As I write this, just prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I’m making a conscious effort to not write yet another retrospective piece. It continues to be done by so many more thoughtful and talented journalists that I cannot improve upon them, nor shall I try. [Pause] You’re welcome.
One thing I do continue to comment on is that tangible positive progress in aviation security still seems hard to come by. Indeed, TSA itself notes it still hasn’t found that comfort zone; it claims a “perpetual state of evolution” as it defends itself against naughty images in the machinery and bad PR stories about certain screening processes at the checkpoint. Perhaps that’s not an altogether bad thing. One would expect technology will continue to evolve, along with improved training, policies and procedures. But just as importantly, what the media are not reporting is airplanes falling out of the sky.
That’s good. For better or worse, for all the bizarre stories we hear about little old ladies in wheel chairs and diapered infants (and senior citizens) being involuntarily afforded a pre-flight internal medical exam, somehow the system is working, perhaps in spite of itself.
There are plenty of reasons it shouldn’t. TSA's takeover of airport screening was based on a mistaken belief that screening failures allowed 9/11 to happen. No; it was intelligence failures. Indeed, we are still seeing that truth: Mr. Atta and many of his colleagues had been known and tracked by federal agencies for many months, and intelligence was known regarding the shoes, shorts and toner cartridges, but poor communications and agency turf wars stifled the appropriate distribution of any actionable information. Another major structural governmental flaw – admittedly a Congressional blunder, not of TSA’s doing – is the agency's serious conflict of interest in being the aviation security regulator and also being the provider of aviation security services – fox in the hen house, regulating itself.
Bad policy, but it seems nobody in the agency or the Congress is willing to ‘fess up to that bad idea and fix it. Instead, they keep picking at the self-inflicted wounds, but it just won’t – and can’t - heal. The largest government reorganization since WW-II has now spent about $40 billion doing a pretty good job of making air travel a truly unpleasant experience, and for many a non-experience because they now choose not to fly, or to even travel for pleasure at all – yet another drag on the flagging economy.
“Trusted traveler” and the intelligence-based IATA Checkpoint of the Future concept is likely to be a very good first step, although many argue that the annual fees tend to separate the business frequent flyer “haves” from the occasional vacationer family “have-nots”. The idea has been around since well before 2001, recognizing that pre-vetted passengers could be exempted from much of the checkpoint hassles since the overwhelming majority of those who fly are demonstrably not a threat. It makes sense to devote more resources to identifying those more likely to be a threat, or those in the middle about whom we know nothing at all, thus refocusing airport security on keeping bad people off planes, rather than bad objects.
So how worried should you be? Reason magazine ran a rough calculation that suggests “your annual risk of dying in a car accident of 1 in 19,000; drowning in a bathtub at 1 in 800,000; dying in a building fire at 1 in 99,000; or being struck by lightning at 1 in 5,500,000.” In other words, based on worldwide numbers of terrorist-caused fatalities, in the last five years you were four times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist. Good job, TSA. I think…
