Oliver Burkeman on airport security (original) (raw)

The security expert, Bruce Schneier, is fond of pointing out that there are several fairly straightforward ways to hijack or bomb an aeroplane. Garottes can be made from fishing line or dental floss, and the snapped-off handle of a wheeled bag makes "a pretty effective spear". Alternatively, you could buy some steel epoxy glue from a hardware store: it comes in two tubes, one containing steel dust and the other hardener, which can be combined in-flight and moulded into a stubby steel knife, using a metal teaspoon as a handle. (Neither steel epoxy glue nor metal teaspoons are prohibited in hand luggage on flights departing from the UK or the US - unlike, say, snow globes, which are banned under US rules.)

If you would rather use liquid explosive, simply label the bottles "saline solution" and board in the US, where you are allowed to travel with as much saline solution as you wish. Or you could risk it at a British airport: when security staff find liquids in volumes greater than 100ml - and they have been known to seize an estimated five tonnes nationwide in a single day - all they usually do is place them in an open bin and let the offending passenger continue unpenalised. Nor is it a problem if you're on the US "no-fly list", the register of people deemed too dangerous to fly ("But too innocent to arrest," as Schneier puts it). Just target a flight for which you don't need photo identification, and no one need ever know you're on the list. Schneier tested this recently, taking a domestic flight from Minneapolis with no photo ID and little hassle. The terms and conditions of at least one British budget airline suggest the same may be possible here.

"There are precisely two things that have made air travel safer since 9/11 - locks on cockpit doors and teaching passengers that they have to fight back," says Schneier, who is chief technology officer for the security consultancy Counterpane, owned by BT. He is 44, a computer scientist by training, with a greying ponytail and the quiet voice of someone secure in his opinions and unconcerned about winning you over. "You can argue there's a third, sky marshals. But, actually, once you tell people you have them, you don't really need them. It's the idea of sky marshals that makes us safer, not the marshals themselves."

From time to time, Schneier chalks up a victory in the war against what he calls the "silly security season" of the post-9/11 era. For example, last July, US authorities lifted a ban on cigarette lighters, conceding it was pointless, given that matches or batteries could just as easily be used to ignite a bomb. Mainly, though, he sees irrationality and wasted money, including in the measures recently announced by Gordon Brown to beef up security at UK airports, railway stations and elsewhere, constructing barriers around buildings and improving their blast-resistance at a cost of £1bn. A posting on Schneier's blog, describing how this would affect Liverpool Lime Street, but not less busy stations nearby, was called "UK Spends Billions To Force Terrorists To Drive A Little Further."

Talking to Schneier and reading his essays does something strange to your brain: you start seeing security loopholes and idiocies everywhere. You will be at Heathrow's terminal three, for example, having passed through the main security check, and you'll be shuffling in line towards a second search point, where people are taking off their shoes to be x-rayed, when you'll realise that they are queueing for the shoe-check only because everyone in front of them is doing so: inexplicably, it appears to be optional, and you can just step around it - as I did - with no apparent adverse consequences. You might then begin to share Schneier's suspicion that the whole system of air security is based on a set of misunderstandings, not complex or technical but so obvious that even most professionals in the field - perhaps especially the professionals - can't see them, or don't want to think about them.

You might even come to understand the frustration of Elwood Menear, a pilot with US Airways, who was escorted to jail in January 2002 after asking a security screener at Philadelphia International Airport the following question: "Why are you worried about tweezers when I could crash the plane?"

What they refer to at Heathrow simply as "the crisis" began at 2am on August 10 last year, with the arrival of a fax from the Department for Transport. It informed BAA that they had until the next batch of passengers started arriving - at 4am - radically to change security procedures, banning liquids and all other carry-on items except money, essential documents, medicines and baby food. By 3am, BAA executives were arriving at the airport to be there in advance of the 2,000 security staff about to show up for their shifts with no idea about the changes. In the hours that followed, police raided homes in London, Birmingham and High Wycombe, and announced, in time for the morning news, the foiling of an alleged plot to destroy up to 10 transatlantic jets.

Almost immediately, Heathrow became a hellhole of static queues and furious passengers. Sheer volume of people is its biggest problem at the best of times, and neither the staff nor the buildings could cope - especially inside terminal two, built in the 50s, when there were no security procedures at all. "One of the criticisms put to us was that we didn't have a contingency in place," a BAA spokesman said as we toured the terminal's cramped security screening area. "Well, our workload increased fourfold. If the argument is that we didn't have a contingency that allowed us, in the space of two hours, to quadruple our manpower, I think we'd say, 'Fair cop.' I don't think you could ask any business to do that. But that's not to say we couldn't have done some things better." Transit passengers arriving with bottles of duty-free alcohol had them confiscated. "People were really, really mad, as you can imagine." Heathrow has since hired 500 additional security staff.

