"Airport Security: Still Fighting the Last War?"

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Airport Security: Still Fighting the Last War?
Airports are trying, but are they flexible enough to prevent the next
generation of terrorist attacks? 
By Alan S. Brown
Homeland Response


To understand why airport security has consumed from 50 percent to 80
percent of the total Transportation Security Administration (TSA) budget
since the agency was created in 2001, consider a cardinal rule of politics:
Never lose the last war. 

This rule is why the French built the Maginot line after World War I, even
though many officers (including then-obscure Charles DeGaulle) foresaw that
German mobile armor would sweep around it easily. And it is why airport
screeners on the morning of 9/11 searched for guns and large knives, the
weapons used by hijackers during the 1970s and 1980s. 

"The system did just what it was designed to do. It kept large weapons off
the plane but allowed box cutters and Swiss army knives to pass right
through," explains Robert Poole, director of transportation for Reason
Foundation, a conservative think tank. 

Standard hijacking procedures - cooperate to minimize casualties - made it
easy for a handful of terrorists with small hand weapons to convert three
aircraft into suicide missiles. When passengers aboard the fourth plane,
United Flight 93, learned about the WTC and Pentagon, knives and box cutters
were not enough to keep them from rushing the hijackers. 

Three months later, Richard Reid attempted to bring down a Paris-Miami
flight with plastic explosive hidden in his shoe. Surprisingly, ICTS
International NV, the screening company at the Paris Airport, identified
Reid as suspicious and subjected him to a lengthy interrogation. Although it
confiscated nail clippers and nail files from other passengers, it had no
effective way to check for explosives. Only immediate action by aircraft
crew and passengers stopped Reid from detonating his bomb. 

The Next Threat

This sequence of events highlights some important truths about airport
security. First, security systems and procedures did what they were designed
to do. Second, terrorists were able to find and exploit vulnerabilities in
the system. Third, it is easier for security to aim technology at the last
threat rather than find the next, unknown threat. Fourth, people remain the
most important line of defense, but they need the right tools to be
effective. 

The question about air security today is whether TSA and airports are
building systems and technology flexible enough to deal with the next round
of threats. "As soon as you harden one area, you leave another vulnerable,"
says Ray Garza, president of CTI Consulting Services, a Germantown, Md.,
firm that helps airports improve security. 

"When you upgrade the front door, you'd better secure the back door because
that's where they're going to go next," says Garza. "And after you do it,
better check the windows. And then you better make sure the person ringing
your front door is really the delivery guy." 

U.S. airports have certainly locked the front door and the back door too.
They have undoubtedly improved security from five years ago. Yet some -
perhaps many - windows remain open. 

Open Windows

Since 9/11, The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued 36
reports highlighting airport security shortcomings. It has criticized
everything from screener training, worker access systems, and cargo
shipments to out-of-control implementation of programs to prescreen and
register travelers. The Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS), which now includes
TSA, has only begun to look for ways to focus security resources on the most
risky passengers. 

TSA has many critics. Poole, for example, claims TSA has a built-in conflict
of interest because it sets and regulates security policy while employing
the baggage and passenger screeners who implement it. 

"How can it regulate itself," asks Poole. He argues that airports should
take responsibility for their own security while TSA pays for some equipment
and audits procedures. He also wants to see a more risk-based approach to
passenger screening, even if that means profiling based on suspicious
patterns of behavior and purchases. 

Hans Weber, president of San Diego, Calif.-based Tecop International Inc.
and a member of several security panels constituted after 9/11, also makes
the case for profiling. "So far," he explains, "our policy is to keep bad
things from getting on airplanes, and we define those bad things based on
what terrorists have shown us in the past. 

"After 9/11, we banned small knives. After Reid, we bought 1,000 explosion
detection systems costing $1 million each to check for bombs. Once we
defined that threat, then we had to worry about man-portable antiaircraft
missiles. We go on and on, defining threats and using technology against
them. 

"Our enemies will always be a step ahead of us in defining the next bad
thing. They'll see where we put defensive measures, then go where our
defense is weakest. We can't possibly afford to protect against everything.
We can't continue to go after bad things exclusively. We have to factor in
bad people, and that means we have to profile." 

Overlapping Layers

Weber argues that profiling could eliminate known passengers who do not pose
a threat. That would enable security personnel to spend more time on unknown
travelers. Profiling, however, is not even an option until TSA and DHS
implement the computerized information systems they need to capture and
analyze passenger records. 

Some of these programs, such as Registered Traveler and Secure Flight, are
moving towards fruition. Yet both have had significant implementation
problems and remain far behind schedule. Meanwhile, airports must
concentrate on "bad things" through a series of overlapping security
systems. 

