Misplaced Confidence

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Misplaced Confidence

Did you feel confident the last time you were at the airport, saw all of those TSA security personnel, and patiently endured the wait of all phases of post-9/11 airline security?

If so, The Atlantic Monthly's James Fallows strongly suggests that you're deluding yourself. In the magazine's current issue, Fallows writes:
The most damaging form of make-believe (in the war against terror) is the failure to distinguish between destructive but not annihilating kinds of attack we can never eliminate but can withstand and the two or three ways terrorist groups could actually put our national survival in jeopardy.

... 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 the two people whose job 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. You have the guy whose job is to shout out a reminder for you to take off your jacket and get your computer out of your bag. You've got one-year-olds taking off their shoes. It is hard to think of a way you could caricature it to make it look sillier."

At the same time, the ritual manages to be intimidating, as a standing reminder of how much Americans have to fear.

The airport screening process is surprisingly expensive, directly costing the Transportation Security Administration more than $4 billion a year.

... Are the measures worthwhile? They certainly reduce one specific danger: that a plane will be brought down by a shoe bomb or some other explosive device concealed in a passenger's clothes or carry-on luggage. But they probably make no difference in the odds of another 9/11-style attack, now that cockpit doors have been reinforced and passengers know they must not let a hijacker succeed.

And they also do nothing to reduce the risk of explosions in the cargo hold, since most airborne cargo containers are not screened at all, even when carried on passenger airplanes.

In a larger sense, such extensive screening at airports may actually make America more vulnerable, because of all the things the Transportation Security Administration is neglecting to do as a result.

The TSA has a total budget of some $5.3 billion—more than 80 percent of which goes to airport screening. Although there is some money for transportation security in other parts of the federal budget, the TSA, which is supposedly responsible for all modes of transportation, has well under $1 billion for everything except airlines: roads, bridges, subways, tunnels, railroads, ports, and other facilities through which most of the nation's people and commerce move.

"Nobody can 'prove' that it's wrong to have so little left for ports and roads and railroads, because nobody has done the analysis," says Daniel Prieto ... (a former) staff member for the House Select Committee on Homeland Security ...

"... it sure doesn't seem right, when trucks account for 70 to 80 percent of all shipping in the United States; when terrorist attacks globally, like the Madrid bombing, show that land-based transportation targets are among the deadliest and most easily hit ..."

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