The legacy of August 2006 is today's ban on liquids in volumes larger than 100ml, and the requirement for all liquids to be carried in a clear plastic bag. (The one-bag-per-person carry-on restriction is likely to be lifted next year.) It all feels unprecedentedly severe, an impression encouraged by John Reid, the home secretary at the time, who spoke of the need to respond to an unparalleled level of threat. But, seen from another perspective, the clampdown was far more predictable. It was just another move in a cat-and-mouse game between terrorists and the authorities that began in the late 60s - exemplified best by the enduringly mysterious tale of Dan Cooper.

The man who called himself Dan Cooper was wearing a dark suit and raincoat when he boarded a Boeing 727, operated by Northwest Airlines, in Portland, Oregon, on the night of November 24 1971. Once the plane was in the air, headed for Seattle, he lit a cigarette and ordered a bourbon and soda. Then he passed a note to the 23-year-old stewardess, Florence Schaffner, who at first assumed he was flirting, and didn't bother to read it. "Miss, you'd better look at that note," Cooper said. "I have a bomb." She unfolded the piece of paper. "I have a bomb in my briefcase," it read. "I will use it if necessary. I want you to sit beside me." Schaffner sat down, and Cooper opened his bag, revealing a mass of batteries and wires.

Via Schaffner, Cooper communicated his demands to the captain. When the plane landed at Seattle, he wanted $200,000 in cash and four parachutes. He got them, and released everyone except the captain and another stewardess. Then he ordered the plane back into the air, flying in the direction of Mexico City and keeping to an altitude of below 10,000ft. He strapped on two of the parachutes, pocketed the money, and asked the stewardess how to lower the 727's rear steps. Somewhere over Washington state, he climbed into the freezing night and vanished.

The case has never been solved. In 1980, a family picnicking in the Washington countryside found almost $6,000 of the ransom money, but that was all. (This may be about to change: earlier this year, the FBI managed to extract DNA from a tie that Cooper abandoned on board, and a retired postal worker has presented convincing evidence that his deceased brother, a former Northwest employee, was the culprit, according to New York magazine.)

Since then, the evolution of airport security has been a simple matter of back-and-forth: terrorists exploit a weakness, governments address the weakness and terrorists look for a new one. The Dan Cooper affair led to the invention of the "Cooper vane", a wedge to stop stairways being lowered in flight. From the early 70s, metal detectors and x-ray machines made it hard to smuggle guns onboard. In the 80s, terrorists starting smuggling bombs into the hold, but not boarding the flights themselves, so passenger bag-matching was introduced. In 1985, a Hezbollah front group used cleaners at Athens airport to place guns in the lavatory of a TWA plane, so screening of airport employees began to be taken more seriously. In 1986, an Irish chambermaid working at the Park Lane Hilton in London was stopped at Heathrow in possession of a bomb, placed in her bag without her knowledge by her Jordanian boyfriend. Ever since, security staff have asked passengers, "Did you pack your luggage yourself?" and "Has anybody asked you to carry anything?" In the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the terrorists rewrote the rules again, this time more comprehensively than ever before, by proving themselves willing to die.

"This is the security game," Schneier says. "We take away guns, so they use bombs. We take away bombs, they use boxcutters. We take away boxcutters, they hide explosives in their shoes. Take away shoes, they use liquids." Take away liquids, he might have added, and they attack airports, as at Glasgow earlier this year; Brown's plans for barriers and parking exclusion zones follow the rules of the game perfectly.

The authorities' next moves are being put in place at Heathrow's new terminal five, due to open in March. At the moment, the terminal's vast main hall is almost silent, the cathedral-like calm broken only by small groups of British Airways staff on introductory tours, and the movements of thousands of pieces of dummy luggage to test the baggage-handling system. When passengers arrive, they will encounter the state of the art in security systems, including machines that can identify liquids and explosives hidden in bags, giving staff a 3D view of the contents, and highlighting questionable materials with a red rectangle. Travellers will also have their fingerprints taken and their faces scanned.

