"Searching airport workers prudent"

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Column
Searching airport workers prudent
By Tom Lyons
The Sarasota (FL) Herald-Tribune


My dad was a flight engineer for a major airline. My guess is he would have
griped plenty if he had been treated like a terrorism suspect before he was
allowed into the cockpit.

He figured he was the guy who kept the planes flying despite the best
efforts of hotshot pilots to crash them. So I doubt he would have submitted
without sarcastic comments to the indignity of a random check of his person
by security employees when he arrived at the airport for work.

And yet, if alive today, I bet he'd call it a good idea, long overdue, that
security teams will now make random checks of baggage handlers and food
service drivers and other airport personnel at SRQ and other airports.

Finding a good balance between security and intrusive, inconvenient
invasions of privacy will always be tough. I can almost never say with
confidence that any security measure is going too far or, on the other hand,
that any security measure is adequate.

Assessing the cost-benefit ratio of counter-terrorism measures is so hard to
figure that, at airports especially, we put up with much inconvenience
without knowing for sure that it does anything except make terrorists feel
proud that they have caused us to do this to ourselves.

Yet we hope it causes them more problems than it causes us and, since it
just might save our lives, most of us are gracious about it.

Still, we might have been less so over the past five years had we been more
aware that airport security had a weak link so big and ripe for
exploitation. While little old ladies put up with everything short of body
cavity searches, airport workers with potential bomb-smuggling access to
aircraft weren't being subjected to searches at all.

Anyone with an employee ID badge, or anything that looked like one, got
no-questions-asked access to planes and restricted areas, no matter what
bags or packages they were carrying, it seems.

The amazing thing about this is that we all know that there have been
numerous cases of baggage handlers and even screeners being busted on the
job, and I don't mean just for tossing bags around too roughly.

Some were routinely stealing passenger's valuables. Some aided smugglers.

And so, there has never been reason to think no airport employee would
accept a bribe to smuggle something onto a plane at the direction of someone
who just might be a terrorist. I can't imagine what took the alleged
security experts so long to take this step.

 Do you have an opinion about this story?
Share it with other readers in our CAA Discussion Forums

http://www.californiaaviation.org/dcfp/dcboard.php


*****************************************