Thursday, May 10, 2007
U.S. airport security experts take a look at Israel's
methods
By Matthew Kalman
The San Francisco (CA)
Chronicle
Ben-Gurion Airport, Israel -- Just after noon on Wednesday,
an alarm message flashed onto one of a dozen screens in the central command room
high above this airport near Tel Aviv. The image on the screen switched to a
remote-control camera on the airport perimeter fence and zoomed in to show a man
in light-colored clothing trying to scale the fence with a ladder.
Within
seconds, a patrol car came into view, and two armed security guards jumped out
and took up position. One of them made immediate radio contact with the command
room, while the other trained his M-16 semiautomatic assault rifle on the
intruder.
Back in the command room, the duty security manager's finger
was poised at the point in the touch screen where, with a single press of a
virtual button, he could close down every gate in the entire airport within
seconds.
In the passenger terminal, a coded warning was broadcast over
the public address system. To passengers, it sounded like one more innocuous
public-service announcement, but dozens of uniformed and plainclothes security
personnel snapped into a strict security protocol drilled into them by hours of
training and regular refresher courses.
Seconds later, the all clear was
sounded, also in code. None of the thousands of passengers in the terminal had
the slightest clue they had just witnessed a major security alert.
The
incident never made the news because it was just a drill, conjured up by Nahum
Liss, head of security planning for Ben-Gurion Airport, for a group of visiting
American airport chiefs, including Steven Grossman, director of aviation at the
Port of Oakland, and Thella Bowens, president and CEO of San Diego County
Regional Airport Authority.
Last year, Liss held a briefing for 40
California airport security and law enforcement personnel in Oakland. Grossman
said he was so impressed that he suggested a trip to Israel to the U.S. branch
of Airports Council International, which represents local, regional and state
governing bodies that operate commercial airports in the United States and
Canada.
Six American airport directors, from California, Washington,
Florida, Texas and Nevada, have spent the past few days in Israel studying
airport security techniques, viewing the latest technology and listening to
briefings by Israel's top counterterrorism experts. They said they would return
home with a raft of new ideas.
"The Israelis are legendary for their
security, and this is an opportunity to see firsthand what they do, how they do
it and, as importantly, the theory behind it," said Grossman.
Ben-Gurion,
Israel's chief airport, has the toughest security regimen in the world. Every
one of the 10 million people passing through each year is personally interviewed
and immediately profiled, and all luggage is scanned using constantly updated
machinery before each passenger can even check in. It can take up to two hours
to cover the 50 yards from the front door to the check-in desk.
The
system is grueling, but it works. Despite the threat level, there has not been
an attack at Ben-Gurion Airport since 1976, when the suitcase of a Dutch tourist
exploded, killing the tourist and a security guard. The last successful
hijacking of an Israeli airliner was in 1968.
Behind the scenes, Liss and
his colleagues have perfected a system of remote cameras, motion sensors,
night-vision equipment and centralized control that make the airport one of the
most secure -- and watched -- places in the world. Safety concerns are not
limited to the ground. In one room, a sophisticated computer program calculates
the optimum flight path of each incoming and outgoing aircraft to minimize the
risk of terror attack by ground-to-air missiles.
"We don't expect that we
can copy it, because it is very specific to Israel and to the circumstances
within Israel, but there will be lessons that we can take away from this that we
can apply in the United States," said Grossman.
A new terminal is in the
works at Oakland International Airport. Grossman said he was working toward the
kind of integrated security systems demonstrated so effectively in the central
command room, but other techniques used by the Israelis would be impossible to
implement in the United States -- notably passenger profiling.
"Let's
face it, the whole issue of profiling -- that is a difficult word to use in the
United States. The level at which (the Israelis) do it is far beyond anything we
practically can do. That's a major difference," he said. Americans, he said,
"have a different society and a different culture. ... The federal government
has tried to implement forms of profiling at airports and has not been overly
successful in doing that. They rely on it heavily here."
Bowens is also
planning a new terminal at San Diego. She said she would be suggesting some of
the features she had seen at Ben-Gurion, where everything from trash cans to
parking lots to the towering glass facade were designed with possible terror
attacks in mind.
"That provides an immediate opportunity to do
something," she said. "Little things like that really do help to make a
difference. That's something I can pick up and go right back home
with."
But Bowens said she doubted that San Diego passengers would ever
agree to the three-hour check-in time demanded of everyone passing through
Ben-Gurion. "In an airport like mine, where 70 percent of the flights are within
500 miles, that would be difficult," she said. "If I'm going to get on a flight
that takes an hour and a half, why would I want to wait three hours to get on
it? I could drive there in that time."
On the Web:
A Breach of
Trust at Bay-area Airport
http://www.californiaaviation.org/weblog/2007/03/breach-of-trust
Vanishing
act again at Oakland airport
http://www.ibabuzz.com/transportation/2007/02/16/vanishing-act-at-oakland-airport/