manhattan and a brokerage account at Merrill Lynch, carry a Visa card with a $50,000 limit, fly to London six times a year with tickets paid for by the museum, and so on and so on ... well, they can pretty confidently let you on the plane with minimal formalities.
Please notice that neither program--neither risk profiling nor trusted traveller--would make any use of information about ethnicity or religion. They would not in any sense of the term be "racial profiling." Please note as well that both would use only information that the individual himself had voluntarily provided either directly to the airline or to other commercial entities--no government coercion would be involved.
Yet both these approaches have been effectively banned in the United States; the first by the U.S. Congress, the second by informal pressures placed upon the airlines by the Transportation Safety Agency.
Why? Congress and the TSA have surrendered to pressure from advocacy groups who fear that if we concentrate enforcement resources where they will do the most good, we will end up concentrating them upon unattached young Muslim men. Very few Muslims are Islamic terrorists, but all Islamic terrorists are Muslim. Our prescreening process may be ethnically neutral, but the results will not be.
But isn't that precisely the way security is supposed to work?
The British police are excruciatingly fair-minded: At their press conference this week, they stressed that the suspects are "British Asians," strenuously avoiding mention of the words "Muslim" or "Islamic." Yet even they manage somehow to reconcile themselves to dealing with terrorism by narrowing their attention to the most likely potential terrorists. Why can't aviation security do likewise?
You will have plenty of time to ponder that question as you stand in the long, long, long lines that will stretch all through this traveling summer.