Traveling by plane in the USA, especially in the wake of the disrupted London airliner bombing plot earlier this month, looks nothing like it before the 9/11 attacks. Liquids or gels aren't allowed in carry-ons (with a few exceptions). The rules have adapted to emerging threats (remember when nail files were forbidden?). Shoe removal is required at every airport. Air marshals have become frequent fliers, and your pilot might be armed with a gun. The government also moved to centralize the defense of the nation with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Its secretary, Michael Chertoff, discussed air security and other issues with USA TODAY's editorial board. His comments were edited for length and clarity.
Question: The terrorism threat comes predominantly from young, Muslim male extremists. Without racial or ethnic profiling, are there ways to make airport security better match this threat?
Answer: Yes. At the extreme, 3-year-olds are not probably a threat we need to worry about, and 75-year-old grandmothers are probably not a threat. But if you look at the experience of watching suicide bombers in other parts of the world, saying those can't be women is just not factually correct. So I'm hesitant to say that we should focus only on males, or Muslims of a particular age.
Q: So what might an airport screener look for?
A: We are training our screening officers in behavioral pattern recognition, looking at ways people behave that will actually suggest they're trying to hide something. That's a positive step that does not require ethnic profiling but looks to the pattern of behavior. I think some element of that is talking to people when they come through, asking them a few basic questions: Where are you going? What are you doing? Why are you going there? These are tools that would allow us to be more precise, but without getting into racial profiling, which is a bad thing.
Q: Have you learned any more about the chemistry of the London plot that might enable you to fine-tune the ban on liquids and gels?
A: The chemistry's still being looked at. But I actually want to come at it a different way. The question becomes not only is there a more precise way to screen out liquids you're worried about, the question is whether doing so would actually be more inconvenient than having an absolute ban. There is technology that would allow you to screen -- bottle by bottle -- whether something is dangerous. The problem is that it takes a long time. If everybody carries four bottles and it takes 15 seconds, that's a minute per person. Well, if you have 300 people boarding a jet, that's 300 minutes to board. Nobody wants to do that. The trick for us is to find a system that keeps out bad stuff and is as efficient and as convenient as possible. And sometimes it turns out that a more comprehensive ban is clearer, more easy to enforce and more efficient for the traveler.
Q: Had you identified the threat of liquids before the London plot and considered how to combat it?
A: We were aware of this as an issue, and what was particularly troubling about this scheme is how hard these guys worked to come up with ways to conceal liquids. That is what made us see the need to go to this total ban. I had actually thought of a total ban, but I had a real concern about whether it was something that would work. What alarmed me about this was that it was a very, very sophisticated way to bring components in.
Q: What role, if any, did the National Security Agency (NSA) terrorist surveillance program or the banking surveillance program play in thwarting the British terror plot?
A: I can just tell you at a very general level, the ability to monitor communications, or movement of money, is in my experience the single most important tool in stopping terrorist attacks. It's a very important tool.
Q: There is a very obvious security gap regarding a less stringent screening of cargo shipments that are placed on passenger planes. Why has this not been a bigger priority?
A: It is a big priority. First, if you come to the airport or you go to the airline and you want to ship a package on a particular airline in the passenger hold, it's going to go through screening the same as a checked bag will. So people who say we don't screen that are just wrong. Now the (shipping companies) have to verify the person who's bringing the package in. Most of the FedEx and UPS stuff that the ordinary person sends doesn't go on passenger airlines. And I do think that the threat to cargo jets blowing up is not one that I think is probably a likely terrorist target given what we currently know.
Q: But what if someone landed a low-level job at a known shipper? Isn't that still a vulnerability?
A: Here's the problem they would have. They would really have no way of knowing in advance whether a particular package would wind up on a passenger plane. So as a threat vector, it would be hard for somebody to plan, to be able to put something on a passenger jet. Now, that's not to say that we don't want to make it tougher. But the idea that anybody can come up and stick something in a passenger plane and know it's going to go there is actually not true.
Q: The Registered Traveler program, which asks passengers to volunteer information ahead of time, would smooth the screening process in exchange for faster screening, yet it hasn't happened. Why?
A: The airline industry at some point in the last year became somewhat less enthused about Registered Traveler because I think they came to the conclusion that it actually was not going to be something a lot of people would sign up for. I disagree with that. Frankly, there are privacy advocates who are strongly against it. We need to obviously make sure that we're obeying the privacy rules, but I think a Registered Traveler and some form of domestic Secure Flight (a similar government-sponsored program) is still the way to go. It still is better to get a little more information about people, and certainly on a voluntary basis, and then not have to put them into secondary (searches) than to put more people into secondary and have their stuff searched and have them asked questions.
Q: Will the flying public embrace such voluntary screening?
A: Those who choose to do it will get the benefit of it and those who choose not to can weigh their own convenience.
Q: There are significant civil liberties concerns associated with the war on terror as the government collects more and more information about its citizens. What will protect Americans from an encroachment by government in the future?
A: What we'd want to do would actually enhance civil liberties. For example, if we had more specific information about travel history and things of that sort -- this is not deep secret stuff, this is stuff that you give to your travel agent -- that data allows us to focus on people that we are really more worried about. I actually view that as a plus to civil liberties. I dare say if you asked most people, they'd rather give you a little more information and avoid getting padded down and having their bags gone through than have no information given out so we'd have to wind up doing searches of everybody. Chertoff reflects on 5 years since 9/11
'Constantly vigilant': Obviously, we are happy that there has not been a successful attack on the United States soil since 9/11, but that is not a cause for complacency. It's a cause for redoubled effort. Because I think it would be foolish to presume that that's going to continue forever. We will only avoid an attack if we are not only constantly vigilant but always adaptable in trying to look around the corner and see not only what happened before but what's going to happen next.
'A great deterrent': The big danger is the unknown terrorist, or the unidentified terrorist. And these guys leave fingerprints. They leave them on bomb fragments, they leave them in training camps, they leave them in apartments where terrorist planning takes place. We capture these. If we have 10-finger prints from everyone seeking to enter the country, we can run them against each other. The real beauty of this is, it's a great deterrent because now, as this gets rolled out over the next couple of years, every terrorist is going to have to ask himself, "Did I ever leave a fingerprint in a safe house or on some artifact that was found in a battlefield." And they're going to know that if they did, and they come across that border, we can catch them.
'The odds are against us': At Homeland Security, we have to bat a thousand. We have to stop everything. And particularly as you get into low-level, homegrown types of plots that don't require much planning, the odds are against us. A lone wolf can work without ever dealing with other people. It's going to be very hard to detect those.
'We can't go back': We need to get in a place that we can sustain over a long period of time. That means not overreaction, but also, not underreaction. We can't live in a state of constant paranoia or a feeling that we're in an armed camp because that would not be a sustainable way to lead our lives, and it would cause enormous damage to our freedoms. But we also can't go back to pre-Sept. 11 thinking, that these matters are going to take care of themselves and we do not have to adjust the way we live to take account of this very significant, ongoing threat. So the challenge is to proceed in a way that will get us a balanced approach to security -- finding ways to be more precise in targeting the threat and eliminating it, with less inconvenience to innocent people and less disruption of our daily lives.
Copyright 2005 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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