Air travel security a joke

Our airline security system is a preposterous joke, the entire effort fundamentally unserious. In contrast, consider data security over the Internet, for example with credit card numbers, bank transactions, stock trading, and all the rest, and including the data systems used by our armed forces and security agencies. Those systems are surprisingly secure, and why is that?

It's because there are armies of hackers, free-lance or employed by other governments, all over the world who spend their time testing and probing those data storage and transmission systems for holes and weaknesses to exploit. When they find one, a bunch of credit cards, for example, get compromised, everybody suffers the hassle, but the security defect gets fixed. A good argument can be made that we have hackers and their constant testing and probing to thank for the soundness of computer data systems, including for example that a US missile barrage does not get criminally launched with the White House as its target.

So where is the testing of the airline security system? Do we really want terrorists doing that job, so a security breach may cost hundreds of lives, because we only react in a flailing panic after the fact? If we don't want that, then obviously we need some independent outfit that is tasked with constantly trying to crack the system as it exists, to find and expose holes and weaknesses before the terrorists do. Emphasis on independent outfit, independent in the same way that financial auditors are independent of the firm they audit, or hackers are independent of the targets they seek to compromise.

Any model that involves hints, heads-ups, and pre-warnings of impending tests is not even worth bothering with. The effort has to be constant, unrelenting, and fundamentally adversarial. Get hired onto an airline cleaning crew or food service and see how hard it is to smuggle binary explosives onto an airliner; put mock devices in baggage and see how hard it is to get by the screeners; forge or computer-hack documents and see how hard it is to get a seat on a US-bound flight; and so on and on and on. Constant, unrelenting, adversarial testing and probing of the system to find its weaknesses so those can be fixed before the terrorists find them.

The mutual-CYA ethic that prevails in Washington probably makes that impossible, so we will continue to have the lax and disorganized joke that passes for our air travel security system, with the real-time testing done by terrorists. Our bureaucrats would rather have hundreds of American citizens die than that they might fail the testing and be made to look bad. There is no other plausible explanation for why what I describe here has not been implemented long before now. What we have instead amounts to a prescription for planes being blown out of the sky, the only question being when, not whether.

In The Joke's On Us, Mark Steyn examines other aspects of this long-running farce.

Byron