"Life on the Front Lines of Airport Security"

Wednesday, January 9, 2002

Life on the Front Lines of Airport Security
By JOE SHARKEY
The New York (NY) Times


JOHN D. CORNELIUS, a flight attendant for Alaska Airlines, already has a
nomination in mind for 2002 Person of the Year. The nominee is a male
airline passenger, identity unknown, who recently made the ultimate
gesture of futility while being rudely prodded and frisked at a security
checkpoint at the Seattle airport.

"They started wanding and wanting to check everything, really giving the
guy a hard time, and he just went and dropped his pants, right there in
the middle of everybody," Mr. Cornelius said. "To myself, I'm like,
right on!"

Mr. Cornelius, the president of the Portland, Ore., local of the
Association of Flight Attendants, the main flight attendants' union,
offers some justification for this silent cheer. Through their union,
flight attendants have complained recently that they are often singled
out for extra, unnecessarily intense security. The union has complained
that some flight attendants have been harassed, and that a few female
members have been sexually groped, by newly empowered airport security
screeners since Sept. 11.

"If you are a screener and you've got a quota of people you're going to
search, there is a tendency to follow the path of least resistance," Mr.
Cornelius said, suggesting a theory. "And because they're professionals,
flight attendants in uniform are going to be the least likely people to
argue with you or complain about what you're doing. So it sends a
message to the public that, hey, they're checking everybody, including
the airline crews."

Flight attendants, pilots and other crew members are not the only ones
expressing unhappiness with the new airport security-checkpoint
experience. As has been noted previously in this space,
security-checkpoint hassles are among the top complaints that business
travelers and other frequent fliers have expressed since Sept. 11. Some
say they have curtailed travel because of it.

The most recent prominent example of the scope of this problem occurred
at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington last weekend, when a
75-year-old United States congressman, John D. Dingell, a Michigan
Democrat, was taken into a room and ordered to remove his trousers after
steel pins in his artificial hip set off a checkpoint metal detector.

"They felt me up and down like a prize steer," Mr. Dingell said,
according to The Associated Press.

"Pantsing" a congressman will undoubtedly add impetus to the current
push by the airline industry to persuade the federal government, which
takes over total responsibility for airport screening next month, to get
behind a new passenger-profiling system that is being proposed as a way
to separate the potential non- threats from the potential threats at
airport checkpoints. 

The industry's trade group, the Air Transport Association, has become
very candid about the word "profiling," by the way. To improve safety
and address service complaints, "some element of lawful profiling is
essential" at passenger checkpoints, Michael Wascom, a spokesman, said
yesterday. 

A leading national passenger advocacy group, the Air Travelers
Association, has said that it wants to work with the airlines and the
federal government to develop a voluntary passenger identification-card
system, in which prescreened passengers would use so-called smart cards
encoded with biometric identifiers to expedite their passage through
security checkpoints. Those without the ID cards would receive a more
intense level of security.

Much of the attention so far has been focused on the proposed technology
- handprint, iris, facial and other identification techniques - that
would underpin the system. But before technology is selected, Mr. Wascom
said, the industry wants the federal government to commit itself to a
passenger profiling system that employs "a unified, coordinated
database" to collect passenger profiles from criminal, customs,
immigration and federal intelligence records.

Passengers with the ID cards would still go through security checks, but
those who choose not to enroll in the program, or do not meet the
criteria, would be subject to a "very rigid process before we let them
onto one of our planes," Mr. Wascom said. 

He and other proponents say that the new system would allow security
resources to be focused more on people whose profiles suggest a
potential threat, rather than those whose profiles suggest no threat.
"Right now, the system is designed to, in essence, treat everyone as an
equal threat," Mr. Wascom said.

The industry has proposed that the profiling system be developed under
the aegis of the Office of Homeland Security, rather than the
Transportation Department.

The Transportation Department has signaled a reluctance to support
passenger profiling, beyond a current system in place that randomly
selects some passengers for extra searches based on criteria that
specifically exclude personal and ethnic characteristics. In an
interview on "60 Minutes" last month, Transportation Secretary Norman Y.
Mineta said, for example, that a 70-year-old woman from Vero Beach,
Fla., ideally should receive the same level of security attention as a
young Muslim male from Jersey City.

The smart-card ID proposal has also drawn opposition from civil
liberties and libertarian groups, who are worried about implications for
individual privacy. And conservative critics insist that any program of
airline security under federal control is unacceptable. 

Passengers with ID cards would basically "go through the same level of
security that we have today," said Michael Boyd, the president of the
Boyd Group, an aviation industry consultant firm. But those without the
cards, he joked, would then merely "get a higher level of bad security,
get the John Dingle treatment, where they're going to take your pants
off."


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