US Security and Israelification

This morning we started out in Phoenix with an eight-thirty flight to BWI on US Airways. We were in the check-in line an hour and a half before our departure time. Right now it's nine-fifteen at night, and we are still in Phoenix, staying in a Quality Inn, thanks to a discount offered by the airline after we stood around the airport all day.

I don't see it in the news, but apparently US Airways is having some kind of sick-out, crews are failing to show up for work and flights are being canceled and delayed. With that in mind you can almost understand why it took forty-five minutes to get through the line to the ticket counter to check our one cardboard box full of presents. It's unforgivable, but understandable.

It is not understandable though that people have to stand in line another forty-five minutes while the Transportation Security Administration x-rays their shoes and measures their shampoo, scans them for loose change, peeks through their clothes. This is supposed to make us safer. It doesn't. It only takes up everybody's time and frustrates people.

Reading about the Nigerian Underwear Bomber, you realize that they should have stopped him at every step of the way. Nobody could look more suspicious than that guy, from paying nearly $3,000 in cash for a ticket and checking no baggage to the call his father placed to the American embassy warning our government about him, to the briefing President Obama received a few days before Christmas telling him that al Qaeda was planning something, to the fact that this guy was in the government's terrorist database. And still they take your shampoo away from you. Leaving Chicago, I was randomly picked to be scanned in one of those fully-body scanners that reveal your body underneath your clothes, I'm sure you could feel the ripples of excitement spreading out from the TSA Voyeurism Kiosk throughout the airport as they peeked at the stuff in my front back pocket. I'm a middle-aged federal employee going on Christmas vacation with my wife and children to see the kids' grandparents, do you really think anybody thought I was a security risk? And the Nigerian Underwear Bomber gets on with no questions.

Security expert Bruce Schneier uses the term "security theater" to describe the kinds of activities that might make people feel safer but don't actually increase security in any real way. His article on the CNN website is a concise summary of his opinions on the subject, I recommend you read it HERE.

It is time for Americans to get serious about security. We should accurately estimate the probabilities of various threats and devise rational strategies for combating them. It's not easy defending yourself from an enemy who uses randomness and the element of surprise against you, but it can be done.

You know who does it? The Israelis. There is an interesting and little-cited article at thestar.com, a big Canadian news site:

While North America's airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification.

That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience.

"It is mindboggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago," said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He's worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world.

"Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don't take s--- from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, 'We're not going to do this. You're going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport."

That, in a nutshell is "Israelification" - a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death.

Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel's largest hub, Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?

"The first thing you do is to look at who is coming into your airport," said Sela.

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

"Two benign questions. The questions aren't important. The way people act when they answer them is," Sela said.

Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of "distress" — behavioural profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.

"The word 'profiling' is a political invention by people who don't want to do security," he said. "To us, it doesn't matter if he's black, white, young or old. It's just his behaviour. So what kind of privacy am I really stepping on when I'm doing this?"

Once you've parked your car or gotten off your bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.

Armed guards outside the terminal are trained to observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behaviour. At Ben Gurion's half-dozen entrances, another layer of security are watching. At this point, some travellers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer.

"This is to see that you don't have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious," said Sela.

You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

"The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds," said Sela.

Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has gotten this far.

At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area. Sela plays devil's advocate — what if you have escaped the attention of the first four layers of security, and now try to pass a bag with a bomb in it?

"I once put this question to Jacques Duchesneau (the former head of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority): say there is a bag with play-doh in it and two pens stuck in the play-doh. That is 'Bombs 101' to a screener. I asked Ducheneau, 'What would you do?' And he said, 'Evacuate the terminal.' And I said, 'Oh. My. God.'

"Take Pearson. Do you know how many people are in the terminal at all times? Many thousands. Let's say I'm (doing an evacuation) without panic — which will never happen. But let's say this is the case. How long will it take? Nobody thought about it. I said, 'Two days.'"

A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options.

First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away.

Second, all the screening areas contain 'bomb boxes'. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.

"This is a very small simple example of how we can simply stop a problem that would cripple one of your airports," Sela said.

Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at the only one which Ben-Gurion Airport shares with Pearson — the body and hand-luggage check.

"But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America," Sela said.

"First, it's fast — there's almost no line. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They're not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you," said Sela. "Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes ... and that's how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys."

That's the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.

This doesn't begin to cover the off-site security net that failed so spectacularly in targeting would-be Flight 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — intelligence. In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies.

"There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States," Sela said. "Absolutely none." The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother

Figuring out how to tell the good guys from the bad guys, that's the real question, isn't it? Everybody knows there is no danger if grandma carries a bottle of shampoo onto the plane, nobody has ever been caught with a bomb in their shoe since the original shoe-bomber, though millions and millions of shoes have been x-rayed. It's not the shampoo that's a problem, not the shoes, it's the intention of the passenger. We want them to catch bad guys, not hassle grandmothers for carrying cold cream in their hand bag.

The Israeli approach is not security theater, it's not designed to make people feel that their Big Brother government is taking care of them -- it is designed to actually make them safer. This will never happen here, you know -- such a concept is absolutely unthinkable to Americans. How did we get like this?

I love how this piece ends:

But even without the intelligence, Sela maintains, Abdulmutallab would not have gotten past Ben Gurion Airport's behavioural profilers.

So. Eight years after 9/11, why are we still so reactive, so un-Israelified?

Working hard to dampen his outrage, Sela first blames our leaders, and then ourselves.

"We have a saying in Hebrew that it's much easier to look for a lost key under the light, than to look for the key where you actually lost it, because it's dark over there. That's exactly how (North American airport security officials) act," Sela said. "You can easily do what we do. You don't have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit — technology, training. But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept."

And rather than fear, he suggests that outrage would be a far more powerful spur to provoking that change.

"Do you know why Israelis are so calm? We have brutal terror attacks on our civilians and still, life in Israel is pretty good. The reason is that people trust their defence forces, their police, their response teams and the security agencies. They know they're doing a good job. You can't say the same thing about Americans and Canadians. They don't trust anybody," Sela said. "But they say, 'So far, so good'. Then if something happens, all hell breaks loose and you've spent eight hours in an airport. Which is ridiculous. Not justifiable

"But, what can you do? Americans and Canadians are nice people and they will do anything because they were told to do so and because they don't know any different."

The point then: Americans get nonsensical security theater because we're sheep. We put up with it. You listen to the grumbling in line, everybody knows this is ineffective, but we shuffle through the process and try to pretend that these rude TSA goons are there to make us safer. As long as Americans (and Canadians) let government play to their fears instead of demanding that they do a competent job, in security and everything else, we get what we deserve.