Airline Travel in the Post-9/11 World

We just got back from vacation, and are back in blog-land. During our absence, a ceasefire was arranged in the Iranian-Israeli war (fought through the Hezbullah proxy, Iran's answer to the aircraft carrier for forward power projection). The French reneged on their promise to provide a robust presence in the toothless UNIFIL mission to Lebanon (and then, surprisingly, reneged on their renege -- you don't see THAT very often from the French), and Olmert is floundering, clueless and corrupt.

On the other hand, Tuscany and Rome were great. What wasn't great was the silly and non-confidence inspiring airport security (even the dumber-looking people in the check-in line seemed to be smirking and were less patient). More specifically, I continue to be puzzled by the seeming inability of our government, whe it comes to airport security, to figure out how to do something more proactive than fighting the last war against terrorists.

The attached Op-Ed from the Boston Globe is direct and to the point in laying out that, when it comes to airline safety, nail clippers (or nail polish, for that matter) don't make planes crash -- people do. While there are practical training and cultural problems in applying an Israeli approach to psychologically- driven screening of passengers, subjective and to some extent reliant upon profiling, it is clear that our numb-nut security personnel will never catch a determined MacGiver at the check-in line unless we are all forced to walk on the planes in our underwear. The Department of Homeland Security seems to finally understand this, albeit five years after 9/11, with the initiation of a pilot program at airports to actually observe people's behavior (and, might I use that dirty word, "profile" passengers). Too little, hopefully not too late.

In the meantime, the screeners at the airport will continue to confiscate sealed containers of my kids' chocolate milk and tubes of peanut butter (true story -- the screener wasn't sure whether to confiscate the peanut butter until they saw the word "Creamy" on the tube -- when I asked whether they would have confiscated it if we had brought "chunky" peanut butter instead, I received no response). On the other hand, be rest assured that your competent Homeland Security officials, whom you can depend upon to competently fight the past war with no creativity or imagination, will continue to allow the guy next to you in the check-in line to bring onboard his cell phone and laptop, with G-d knows what capabilities for destruction concealed in those devices (aside from the baseline destructive power of an exploding Sony-made laptop battery).

Until the day comes that Homeland Security grows political balls, or homeland security competence, lets hope that the British continue to listen in on the right phone calls to stop terrorists from doing their worst.

What Israeli security could teach us - The Boston Globe