Airport security

To continue from the previous post: we can’t win the war against terrorists (and it is a war) by just defending ourselves. This doesn’t mean that defense isn’t important. In fact a good defense will sap major terrorist resources and also deprive them of the publicity and recruitment value of a success or a near success. There is no doubt in my mind that the “panty” bomber’s Christmas day attempt will be used by his dispatchers to recruit more volunteers.

So what are we doing to defend ourselves on the narrow front of air travel?

It is quite obvious that our intelligence system is screwed up. According to the President, even when we have the information it is not available in an actionable form and its use is hampered by political correctness. The last is my conclusion.

There is a last line of defense: the airport. The President promised more money and more people to secure us. The money will be spent on more full body imaging machines and the additional guards will be, presumably, standing around and looking at our things.

Let’s do some arithmetic:

One of the busy airports of the nation, McCarran International in Las Vegas, has about 40 million passengers going through it every year. If we assume that an average flight holds about 200 passengers. This is 200,000 flights per year or 570 per day. This is based on 350 working days per year, which should somewhat compensate for seasonal fluctuations in traffic. Of course only half of these people are going out and need to be screened. This make it about 285 daily outgoing flights. The above numbers are based on statistics published at http://www.mccarran.com.

Now back to our calculation: a full body scanner of the type used now requires about 30 seconds to complete a scan. Assuming only 10 seconds for a person to get in and 10 to get out and flawless operation we need 50 seconds per passenger. Since few outgoing flights are scheduled late at night, we can assume that our 285 flights are spaced unevenly and happen during about 18 hours every day. A majority will be going out in a 10 hour period, but we will not include this in our calculations. That makes it 16 flights per hour on average, or 3200 people per hour to be scanned. It means 3200x50=160,000 seconds or 26.6 hours of scanning per hour of passenger traffic. It seems that the minimum number of machines to be installed is 27 – they need to scan all the passengers within an hour to prevent the lines from building up. In practice there will have to be more machines to deal with peak hour traffic and breakdowns, and not all machines will be in use when traffic is down.

At a cost of about $150,000 per scanner we need an investment of at least $40.5 million just to buy the machines. That’s for just one airport and not the busiest one either. The other problem is that lines will be at least 1 hour long (that was our basic assumption). There is also a human factor to be considered: the person looking at the scanner display will have to see 72 people every hour. How long will it take them to get bored and lose concentration? What happens if they see something and decide to alert the guards? More delays?

There is another problems with full body scanners: what to do with passengers that have, or claim to have, medical attachments. A urine bag attached to a catheter is the first that comes to mind, but there are more. Do we just let them go, ask for a letter from a doctor or just refuse them entry?

The last concern is radiation: the scanners operate by showering the body with low energy microwaves and measuring the reflected energy or using the back scatter from low intensity X-rays. Do you feel safe standing for 30 seconds inside a low power microwave oven? What about cumulative effects?  The X-Ray intensity used by these machines is thousands of times lower than a chest X-Ray or a CT scan, but X-Ray damage is cumulative and there will be some people who will get sick. Maybe the National Health insurance program provided by our benevolent Government will cure us all but I wouldn’t bet on it.

So we invest $200 Billion (just an estimate) to equip most of our airports with full body scanners and what do we get for it? Will we be safer? No. A moderately creative mind will find ways to smuggle stuff aboard an airplane without carrying it on one’s body. I will not enumerate the ways it can be done within the parameters of the current system, or any future one – maybe the terrorist are not as smart as all that and I don’t want to give them ideas.

Actually we will be LESS safe. The money that will be spent on machines, their crews and service will not be spent on other, more effective measures.

The way to go is profiling. Israel does it and we can do the same. The way Israel defends it’s airports (there are several) is simple but effective: a layered defense based on behavioral profiling.

There is a gross misconception about how this system operates. I heard the other day several TV talking heads espousing the benefits of profiling Muslims. “Not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims” is a catchy phrase, but completely wrong. I found myself agreeing with a guy from CAIR that was objecting to such profiling.

This is why Israel doesn’t profile Muslims – how can you know who is Muslim? Will a terrorist necessarily admit that he/she is? What about a 1988 case when a pregnant Irish woman was about to get on an El Al flight from London to Tel Aviv. She wasn’t Muslim and British security checked her carry-on bag and found nothing. The El Al profiler at the gate asked her a couple of questions and decided that something was wrong. A thorough examination of her bag uncovered a sophisticated bomb inside a calculator. The woman didn’t know about it. Her Jordanian boyfriend, and father of her baby, gave it to her knowing that she and his unborn child would die when the plane reached 39,000 feet.

Behavioral profiling is just that: it’s BEHAVIORAL. If you behave strangely you are a suspect whether you are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu or something else. The only requirement for this is to have trained people look at the passengers, not only their stuff. You can never discover all there is to discover about stuff, which will always leave an opening for a terrorist. You can see enough to decide that some people need to be screened more thoroughly than others. Some of this can be done by machines – a passenger without luggage paying for a one way ticket to the US with cash should have been flagged by a computer program – but it will always be a person that decides who is to be thoroughly searched.

Last time I left for the US from Israel’s Ben Gurion airport the whole security check took less than 15 minutes. Luggage to be shipped through is screened in your presence BEFORE you give it to the airline. My carry-on, with the laptop in it, went through the same machine and I didn’t have to take the laptop out. The metal detectors are set NOT to go of if I wear my watch and belt (I have to take them off in US airports) and we were not asked to take off our shoes. We did spend several minutes talking to a security profiler (a nice girl) and another short conversation at the airline counter (another profiler) while getting our boarding passes and turning our suitcases over to the airline. They would have sounded an alert if we were unnecessarily nervous or seemed to lie. We were also watched all the time, from the moment our taxi entered the airport gate, by people who were looking for suspicious behavior.

I have heard many objections to an Israeli-style system being implemented in this country. The main one was size. Ben Gurion has only 12 million people going through it each year. That is a smallish airport on the US scale and people say: “what they do can’t be easily scaled up”. This is wrong. A larger airport will need more profilers and a means to better control passenger movement but it’s not rocket science.

For example: it shouldn’t be a problem to have a security check point at the entrance to McCarran (or JFK or any other airport). Armed guards would stop every car and ask the driver and passengers how are they doing and where they are coming from. The next question would be (depending on who is in the car): "Can you please open the trunk: Oh you have no luggage. Please move to the side of the road (or whatever)". And we have one more suspect either caught or thoroughly checked and let through for the next layer to take care of. Sounds simple, but it is very effective in screening out the obvious dangers. This kind of check point doesn’t need to slow traffic down much and is not very expensive.

Until we have a system like the Israeli one we will be more and more harassed, costs will go up and there will be no improvement in security. I am not optimistic about the Israeli-style security coming to an airport near you any time soon.