Airport “Security”

My husband got through airport security with a 3″ pocket knife in his backpack.

He didn’t try and sneak it through.  He just forgot that it was there – he had packed it on our last car trip to Calgary and then forgot to unpack it.  He told me that he went through security, had his gels and liquids in the right size packages and in a baggie, and opened up his computer and all that crap…but the knife went through no problemo.  When he was sitting in the lounge, he was looking for something in the bag and found the knife.  He took it back up to security and told them that they had missed it.  “Oh.”  My husband took the knife back to his car because he didn’t want them to confiscate it and then he went back through security.

Note: metal blade.  Not ceramic.  Jack Reacher should just relax. 

I guess security is too busy worrying about all those dangerous elderly nuns…

Airport security is fallible.  Bad “things” will get through.  What should be important is making sure that bad people don’t get through.

[...] …the best way to detect terrorists is to focus on intercepting not bad things, but bad people. To a much greater degree than in the United States, security at El Al and Ben Gurion depends on intelligence and intuition — what Rafi Ron, the former director of security at Ben Gurion, calls the human factor.

Israeli airport security, much of it invisible to the untrained eye, begins before passengers even enter the terminal. Officials constantly monitor behavior, alert to clues that may hint at danger: bulky clothing, say, or a nervous manner. Profilers — that’s what they’re called — make a point of interviewing travelers, sometimes at length. They probe, as one profiling supervisor told CBS, for “anything out of the ordinary, anything that does not fit.” Their questions can seem odd or intrusive, especially if your only previous experience with an airport interrogation was being asked whether you packed your bags yourself.

Unlike in US airports, where passengers go through security after checking in for their flights and submitting their luggage, security at Ben Gurion comes first. Only when the profiler is satisfied that a passenger poses no risk is he or she allowed to proceed to the check-in counter. By that point, there is no need to make him remove his shoes, or to confiscate his bottle of water.

[...]

But because federal policy still bans ethnic or religious profiling, US passengers continue to be singled out for special scrutiny mostly on a random basis. Countless hours have been spent patting down elderly women in wheelchairs, toddlers with pacifiers, even former US vice presidents — time that could have been used instead to concentrate on passengers with a greater likelihood of being terrorists.

No sensible person imagines that ethnic or religious profiling alone can stop every terrorist plot. But it is illogical and potentially suicidal not to take account of the fact that so far every suicide-terrorist plotting to take down an American plane has been a radical Muslim man. It is not racism or bigotry to argue that the prevention of Islamist terrorism necessitates a special focus on Muslim travelers, just as it is not racism or bigotry when police trying to prevent a Mafia killing pay closer attention to Italians.

Sometimes common sense should trump “multicultural sensitivity”.