"There's no way to eliminate 100 percent of the risk when someone is willing
to give their life," explains James O'Bryon, a Belair, Md., consultant who
chairs the National Research Council's Committee on Assessment of Security
Technologies for Transportation. 

Instead, he suggests multiple, overlapping barriers. "It's sort of like
holding a balloon," he explains. "If you squeeze one part, it bursts out
somewhere else. If we put in enough systems to act as deterrents, maybe we
can force terrorists to go somewhere else where they're less comfortable and
catch them if/when they make a mistake." 

The security squeeze starts with passengers and carry-on luggage screening.
Passengers, usually shoeless, walk through a metal detector while their
baggage goes through an X-ray system. The system relies on nearly 40,000 TSA
employees and a much smaller number of private security guards to read the
X-ray images and correctly identify potential weapons or bombs in carry-on
bags. 

They must also try to guess which passengers might be carrying explosives or
ceramic knives on their persons. "There are technologies that can detect
what you have under your clothing, but they clearly outline your body so
they're deemed unacceptable [because of privacy] so far," says Weber. Even
without those tools, screeners are the most important barrier to keeping
dangerous people off airplanes. 

There are many ways to improve screener effectiveness, says Colin Drury,
director of State University of New York at Buffalo's Research Institute for
Safety and Security in Transportation. An expert on inspection systems,
Drury argues that feedback is the best way to improve performance. Most
X-ray machines, for example, can insert images of threats - guns, knives,
bombs - into images of bags going through the machine. "That keeps them
trained and alert," says Drury. 

He also recommends tests to select people with a strong sense of spatial
relationships, frequent assignment changes to maintain sharpness and
training programs that expose screeners to progressively more difficult
images so they can build better mental models of threats. "A side-on knife
is easy to spot," he says, "but it takes training to understand what you're
looking at when the knife is pointing straight up at you." 

Even so, given the enormous flow of people through airports, screeners have
little time to subject passengers to intensive interrogations. 

Check In

Screeners may not search passengers, but they test 100 percent of their
checked-in baggage for explosives. This is done with X-rays, computer
tomography (CT), chemical swabs or even bomb-sniffing dogs. 

Some of the equipment is quite sophisticated. CT systems, for example, work
like hospital CAT scan systems. As a bag moves through the unit, a rotating
lens takes X-ray "slices" that a computer reassembles into a
three-dimensional image. Complex mathematical algorithms assess the density
and energy absorption and scattering of the materials in the bag. If the
patterns match those of known explosives, the bag receives further
attention. 

The system is far from perfect. "It really galls me that we haven't we got a
competent explosive detection system," says Aaron Gellman of Northwestern
University's Transportation Center in Chicago. "We have far too many false
positives, and a lot of false negatives too." 

Experts understand Gellman's frustration. "A foolproof explosives detector
is extremely difficult to design," says Weber, who made his name designing
measurement equipment. "The difference in atomic composition of explosives
and safe molecules is often a matter of the placement of an atom or two.
This is a very small difference to detect. 

"The very few techniques that are really specific to explosives detection
have two weaknesses," he continues. "First, none cover the broad range of
explosives. Second, they are very slow, not 500 bags per hour but one bag
per 15 minutes. 

"For high-speed process, we have to use techniques that are not fully
specific to explosives," he says, referring to X-rays and CT. "In the
universe of stuff they detect, explosives overlap with safe molecules. As a
result, the false alarm rate is high. I know how to make bags from perfectly
acceptable materials that will alarm 100 percent of the time," he says. Yet
Weber sees improved technologies on the horizon. 

So does O'Bryon. "I've been watching for more than eight years, and we've
made quite a bit of progress," he says. "Detection rates have grown more
reliable, and false alarms have gone down though they are still too high." 

O'Bryon believes explosive detection systems are reliable enough for
automatic detection, passing through the vast majority of bags and kicking
out those that need further attention. 

Poole points to GAO studies that show fully automated systems could
eliminate up to three-quarters of the people now needed to screen checked-in
baggage. "The payback for these systems is only one to two years, but the
way funding works in Washington, TSA operations have first claim on budget
monies. If anything is left over, it can then go into the capital budget,"
he says. This makes it unlikely TSA will install more automated systems
without Congressional action. 

Outside In

In the past, terrorists posing as passengers have hijacked airplanes. But
what happens if the threat comes from workers inside the airport? 

"An airport is like a community, like a small town," says Garza. "Think
about trying to protect your community from people who live there, from
visitors, from people going through." 

It creates massive access control problems. In many ways, this is a problem
U.S. security firms are accustomed to solving. They begin with establishing
a perimeter fence and monitoring it with motion detectors, pressure sensors,
and microwave and laser sensors. Inside the perimeter, swipe cards, PIN
numbers and even biometrics give employees access only to those areas they
are authorized to enter. 

