27 Jan Doing security better

Contrarian has produced dozens of posts about the stupidity of airport security as practiced by the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority and the Department of Homeland Security. How about some sensible security ideas? Pilot and author Lane Wallace, guest-blogging for James Fallows, has a few ideas. She begins by noting that airports aren’t the only places vulnerable to attacks like the one that killed 34 people in Moscow Monday:

Russian President Dimitri A. Medvedev has said that airport officials at Domodedovo must be held accountable for failing to prevent the attacks. I feel for those officials. Because the ugly truth of the matter is unless we want to prohibit more than five people from gathering in any given place, targets will exist for people willing to sacrifice their lives to hurt others. And it is impossible to police or screen public gathering places well enough to keep any attempted attack from succeeding…

The bombing at Domodedovo happened to take place in a public area at an airport, so much of the alarm and reaction is (rightly or wrongly) going to focus on airport security. But really, the same bomb could have been detonated, and done just as much damage, raising the same issues of security and access, in any crowded, public area. Think, for a moment, how many people are in Grand Central Station at rush hour. It more than rivals any airport reception area. Or in Times Square on any given evening. Or in Macy’s, the morning after Thanksgiving. Or at Rockefeller Center when the Christmas tree is lit. The list goes on and on. The point is, finding a place where a suicide bomb explosion will kill 30 or 50 people is just not that tough to do. And there is simply no way to eliminate that risk.

So what to do about it? Wallace offers three sensible suggestions after the jump:

1. Argue for more intelligent security, focused on “behavioral screening” (an approach many security experts advocate). During my return to the U.S. [after a trip to the Athens Olympics], the security personnel in Charles DeGaulle airport questioned me intently about how I’d spent my six and a half weeks in Europe. They even asked for hotel receipts to back up my stated itinerary. But then, after I’d produced a few pieces of back-up paperwork, the security guard asked me — while looking directly into my eyes — what my modes of transport had been for my various travels.

“Let’s see,” I answered. “Plane, train, truck, blimp, ferry, car, and then train again.” She didn’t even blink at the “blimp” part. But then, neither did I, which is the point.

2. Stop waiting for someone else to do the vigilance. No agency or screening technology is going to detect every person trying to detonate a bomb in a public place. And we don’t do ourselves any favors by hoping that it will. If there was ever a good use for “crowdsourcing,” security is it. We are our own best weapon, as the examples of the Times Square bomber and shoe bomber illustrate. Or, as I like to say, we are the heroes we’ve been waiting for. Far better to be take the approach that each one of us is active and responsible part of the solution, rather than just a passive, fearful, and helpless-feeling victim.

Of course, having said that, I also think the security experts are correct in arguing the need for training in what constitutes “suspicious” behavior.” The article I linked to above quotes experts advocating for that training among security personnel — but I’d argue that providing some programming on spotting suspicious behavior, via PBS, NPR, or any other outlet, would be a far more welcome and helpful service than the useless “threat level orange” alerts.

3. Work at viewing the threat of harm from a terrorist attack the way we view the threat of harm from automobile accidents or firearms. Each year 50,000 people die in automobile accidents across the U.S. Many of the victims were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, when someone else ran a light, crossed a median, or spun out of control. And yet, we don’t panic every time we get in a car. We understand the risk is there, but on some level, we accept it — perhaps because we really don’t want to give up driving.

By the same token, 30,000 people a year in the U.S. are killed by firearms. True, the numbers aren’t random across the entire population. But, still. Those numbers are far higher than the number of people killed in terrorist attacks, but they don’t prompt anywhere near the outcry and panic of a terrorist setting off a single bomb. Why is that?

One reason may be that bomb attacks kill dozens or hundreds of people at once, so they’re more alarming, and more widely publicized. There’s also a sense of vulnerability and intentional violation that accompanies the idea of a terrorist attack, which only direct victims of gun violence would feel. But it’s worth pondering why we give such intimidation power to terrorists, when we’re clearly capable of weathering greater losses from other causes without calling for someone to assure us, even if it’s not true, that events like that won’t happen again.

With all our advances in medicine, technology, and consumer safety, we’ve managed to make life a lot less uncertain than it used to be. We don’t regularly lose children to illness anymore, and we now live longer than previous generations. So it’s possible for us to imagine that we can be kept safe from all lethal risks and threats. Unfortunately, we can’t. But as any mountain climber, pilot, or other adventurer knows, recognizing the impossibility of eliminating risk is actually the first step in handling it and mitigating it effectively. Beyond that, all we can do — indeed, what we must do — is endure.