Security

Comics used to joke: What if the shoe bomber had put the bomb in his underwear? Would we all have to take off our underwear to fly? Be careful what you joke about.

The attempted Christmas day bombing of an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight has caused another DBS move (desperate but stupid) by the administration. Among the proposed “solutions” to resolve the latest terrorist threat: restricting passengers to their seats for the final hour of flight; denying access to the overhead for that final hour; increasing security checks on the way to the plane; using full-body scanners. Good luck with that.

The Washington Post reports that starting today, international passengers flying into the US are being randomly subjected to full-body scans. The scanners have two problems that I can see. First, though the TSA agent viewing the monitor may well be about to guess your cup size, the genital area is (allegedly) blurred; and since that is exactly where the Christmas day bomber hid his explosives, I’m not sure how much good this will do. Second, the Post reports that there are only forty scanners in nineteen airports, with 150 more “on the way.” So beating the scanners is as simple as using an airport or a terminal that doesn’t have one. The Post gave potential terrorists a head start by revealing three of the airports that have them.

Given the huge daily number of flyers, it is simply impossible to thoroughly check every passenger on every flight. To have even a modest impact on the actual threat, something that goes beyond the cosmetic security efforts being used today, the administration would have to take two difficult steps: drastically reduce the number of flights, at least international if not domestic; and replace the current cadre of ill-prepared TSA agents with highly trained – and highly paid – security personnel. They don’t want to do the first because it would cost the airlines too much money, and they don’t want to do the second because it would cost the taxpayers too much money.

Life is filled with difficult choices. It may be time to make one.