"The Ridiculous Side of Airport Security"

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

The Ridiculous Side of Airport Security
By JOE SHARKEY
The New York (NY) Times

 
Like most business travelers, I've become good at sailing through airport
security without a hitch. With no metal in my pockets, not even the foil on
a stick of gum, I invariably step across the magnetometer without setting
off the alarm.

Which is exactly what I did on Saturday morning on my way to a flight from
the airport in Phoenix. So why was that checkpoint screener in an uproar?

"Sir! Sir!" she barked in that unmistakable tone that says you are in
violation of an official's rule, regulation or whim. She ordered me to step
back through the magnetometer.

"Take your shoes off!" she said.

"They're sneakers. There's no metal in them," I replied. Obviously, this was
true, since I had just passed through the magnetometer twice without setting
it off. Sneakers, which don't have the metal supports typically found in
shoes, have become the frequent flier's standard choice in footwear.

"I don't care," she said. "You have to put them through the machine."

"Is that just a rule for Phoenix?" I asked.

"It's for every airport," she replied with the firm certainty of the
invincibly clueless.

So I took the sneakers off and went through again in my socks. On the other
side, as I was putting my sneakers on - screeners' electronic wands had been
placed on the few chairs, rendering them unavailable for use by passengers
who wanted to sit down to put their shoes back on - I heard the same
screener barking new orders at the checkpoint.

This time the culprits were a stocking-footed young couple and their infant
child, who was dressed in white and wearing a pair of those tiny white baby
shoes that parents used to save and dangle on their cars' rearview mirrors.

"The baby's shoes have to go through the machine or that baby gets wanded,"
the guard warned the startled parents, who quickly complied. Wisely, the
baby kept its little mouth shut.

The federal Transportation Security Administration took over responsibility
for airport security checkpoints early last year. Since then, the T.S.A. has
been given abundant credit for replacing a sour, often surly, indisputably
underpaid and badly trained work force with a decently paid group of federal
employees who at least understand that passengers are not to be treated like
inmates in a maximum-security prison.

In the process, however, the agency has come under fierce criticism for
spending more than $5 billion in its first year, mostly to hire 55,000
screeners, twice the size of the former security work force. Reacting to
Congressional complaints about overstaffing at a time when air traffic is
down, the T.S.A. laid off 3,000 screeners last month and plans to let
another 3,000 go after the summer travel season.

But from the start, some critics have denounced the agency not just for its
spending, but for uneven or capricious application of rules, and for what
they say is a fundamentally flawed approach to airport security itself.

Over the last 18 months, hundreds of juicy tales of silliness at the
security lane have supported their case. For example, Al Gore and Dan
Quayle, former vice presidents of the United States, independently told me
last year that they were routinely taken aside for extra security pat-downs.
Another example I like is the pilot who was told by a checkpoint guard that
his carry-on bags were being pawed through because "we can't allow you to
have anything that would let you take over the plane."

Things have improved as security guards have gotten better at their jobs.
But obviously, the silliness can still be found, as the shoeless infant
showed me on Saturday.

That prompted me to recall another recent trip to Phoenix. I thought of some
remarks on security made by Michael Boyd, the airline consultant and pundit,
at a conference of regional airline executives there in late May.

"One of the airports we work with described having the T.S.A. on site as
having an army of occupation take over your airport. Unfortunately, it's the
French Army," Mr. Boyd cracked.

"What we've done is reactive and predictable," he said. "Some clown tries to
blow up a 767 over the Atlantic using his shoe, now we're all looking at
shoes. Thank God he didn't have that bomb hidden in his knickers."

He added: "Looking for pointy objects - that's not security. They're looking
to find nail files, a pocketknife - then they come out and say, `Look at the
weapons we found.' A nail file, boys and girls, is not a weapon."

The T.S.A., of course, rejects the idea that looking for pointy objects is
pointless. The agency said, for example, that its screeners intercepted more
than 4.8 million prohibited items at airport security checkpoints last year.
Among them, the agency said, were "1,101 firearms, nearly 1.4 million
knives, nearly 2.4 million other sharp objects including scissors, 39,842
box cutters, 125,273 incendiary or flammable objects, and 15,666 clubs."

In a statement announcing those interceptions, the agency's administrator,
former Adm. James M. Loy of the Coast Guard, said, "Those statistics are
strong testimony to the professionalism and attention to detail of our
highly trained security screeners." Although most intercepted items
represented "inadvertent violations" by passengers, he said, "keeping
dangerous items off flights is a top priority and we must err on the side of
caution."

Mr. Boyd and other industry critics deride the agency's major security
thrust - looking for objects on passengers - as "window dressing" that
annoys passengers and imposes huge costs on airlines while ignoring
significant security vulnerabilities elsewhere, like cargo areas, around
gates, in warehouses and in maintenance areas of airports and seaports.

"Security is anticipating," he said. "You want to know what anticipation is?
It's not looking for pointy objects. Security is saying, `What could these
clowns do next, and where are we vulnerable?' "


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