Ian Hutcheson, BAA's director of security, is proud of the new system, but even he concedes it's far from perfect. "It's not utopia. Utopia looks like a portal that you'd walk through, carrying everything, and you get a red or a green light, and if you get a green light you keep on walking to the plane. We're a long way from that." Technology is only part of the problem: utopia would also mean more space and staff than even terminal five will provide. Already, there are full-body "backscatter" scanners that can see under clothes, and sealed glass pods in which passengers are blasted with jets of air to displace stray particles that can be analysed for traces of explosive. But they are not much use if employing them on a large scale would slow queues to a halt. And even the best detection systems rely on alert human operators; on several recent occasions in the US, screeners have missed a clear majority of items placed in baggage by security officials as a test.

Besides, Hutcheson is the first to concede that security isn't really a question of advancing towards utopia. It can never be perfect: it's a trade-off. We spend billions of pounds and tolerate airport queues in order to feel safe, "but the debate that's never had is, how much risk are you prepared to accept?" The question is crucial, because air security obeys the law of diminishing returns. The more money we spend, and the more we slow down the process of travel, the smaller the added security benefit we obtain each time. The basic bag-check is by far the most important deterrent measure; everything else merely targets one specific method of attack. But since anything can be a weapon - even a pair of bare hands, used skilfully - there's no conceivable end to the back-and-forth; we just invite terrorists to concoct new tactics. Meanwhile, queues lengthen and people become more edgy - which was the terrorists' goal to begin with. "It's a game we can't win," Schneier says. "We should stop playing!"

Which leaves one more option, largely absent from the British approach to security, and fraught with ethical difficulties: if you can't stop people bringing bad things on to aircraft, why not try to identify the bad people instead? Replace technology with psychology, in other words. "The way to prevent aeroplane terrorism is not to keep objects that could fall into the wrong hands off aeroplanes," Schneier says. "A better goal is to keep those with the wrong hands from boarding aeroplanes in the first place."

In October, I flew from Heathrow to Tel Aviv and back on El Al, the Israeli national airline. Since the first and only successful attack on an El Al plane, in 1968, the airline has earned a reputation as the world's most secure. In part, this is thanks to armed marshals disguised as passengers on every flight, advanced bag-scanning systems and cockpit doors that cannot be opened in flight. But it is also a result of El Al's psychology-focused approach to assessing the risks posed by passengers - as I discovered on my return flight from Ben Gurion International Airport.

I was one of the first to arrive for the flight, and before I could reach the check-in desk I was ushered aside to another counter, where a thirtyish airline employee addressed me from behind a computer display. I explained the purpose of my trip - interviewing the employees of a software company - and where I had stayed and for how long. She asked to see my notes and tape recorder, and listened to a minute or so of my interviews.

"Is there someone at the company who we could call?" I gave her the managing director's name and mobile phone number; she left a message on his voicemail. "So," she said, "you were working in Tel Aviv but you went to Jerusalem as a tourist?" Her tone throughout was one of polite amusement.

"Yes."

"Did you meet anyone in Jerusalem?"

"I had a drink with the Guardian's correspondent."

"Do you have a camera? Some photos from Jerusalem?" I handed over my camera and, at her request, showed her how to display the date of each photograph. She flicked through the pictures, then narrowed her eyes. "Wait a minute," she said. "You said you were in Jerusalem. This is a picture of boats on the sea. There's no sea in Jerusalem."

"I took that from my hotel window in Tel Aviv. It's the marina."

"Did you go to any private homes in Jerusalem?"

"No."

"Do you know anyone there?"

"Well, like I said, I had a drink..."

More questions about Jerusalem followed. "And did anybody ask you to carry anything?" she asked at last.

"No," I said.

She looked suddenly stern. "You do realise I'm asking you in case somebody might have used you to put a bomb in your bag?"

"Yes."

She beamed at me. "Thanks. Enjoy your flight."

The exchange took almost half an hour - not long, compared with many anecdotes of flying El Al, but much longer than it would have taken to search my bag by hand, or to put me through a body-scanner. Nor was any of the information I gave recorded, as far as I could tell. The airline's sole calculation appeared to be that reading my body language - and seeing if I could keep my story straight in the face of being asked the same questions, over and over again - was a better way to judge if I posed a threat.

El Al refuses to discuss its security procedures, but judging by comments from former staff, however, its employees would have started constructing a psychological profile of me from the moment I booked my ticket, then watched me up to the gate. "We study the way people walk around the airport, we make a careful note of the kind of language they use, the dialect, and their behaviour," Leo Gleser, a former El Al security officer, said shortly after 9/11. "We see if they are on their own and with whom they have contact. And we study their eyes. There are many ways in which terrorists betray that they are not feeling comfortable ... The whole point of profiling is to concentrate effort where it is most needed."

