I approve of government bailouts for too-big-to-fail banks. I sincerely hope that the final health care bill includes a public option. But if the Transportation Security Administration meddles with airport security procedures one more time, you can find me at the local tea party movement headquarters painting posters about big government, misuse of tax dollars and Barack Obama's Big Brother tendencies.
To be clear, I am very much in favor of policies that make airplane travel more secure. Unfortunately, the inane policies set in place by the TSA after the failed Christmas Day attack reveal an agency more concerned with appearing tough than actually making travelers safer. For too long, Americans have willingly swallowed the TSA's line that greater inconvenience at an airport translates into greater security on an airplane. However, as long as we treat airports as the primary arena for catching would-be aviation terrorists, we will be vulnerable to terrorist attacks. If we have any hope of preventing future disasters, we must focus our resources on stopping terrorists before they reach the airport.
The TSA's current policy can be compared to a giant and futile game of Whack-a-Mole played at taxpayers' expense. Each new revelation of a terrorist plot sends the organization scrambling to crack down on the plotters' weapon of choice. Then, as soon as its attentions are turned to suppressing these threats, a new plot pops up in a wholly unexpected place, and the agency scrambles once again to reallocate resources.
When we focus on methods that terrorists have already used and get caught up in the nuances of these scenarios, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that there are literally thousands of other ways an attack could be carried out. The recent focus on passenger screening methods assumes that terrorists will attempt to smuggle weapons through airport security checkpoints, when in fact there are many other points of entrance that a determined terrorist could exploit. From food court workers to gas truck drivers, the employees needed to keep an airport running smoothly do not pass through daily screening checkpoints. As the former TSA director Kip Hawley pointed out in The Atlantic ,even if employees were screened, outside accomplices could toss weapons to them over the airport fence.
As counterintuitive as it might seem, the best thing the TSA can do in the wake of the most recent near miss is, well, nothing. This does not mean that improving security is a hopeless task. As soon as we realize that our best hope for preventing terrorist attacks lies not with TSA screeners, but with expert analysts in the U.S. intelligence community, we can push for improvements that will produce real results.
Shining examples exist of what happens when an intelligence community works. In 2006, British investigators interrupted a plot to detonate liquid explosives on at least 10 airplanes destined for the U.S. after months of careful intelligence-gathering. British officials were first tipped off when a search of a known Al Qaeda sympathizer's luggage turned up suspicious materials. In ensuing weeks MI5 watched the man and his associates buy materials that could be used in constructing bombs and spend several hours researching flight timetables at an internet cafe. A secret search of the man's apartment revealed what appeared to be a bomb factory.
These are the sorts of activities that our tax dollars should be funding. Resources should be applied to intercepting communications about impending attacks, putting together pieces of information that together form a sinister picture and tracking the activities of individuals with known terrorist sympathies (like the Christmas Day bomber, whose father had warned the U.S. embassy in Nigeria about his son's extremist views). An intelligence community that can perform these tasks competently will go a long way in making air travel and in fact all modes of transportation more secure from terrorist attacks.
It will be hard for the TSA to resist the temptation to institute new procedures that create the illusion of heightened security. It will also be hard for travelers to accept that an organization that failed to detect an individual carrying explosives onto an airplane is making no effort to improve its procedures. However, paying for the illusion of security is no longer a luxury we can afford.