Just to be contrary

I’ve bitched and moaned about airport security and how goofy it is plenty of times, but I tend to have a contrarian streak about folks talking about it, from whichever direction. Take this quote from the Atlantic (subscriber only), passed along by Kottke:

Screening lines at airports are perhaps the most familiar reminder of post-9/11 security. They also exemplify what’s wrong with the current approach.

Many of the routines and demands are silly, eroding rather than building confidence in the security regime of which they are part. “You can’t go through an airport line without thinking ‘This is dumb,'” says Graham Allison, the author of the recent Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, and the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, at Harvard, which conducts many projects on anti-terrorism and security. “You have two people whose job it is to see if the name on your driver’s license is the same as the name on your ticket — as if any self-respecting terrorist would fail to think of that. …”

Having two people do it has always struck me as silly. By the same token, people, even terrorists, make stupid mistakes. Indeed, most criminal enterprises, when they are detected ahead of time, are usually detected because of stupid mistakes. In this case, such mistakes would be understnadale, especially if cultural cues like name spelling and letter forms are different between a forger and the place he’s trying to slip through. I can easily imagine a terrorist forging a ticket, or a drivers license, or both, and making a spelling error between the two.

Further, the check is also necessary to restrict the gate areas to just ticket holders. If I have three ticket holders, and we all go through, one of us could go back with the three tickets and bring two of our friends along on the next pass. If there’s a security basis for keeping non-passengers away from the gates (I’m not sure what it is, but let’s posit it), then some basic check of identity of this sort is essential.

You have a guy whose job is to shout out a reminder for you to take off your jacket and get your computer out of your bag.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person whose sole job that was, but that’s not a matter of a security check but basic line management. No matter how many signs you have providing those instructions, you will still get people trying to walk through with their jackets on, or send notebooks through inside their brief cases. Whether those are valid security measures is a different question (not addressed here), but having people do things to get people prepped prior to standing there in front of the conveyor belt like an idiot is something that I, as the guy twenty people back in line, appreciate.

You’ve got one-year-olds taking off their shoes.

Katherine actually loves taking off her shoes at the check point.

That said, let’s say we didn’t require that (the requirement seems to vary by airport, but that’s another subject). If toddlers aren’t being searched, or if magnetometer beeps on them aren’t paid attention to, then what do I, as a Prospective Terrorist, know? I know to bring along a kid to hide my knife/gun/explosives/whatever on.

If we are not going to try to intelligently guess who might be a possible terrorist (a prospect that Kottke himself pooh-poohs regarding his own suspicious ticket-buying behavior, and which causes civil libertarians and the like fits), then the alternative is that we search everyone, no matter how ridiculous it may be, since trying to second-guess who might mean harm to a flight is too easily identified as profiling, which is, of course, sheer evil. (The difficulty of doing profiling “well,” and how to deal with and learn from false positives, is also another matter). That means that, yes, one-year-olds, their tired-looking parents, and the 86-year-old lady right behind them, need to take off their shoes.

I’d actually like to read the full article, to see if the author has any constructive suggestions re airport security.