Airport Security Follies

It will come as no surprise to my friends and family that I don't much care for the New York Times. But just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, sometimes the ivory tower gets it right.

As I sit in the food court of the Seattle/Tacoma International Airport waiting for my flight home, I see that Bruce Schneier referenced an excellent NYT Opinion/Blog piece. Key paragraphs:

To understand what makes [airline security] measures so absurd, we first need to revisit the morning of September 11th, and grasp exactly what it was the 19 hijackers so easily took advantage of. Conventional wisdom says the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard box-cutters. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings.

In years past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of “passive resistance.” All of that changed forever the instant American Airlines Flight 11 collided with the north tower. What weapons the 19 men possessed mattered little; the success of their plan relied fundamentally on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.

For several reasons — particularly the awareness of passengers and crew — just the opposite is true today. Any hijacker would face a planeload of angry and frightened people ready to fight back. Say what you want of terrorists, they cannot afford to waste time and resources on schemes with a high probability of failure. And thus the September 11th template is all but useless to potential hijackers.

(Emphasis mine.)

Frequent travelers know this is true. I got back on an airliner in late September/early October 2001, flying out of Chicago O'Hare airport to Denver. I shared a car to the airport with a perfect stranger. But as we discussed the events of the fateful day a few weeks earlier, she showed me her long fingernails. "These are sharp and I know how to use them," she said.

Bill Whittle captured that spirit wonderfully in his TRIBES essay. He compares the difference in software executed by the people on United 93 and in Manhattan on 9/11 versus the people in New Orleans after Katrina. I love this paragraph:

Much has been said regarding how much more massive an event Katrina is relative to lower Manhattan. But the fact remains that firemen went up the stairs when people were coming down, and one ordinary group of people on an ordinary flight on an ordinary day defeated the very best that the global terror network could put together. Our ladies junior varsity squad whipped the living shit out of their Super Bowl A-team over Pennsylvania that day, and they did it because for one brief shining moment enough passengers on that airplane went Grey.

(Emhpasis mine.)

Maybe the change in administration this year will give someone an opportunity to slip in some long-overdue sanity to the USA airline security regime. Here's to hoping.