American Airport Security Still Broken
Dan Reed at Forbes.com points out that while lines at TSA checkpoints in airports are down, the system is still broken.
The real problem is that the entire approach to airport and airline security is all wrong – and has been since at least 9-11. It took Herculean efforts – and lots of managerial smoke and mirrors – to get the Fourth of July holiday crowds through airport security checkpoints in less than 30 minutes, on average. But it did not make any one of those passengers, or those airports, or the flights on which those passengers flew, one bit safer. Remember last year’s report from Homeland Security’s Inspector General that showed that airport screeners failed to find weapons and illegal materials smuggled through checkpoints by IG operatives a staggering 95 percent of the time? Nothing has changed over the last year to drop that to some acceptable failure rate – like zero. In fact, with bigger crowds at the airport than ever, and intense pressure to speed up the process, a reasonable person could surmise that the TSA’s failure rate just might have ticked up a point or two (though it can’t go much higher than it already is).More than a decade ago Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and expert on computer security and privacy, famously dubbed the entire airport/airline security process “security theater.” And that’s what it remains today, even with the “better” performance over the holiday weekend.
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