Airport Security. Part 1

I don’t feel safer now that my water bottle was confiscated. I honestly think that the terrorist plot was not to blow up planes, but to cause massive dehydration in America’s skies. I don’t feel safer now that everybody’s shoes have been inspected. I suspect the next attack will be a highly contagious foot fungus released on the floor of airport security checkpoints. I don’t feel safer that the 80 year old woman in a wheelchair is pulled aside, her wheelchair searched thoroughly. Why not? I’ve had the great fortune of sitting at a desk and looking at a computer screen all day, looking at numbers, looking for mistakes. After a while of doing the same exact thing, you zone out, and it becomes harder to detect mistakes. I also know that more rules are rarely a good thing. The longer the checklist becomes for tasks that a TSA worker must fulfill, the less likely that worker will be to think and act critically. The mind is dulled by so many rules and repetition. There’s a false presumption that more rules create efficiency, but the only efficiency these rules create is a success rate for having satisfied all of the rules. They do not keep TSA workers on the lookout for new risks, they do not afford them the time to observe behavior of passengers. After every water bottle is taken, after every pair of shoes is checked, every ipod, laptop, hair gel and toothpaste container is searched and scrutinized, there will still be something left to think of. And so, in the tradition of reacting to all of our past threats, we are concerned with detecting objects more than we are with detecting suspicious behavior or thinking like the terrorists. And that is the point I want to get across, because it might be possible to detect suspicious behavior at times when we don’t know what object we are looking for on the x-ray machine.

I’m not sure what I’m advocating. Maybe we need someone to go through line and randomly select passengers to ask questions to while they are waiting. British customs tripped me up every time by asking their questions a certain way. There might be social profiling in this case. But it doesn’t have to be racial. When my 60 year old mom is pulled aside for 10 minutes as her vitamin containers are inspected, I question if the time could be better spent. Especially since fishermen are checking 10 pounds of salmon that could very well be explosives (and less likely to be detected because of the smell and grossness that would discourage inspection), and especially since coming from Canada to Alaska in some spots does not even have a border control. What we don’t need is somebody taking the time to confiscate the water that we bought AFTER passing through security.
I enjoy thinking like a criminal. I am not evil, I am not a criminal, but when you stand in a long security line and watch passenger after passenger go by and watch security workers, you start to think of things you might be able to get through. I won’t test the system that way, but I would recommend that TSA workers travel around the country and work at different airports. Let them stand in line amongst the people and observe different behaviors. Let them think, “I wonder if I can get this through security.” Only when they think like that are they better able to do their jobs. Thinking "No water bottles, toothpaste, hair gel, cosmetics, nail clippers" is not the answer.