The word "profiling", however, invokes the spectre of ethnic profiling, a charge El Al has not escaped: it is widely maintained that passengers with Arab names or appearances are singled out for tough questioning, while Hebrew-speakers are classed as low-risk: leaving London for Tel Aviv, I was asked if I spoke Hebrew. Even apart from ethical considerations, the overwhelming conclusion of studies by US criminologists is that racial profiling simply doesn't work: it does not result in more guilty people being identified. But person-by-person psychological profiling is a different matter. It need not be racist at all. It just takes a lot of time and money.

"The El Al model is a totally different model, based on differentiation," says Ian Hutcheson at Heathrow. "They differentiate through questioning. And if you have one or two flights a day from Heathrow - three at the very maximum - you can do that. But if you're British Airways, and you're operating God knows how many flights, you can't."

So could El Al's approach ever be adapted to cope with the volume of an airport such as Heathrow, through which 63m passengers pass each year? To find out, I had lunch with Paul Ekman, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California. This was a disconcerting prospect, because Ekman is the world's leading expert in the study of "microexpressions" - the fleeting expressions that flash involuntarily across our faces, in response to people or events, in the split-second before we consciously gain control of our features. Disgust, guilt, anger: our true emotions are exposed before we can repress them - which means that when you dine with Ekman, you can't shake the suspicion that he might be able, in effect, to read your mind.

"Well, once you learn to read microexpressions, you can't really turn it off," smiled Ekman, a vigorous 73-year-old who is celebrated as the co-creator of the Facial Action Coding System, a catalogue of every one of the 10,000 expressions it is possible to make with the 43 muscles of the human face. "But you have to be careful with how you use it, because it's stolen information."

He has been hired to teach microexpression-recognition skills to the CIA, the FBI, Scotland Yard and airport staff around the world. The basics can be learned in around an hour, he says - resulting in measurable improvements in the ability to detect when people are lying.

In the 60s, Ekman conducted studies among isolated tribes in New Guinea, and communities in south America and Japan, which established that the basic repertoire of human expressions is universal. Contrary to the opinion of sceptical anthropologists, notably Margaret Mead, it turns out that we all express happiness, anger, fear, disgust and guilt in essentially the same way. Subsequent studies demonstrated that police officers were often little better than university students in identifying liars.

Ekman is training airport staff to pay close attention to microexpressions during routine interactions with passengers, and to scan queues for suspicious behaviour, though he won't specify the expressions that indicate danger - "because terrorists read newspapers". Don't we all feel and act a bit guilty, though, when we pass through security or customs, just because we feel watched? "Yes, but as best one can tell, from accounts of people who encountered the 9/11 terrorists, and from other terrorists, guilt was not what they were feeling about what they were about to do. So the fact that you're looking guilty is probably not going to draw anyone's attention."

Earlier this year, it was reported that Glasgow airport had installed cameras tailored to allow the close study of passengers' faces. If you trust the science, and can stomach the total loss of privacy within the airport, the potential is clearly great. "Behavioural profiling has enormous value," Schneier agrees. "It's hard to do right, and if you do it wrong, it quickly turns unpleasant. But done right, it has enormous value."

Still, even behavioural psychology is only part of the answer. If an extremely serious plot was indeed disrupted in August last year, it was disrupted by intelligence work, not airport security. In any case, the efficacy of security can never be properly evaluated: if a stretch of time passes with no attacks, does that show that security measures are deterring attackers, or that the measures are unnecessary? In his book The Black Swan, the probability specialist Nassim Taleb points out that if some US legislator had driven through a law to seal cockpit doors before 9/11, he or she would never have received any credit when 9/11 failed to happen.

As long as we believe technology will solve our problems, Schneier says, we will be subject to "silly security". In his book, Beyond Fear, he recounts a story that became popular on the internet in the months after 9/11 about a plain-clothes sky marshal employed by a major airline to help protect its flights. One day the marshal was passing through security, following the special procedures that enabled him discreetly to bring his loaded firearm on to the flight, when a security screener stopped him. The gun was fine, the screener said - but the marshal would have to surrender his nail clippers.

The story has never been confirmed. More than likely, it never happened. But the real problem, of course, is that it is so easy to believe.