# Expert: Airport Security 'Just A Show'



## The Davy Crockett (Dec 26, 2013)

I realize that for many folks here at AU will hardly find this as news, but thought I'd share this story at Huffington Post that I found.

From the article:



> You may be better off not reading this if you're one of the millions of Americans traveling this holiday season. However, one safety expert is desperate for you to know: Airport security in the U.S. is basically a sham.
> 
> “Checking luggage is very nice, it looks great, taking away the breast milk of the mother of a one month old baby, that looks great,” said Rafi Sela, the president of A.R. Challenges, a transportation consulting firm based in Israel. “It does nothing for security. It’s just a show.”
> 
> For years, Sela has been calling for the “Israel-ification” of America’s airports. Supporters of the tactic -- which involves a great deal more face-time with passengers -- say Israel’s airports effectively deal with much higher threat levels than American airports with way less hassle.


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## Anderson (Dec 27, 2013)

This is, generally speaking, nothing new. I've seen more or less the same content before...particularly the need to emphasize behavioral profiling over random (and often silly) rules

For the argument that the Israeli model doesn't scale...ok, Ben Gurion doesn't tend to get over 50k boardings/day much. 50k/day on average would be equivalent to 18m/yr. There are 11 US airports that exceed this number of enplanements. Most of those are transfer-heavy locations (Charlotte, JFK, etc.), so if you raise the bar to 22-25m/yr, you'd be down to 4-6 airports in the US that you "couldn't work" with this at:
-Atlanta Hartsfield (45.8m)

-Chicago O'Hare (32.2m)

-Los Angeles Int'l (31.3m)

-Dallas/Fort Worth (28.0m)

-Denver International (25.8m)

-JFK New York (24.5m)

Everywhere else is either in the range of Ben Gurion, below it, or arguably in the range of it once you account for the non-trivial number of transfers that are going on at a lot of hubs. The other high ones are San Francisco, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Newark (rounding us out at about 17m). Of those, only Orlando and Las Vegas seem to be particularly transfer-light.


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## jis (Dec 27, 2013)

All that i can say is, be very careful what you wish for.

So we discuss endlessly why PTC is not justified because there are so few truly harmful PTC preventable accidents that happen anyway. Now then, after 9/11 exactly how many airport security preventable incidents have occurred leading to serious harm of any sort to anyone? What is the rate per say a billion passenger miles? Are we trying to fix a system that with all its warts and all sort of works, and replace it with one that is going to be far more intrusive?

What do you suppose all that face time conversation is about? The football game? Though I will be the first to admit that at least initially it is pretty innocuous, and at least I have always enjoyed the conversation. I have become even more knowledgeable about the etymology of my first name and the history of my last name as a result of conversations with Ben Gurion security agents, among other things.  So better polish up on your family history and ancestry among other things. I even had a neat discussion with one of them about the significance of Mitochondrial DNA in establishing deep maternal lineage, the last time I was there.  Fortunately the issue that the Middle-Eastern Jews and Palestinians pretty much the same maternal lineage in many case did not come up in the discussion.


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## Trogdor (Dec 28, 2013)

jis said:


> All that i can say is, be very careful what you wish for.
> 
> So we discuss endlessly why PTC is not justified because there are so few truly harmful PTC preventable accidents that happen anyway. Now then, after 9/11 exactly how many airport security preventable incidents have occurred leading to serious harm of any sort to anyone? What is the rate per say a billion passenger miles? Are we trying to fix a system that with all its warts and all sort of works, and replace it with one that is going to be far more intrusive?
> 
> What do you suppose all that face time conversation is about? The football game? Though I will be the first to admit that at least initially it is pretty innocuous, and at least I have always enjoyed the conversation. I have become even more knowledgeable about the etymology of my first name and the history of my last name as a result of conversations with Ben Gurion security agents, among other things.  So better polish up on your family history and ancestry among other things. I even had a neat discussion with one of them about the significance of Mitochondrial DNA in establishing deep maternal lineage, the last time I was there.  Fortunately the issue that the Middle-Eastern Jews and Palestinians pretty much the same maternal lineage in many case did not come up in the discussion.


Never flown through TLV, and don't think I will in the foreseeable future, so I can't begin to say what the experience is like going through security there. However, I did once work with someone who used to work for El Al in some kind of security-related position (I guess that's the equivalent of me staying at a Holiday Inn Express or something).

Anyway, if you're going to do behavioral profiling and engaging the passenger in conversation, then presumably you need staff trained in that sort of thing. Multiply that times hundreds of airports throughout the country. That means going from a system where agents listen for the beep in the metal detector or look for the thing that's shaped like a gun in the x-ray machine, to one where those people instead have to be able to judge the tone of a passenger's response to random questions and whatnot.


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