Next Stage Of Security Theater: Homeland Security Wants More Info To Let You Board A Plane

from the feel-safer? dept

Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security would like to add another layer of security theater to the airplane boarding process. Homeland Security is now taking over the process of matching your identity to government watch lists at airports (away from the airlines), and they're going to start demanding more info. You will not be allowed to fly if you don't provide your first and last names, birth date and gender. This is positioned as a way to avoid the various "false positives" we've heard so much about with fliers who have similar names to those on the no-fly list. While it's good that they want to cut down on those false positives, it's not as if this makes you any safer. It just requires giving up more privacy to fly.

Also worth noting is that this is the first time that the government has actually admitted how many people are on the no fly list (about 2,500) as well as the "selectee" list for extra careful searches (another 16,000). They also noted that it's quite rare for anyone on the no-fly list to actually try to fly (about once a month -- and it's almost always initiating in a foreign country). Of course, if you were actually a terrorist, would you fly under your real identity?

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Security Theater In Action

from the don't-you-feel-safer-now? dept

The Atlantic has an article in which the author, Jeffrey Goldberg, put various Bruce Schneier theories to the test, to see just how ridiculous airport security is these days. As expected, he discovered that Schneier is correct in calling most airport security "security theater." It's designed to make people think they're safer because they see something that looks like security, even if that security does absolutely nothing to stop terrorists. As the article notes, it's not at all difficult for terrorists to bypass the system, so the only thing the system is really good for is to (a) catch really, really dumb terrorists or (b) to make other people think that the security is doing something.

Schneier, of course, has been making this point for years, so it was interesting to see what sort of response Goldberg was then able to get out of the TSA's boss, Kip Hawley. His responses seem to fall into one of two categories. First, he suggests that the TSA is well aware of the potential vulnerability described, but he can't really explain how it's been fixed, or secondly, he insists that any odd behavior will be spotted by trained employees and stopped. Except that Goldberg tested that theory too, attempting to behave quite strangely -- including ripping up a bunch of fake boarding passes in plain view of people... who all ignored him.

Hawley's responses at times border on incomprehensible:

"What do you do about vulnerabilities?" he asked, rhetorically. "All the time you hear reports and people saying, 'There's a vulnerability.' Well, duh. There are vulnerabilities everywhere, in everything. The question is not 'Is there a vulnerability?' It's 'What are you doing about it?'"

Well, what are you doing about it?

"There are vulnerabilities where you have limited ways to address it directly. So you have to put other layers around it, other things that will catch them when that vulnerability is breached. This is a universal problem. Somebody will identify a very small thing and drill down and say, 'I found a vulnerability.'"

Either there's some totally secret system that the TSA is using to actually stop these vulnerabilities, or there isn't a system and Hawley is just being confusing in order to create some doubt. I'm not sure either one makes me feel any safer about flying. While some may claim that we should feel safer because there might be a more secretive plan in place that Hawley won't talk about, consider me a skeptic. Security through obscurity has rarely proven to be as effective as a real and open security plan. I'm not saying that the TSA should reveal everything it does, but given Goldberg's experiences in "probing" the system, it's not clear that any "secret plan," whether real or implied, is working particularly well.

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TSA Inspections Are Still A Farce

from the security-theater dept

If you thought taking your shoes off and putting your liquids in little plastic bags was going to stop terrorists from smuggling bombs onto planes, think again. A new report from the Government Accountability Office finds that investigators were able to smuggle bomb components through TSA checkpoints without being caught. This isn't much of a surprise; a similar test last year found that the TSA caught only 2 out of 22 people who tried to smuggle dummy weapons through checkpoints in a Newark airport. This is not really surprising. The TSA's strategy has been basically reactive: the 9/11 hijackers used box cutters, so those get banned. Somebody tries to smuggle explosives onboard in his shoes, so the TSA makes us all take our shoes off. Somebody tries to smuggle liquid explosives onto a plane, so the TSA bans bottled water. There's no reason to think these rules actually make us safer, but they do allow the TSA to pretend they're "doing something" about terrorism. A TSA spokeswoman insists that this wasn't a fair test because they only got by one of their "19 layers of security." I wouldn't be surprised if the other 18 layers were as ineffectual than the others, but one thing that can be said for them is that they're a lot less annoying for travelers. How about if the TSA stops wasting resources forcing 5-year-old girls to take their shoes off, and shift those resources to the sort of in-depth police work that led to the foiling of last year's liquid explosives plot.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Automatic Airport Check-In Is Patented?

from the but-why? dept

I've been flying a lot over the past few years, and it's become pretty standard for airlines to now have self-serve kiosks where you can check in and print out a boarding pass. If you have a bag to check, you then take it to a "bag drop" station. There are fewer and fewer places where this isn't the norm -- but apparently Alaska Airlines owns a patent on the process. The company says it got the patent to "reward the employees" who came up with the idea, but that doesn't make much sense. As William Stepp points out in the link above, wouldn't Alaska Airlines have been better off not spending all that money filing a patent. In fact, if they wanted to reward the employees who came up with the idea, why not just give the money wasted on the patent filing to the employees?

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