"Even then, you still need guards at the gates," says Garza. "A driver may
swipe his card and he's okay, but who's that person in the passenger seat?
You have to have someone there to ask that question." 

Yet the biggest weakness in perimeter security remains the human element,
says Weber. "The fundamental vetting of workers is still weak," he says. "It
is unreasonable to think we can separate certain weaknesses in our society -
the ease of ID theft, the ease with which people can get a new driver's
license and assume a new identity - from how airports hire people. There are
too many loopholes, and too many people who want to make money selling
data." 

Weber's concern is underscored by a June 2004 GAO report. It criticized TSA
for not requiring fingerprint-based criminal history checks and security
awareness training for all airport workers. 

GAO also criticized air cargo security, which is essentially based on a
trust system. The system relies on certified shippers, such as UPS and
Federal Express, to put security procedures in place and pay special
attention to new or unusual customers. 

In an October 2005 report, GAO identified problems with TSA shipper
information and how it uses the data to identify shippers who may present
potential risks. It also notes that many shippers may have financial
problems meeting TSA's security requirements. 

Data Fusion

Airports have gotten better at stopping what Weber calls "bad things," but
nearly five years after 9/11, TSA has made only modest progress in
preventing airline ticket sales to terrorists. Under the current
prescreening system, TSA distributes a terror watch list to airlines, which
then check ticket sales against it. 

Some agencies have been reluctant to provide full intelligence on terrorist
identities on such a widely distributed list. "We'd be giving information
out to reservation agents that only high-level security people should
handle," says Poole. 

TSA was supposed to implement a new prescreening system, called CAPPS II,
years ago. It would have required passengers to provide their birthday,
address, phone number and possibly other data. CAPPS II would then check the
information against terror watch lists, commercial databases and criminal
records. 

Privacy advocates objected to such intrusive screening, especially after one
of TSA's subcontractors was caught mining sensitive data for patterns. In
its latest incarnation, CAPPS II has morphed into Secure Flight. Under it,
TSA will check passenger names against a centralized interagency list of
terrorists and mark some passengers for additional scrutiny. 

"It is an outrage," says Poole. "Secure Flight doesn't use pattern
recognition. It doesn't tie things together. Airlines should not be in a
position where they have to make decisions based on fragmentary
information." 

The program itself remains behind schedule. According to a February 2006 GAO
report, TSA not only slapped the program together in haste but has not yet
determined what passenger data it will require from airlines or what
technologies it will use to match names. 

Meanwhile, TSA's Registered Traveler program has completed five pilot
implementations at five airports and plans to roll out the program at
interested airports later this year. The program asks frequent travelers to
volunteer information about themselves as well as fingerprints and an iris
scan. This information will be stored on an identity card that allows
registered travelers to move rapidly through airport security. 

Like Secure Flight, Registered Traveler has been years in the making. Along
the way, it has lost the backing of some of its early supporters. The Air
Transport Association of America (ATA), for example, opposes it because it
offers few benefits to frequent fliers. "When it was first proposed,
screening lines were long and it promised real benefits," says ATA
spokesperson Victoria Day. "Now lines are much shorter, and there's no
guarantee registered travelers would not have to take off their shoes or
take out their laptops like everyone else." 

Risk

Yet ATA's response misses the larger question about how to balance resources
and risk. According to Alex Ralli, vice president of airport operations for
Parsons Transportation Group, there are three basic models for airport
security. The Israeli approach relies on security personnel to profile and
intensively interrogate potential suspects. Europeans, on the other hand,
combine profiling with automated baggage checking. 

The United States, says Ralli, has been moving from a reactive to a more
proactive mode. "Our intentions are good, but our freedom makes us
inherently vulnerable. We don't tolerate profiling or standing in line for
three hours for an interrogation." 

The Israelis, who live in a nation the size of New Jersey, have only a
handful of international flights each day. The United States has about 4,400
movements daily. It has not time to adopt Israeli practices. It needs to
find its own ways to become proactive. 

That's why one of the first recommendations made by Weber's security panel
after 9/11 was to screen for bad people. Registering frequent travelers and
prescreening ticket purchasers would reduce the number of people security
personnel would have to deal with in the airport. 

Using software to screen ticketing and credit information for patterns that
match potential terrorist profiles would help even more. It would enable
airports to devote more resources to the most risky fliers. 

"In my opinion," says Weber, "we can keep putting new layers of technology
in place for each new set of bad things, but we're at our limits. We've
spent 80% of our budget on bombs in checked bags, so we don't have enough
money to implement systems to find explosives on people. There's no way in
hell we have money to go after antiaircraft missiles. 

"And all along, we're not dealing with the fundamental issue. We're fighting
bad people and not bad things," he says. 

And there is no way airports can keep up with the evolving threat unless
they do both.

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