Jay Evensen
  • Front Page
  • Opinions
  • Second Thoughts
  • Portfolio
  • Awards
  • About

Airport security: Can we ever get it right?

6/12/2019

0 Comments

 
After dropping my wife and one of our sons at the airport Wednesday for a trip to see relatives, watching from afar as they went through the familiar TSA dance, I was struck by the concept of faith.
​

At airports, people line up the way I remember my classmates lining up for vaccinations in  elementary school back in the ‘60s, with grim-faced resignation and a vague hope that the pain the school nurse was inflicting somehow would be worth the collective good it would cause.
But at least statistics can be found to back up that hope. The same can’t be said for the faith we put in the airport ritual that signals the start of any vacation or business trip.
In a couple of months we will mark the 18th anniversary of 9/11. The question is whether airports are any safer today than on that awful morning.
For one answer, you can visit the TSA’s own blog, at tsa.gov. There you will find photos of guns and other weapons, both real and simulated, recently confiscated at airports across the land. “Between May 27 and June 2,” the blog says, “TSA screened 16.9 million passengers and found 95 firearms in carry-on bags. Of the 95 firearms discovered, 83 were loaded and 30 had a round chambered.”
To be clear, that’s over just a six-day period.
When you look at the problem this way, finding air travelers with loaded guns seems like shooting very large fish in a barrel. In all of last year, the TSA reported finding 4,239 guns in carryon bags, which was 7 percent more than the year before, the Milwaukee Journal recently reported in a story that focused on 10 guns having been found at the local airport so far this year.
But a more unsettling way to look at this is to ask how many more weapons got past the inspectors. The last time the Department of Homeland Security reported the results of an undercover operation designed to sneak things past the TSA, in 2017, it found a 70 percent failure rate. Seven out of 10 times, they could get fake guns, knives and bombs down the conveyor belt without any problem.
America is a gun-friendly place. Most of the confiscated weapons belong to people who carry them on a regular basis, forget they have them at the airport and pose little threat to anyone else, except perhaps in the event of an accidental discharge. But that kind of failure rate raises questions about vulnerability to people whose intentions may not be so benign.
The Deseret News reported this week that the TSA has begun using facial recognition technology to help recognize bad people at airports. An assistant administrator at the agency said this will speed up the airport experience. It could be used in many places other than security checkpoints, such as baggage drops, check-in stations and gates.
The agency hails it as another tool, but history shows it may be just another toy to build a false sense of faith while posing a serious risk to privacy. Tests of the technology, including a famous one by the ACLU last year that incorrectly identified 28 members of Congress as criminals, are not encouraging. Meanwhile, the TSA and law enforcement will collect a database of American faces massive enough to make George Orwell’s imagination blush.
If you have sent a loved one off on a flight, as I did, you might feel a renewed, intense interest in getting this right, and perhaps a sense of resignation that any effort involving humans trying to pick criminals from among millions of ordinary travelers is doomed to be error-prone.
That may be especially true given the monotony of the job, as well as reports that morale among TSA employees is extremely low, while turnover is high.
We have not seen another airport-related terrorist attack to rival the enormity of 9/11. That’s a fact that can’t easily be dismissed, but it may have much more to do with intelligence efforts outside airports than with x-rays of luggage.
In the end, having faith in the system is good. Without it, air travel would collapse, along with the economy. But Americans should demand the kind of accountability that ensures that faith is not misplaced.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Search this site


    Like what you read here?

      Please subscribe below, and we'll let you know when there is a new opinion.

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

    Picture

    The author

    Jay Evensen is the Senior Editorial Columnist of the Deseret News. He has nearly 40 years experience as a reporter, editor and editorial writer in Oklahoma, New York City, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. He also has been an adjunct journalism professor at Brigham Young and Weber State universities.

    Archives

    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012

    Categories

    All
    Campaign 2012
    Congress
    Crime
    Culture
    Iran
    Oil And Gas
    Poverty
    Steroids
    Taxes
    Utah
    Washington
    World Events
    World Events

    Links

    Deseret News
    Newslink
    Marianne Evensen's blog

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.