"On The Front Line With Airport Security"

Monday, September 12, 2005

On The Front Line With Airport Security
Four Years After 9/11, The Biggest Fear At Bradley Is Complacency
By PAUL MARKS
The Hartford (CT) Courant


You don't want to be a VIP at airport security.

Carl Menze, a 6-foot-3 security screener with a shaved head, said he never
lets on to passengers about the inside joke. "They think it means `very
important person,'" he said, "but it actually means `very inspected
person.'"
  
More formally, those passengers are known to the Transportation Security
Administration as "selectees." They get the maximum treatment at the
security gate, starting with a stay in a holding pen and ending with an
individual body search.

What they don't get is any explanation.

"Male VIP," Menze calls out to the screener to his left, who is scanning
images of bags, shoes and laptop computers passing through an X-ray scanner.
"One bag, one bin." It's a signal that both of those get a hand inspection
as well as an X-ray scan.

Working the morning shift Friday in Terminal A at Bradley International
Airport, Menze is assigned to Lane 1, which handles just about everybody
picked for intensive screening. Moving the VIP's along, he never lets on
about the nature of their first-class treatment.

He softens his firm directives with the polite use of "sir" or "ma'am" and
lots of eye contact. He collects their belongings in plastic bins marked
with orange tape and presses sticky orange labels on their carry-on bags -
markers for other screeners to follow.

Anyone can become a VIP. Many are randomly selected by a computerized
program used by the airlines. Some are tagged for scrutiny because of
behavior such as paying cash for a one-way ticket and other indicators that
security officials will not reveal.

VIP or not, travelers' attitudes toward passing through security can range
from agreeable resignation to prickly impatience. With Sunday marking the
fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a behind-the-scenes
look at how one veteran screener does his job offers some insight into an
agency created as a key part of the nation's heightened homeland security.

Replacing private security agencies hired by the airlines prior to 9/11, the
TSA has established the first set of federal standards for protecting
aviation from terrorism.

Menze, a father of three, said he joined the TSA two years ago after his
former employer in the auto industry moved out of state, leaving him
unemployed. He said his personal goal - and the thrust of his training - is
to combine good people skills with a firm grasp of security procedures.

One of Menze's key tasks as the "loader" working at the head of the
checkpoint line is to make sure laptop computers are uncased and put into
bins for inspection. Heavily metallic and relatively opaque to an X-ray
scan, laptops are considered a prime risk for concealment of bombs or
weapons.

"It's my son's," says a middle-aged man with rimless glasses, fumbling for
the proper zipper on the laptop case. He places the machine in a bin,
unsmiling.

"I'll need you to zip that up," Menze says, and the man makes a token effort
to close the case, then gives up.

"And I'm going to recommend your sneakers go through," he adds as the man
starts to turn away. The black-and-white Nikes go on the conveyor - standard
procedure for most any footwear larger than flip-flops.

The man rolls his eyes. "Anything else? DNA?" he deadpans.

"No, that's about it," Menze responds.

The man walks through the magnetometer gate and promptly sets off an alarm. 

An Inscrutable Mass

At a 4 a.m. briefing preceding Friday's morning shift, TSA employees are
being urged to keep their focus sharp.

Dave Ishihara, Bradley's new federal security director, mentioned the
anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and asked the screeners to remember that the
next suitcase might be the one with a bomb - even though none has been found
at Bradley since the TSA took over screening duties more than three years
ago. 

Last month, though, federal screeners for the first time caught someone with
an explosive device trying to board a plane. A 24-year-old man was arrested
at Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City after a metal carbon dioxide
cartridge filled with gunpowder was found in luggage he was carrying onto a
Delta flight to Atlanta.

"You can't become complacent," Ishihara said. "All I can do is ask you,
implore you, to screen every passenger or bag at the CTX [machine] like it's
the first one of the day."

He said complacency is a real danger. Intuitions that say something is out
of place should not be ignored, he said, even if no lights flash on a metal
detector.

"If your mind is alarming, consider that an alarm," Ishihara said.

Luckily, the X-ray monitor at Bradley International Airport shows a lot.
Keys, coins, steel shoe shanks, cameras and scissors all stand out in sharp
relief.

But it can't see everything. 

Screeners rotate job stations and take 30-minute turns at the monitor to
avoid fatigue. Now Menze is squinting at a dark mass among the on-screen
orange, blue and green images showing the jumbled contents of one well-worn,
maroon suitcase.

"Whose suitcase is this?" Menze asks, snatching it from the conveyer.

He tells the owner his bag must pass through the scanner a second time.
Menze turns it, shakes it, puts it back on the belt.

He frowns at the same inscrutable, dark mass.

"Can I get a bag check?" he calls to a colleague down the row. A blond woman
steps up to open the maroon bag for a hand inspection. Menze, who joined the
agency two years ago, said he is constantly mindful of the lives that would
be at risk should he slip and let a bomb, gun or knife get through.

Inside the suitcase, the other screener finds that the inscrutable mass came
from a wooden box crammed with jewelry. Swiping the interior with a fabric
swatch that is fed into a machine, she tests for traces of explosives
residue and finds no hidden threat to aviation. In minutes the bag is
scanned a third time without the jewelry box, then cleared for release.

Butane lighters, which the government banned from flights earlier this year,
remain common in carry-on bags, something screeners find surprising. On
Friday, a woman who had one taken away was told by a screener, "Just
remember: no more lighters. And you're only allowed four books of matches."

The screener reminded the woman that keeping lighters off the plane is
designed to thwart a terrorist like Richard Reid, the infamous "shoe bomber"
whose plot to blow up a plane failed only because the bomb's fuse failed to
burn.

Near the end of the shift, Dan Lee, a TSA manager, pointed to the list of
contraband items collected: 22 lighters, 22 scissors with sharp points, 15
blades less than 3 inches long and one knife with a longer blade.

In a recent rules change, the agency now allows colostomy patients to carry
scissors provided they are less than 4 inches long and part of their medical
kit. Other scissors must have rounded points. Within the Department of
Homeland Security, there is talk of allowing some small penknives onto
planes, as was done before 9/11.

After a lunch break, Menze finds a bit of comic relief when a woman opens
what looks like a checkered purse and out pops a small, black dog.

"It's a teacup Yorkie, 3½ pounds," says Marlene Filer of Farmington, hugging
the tiny dog. "I was glad they didn't put him through the X-ray."

Menze explains that animals never go through the scanner, and that can have
perplexing consequences. More than once, people traveling with pet birds
have removed them from cages but failed to keep a tight grip. Who chases
them down, he said, depends on whether the bird flies into or out of the
secured area.

For someone with a ruptured Achilles' tendon, Dani Howard of Branford
brought a sunny disposition to the screening station. Wearing an orthopedic
boot of fabric and steel on her right foot, she laughed and said she knew an
individual search was inevitable when she failed to pass through the
magnetometer without triggering the alarm.

"You have to expect it, I think," Howard said, as she was checked with a
metal-detecting wand and patted down by a female screener. "There's a lot of
metal in there."

Now a 60-ish woman arrives in the VIP holding area, looking forlorn with
eyes wide and mouth in a frown. Her dour expression belies the gaiety of the
big, bright butterflies adorning her casual shirt.

Menze greets her briskly: "Would you step right out here, ma'am?"

"Gail," he calls to a fellow screener. "VIP. One bin."


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