Airport Security in This Country is a Bad Joke
So MR knows this guy. 20-25 year old Middle Eastern male. Has a very Middle Eastern (albeit Israeli) name. This becomes important.
This guy spends last weekend in New York. Itinerary: American Airlines - Los Angeles to Newark and back - direct flights both ways. Or, as security officials might refer to it, "transcontinental American Airlines flights to and from a New York airport". Our guy buys and pays for these tickets a week before the first flight, using a crumpled, year-old voucher. As if all this isn't suspicious enough, when he buys the tickets something goes wrong and his name gets misspelled.
So it's the morning to leave, and this 20-25 year old Middle Eastern male needs to get on a transcontinental American Airlines flight to a New York airport with a ticket that's not even on his own name. He's a bit of a tech geek, so his backpack is crammed with, among other things:
* Cell phone, an mp3 player, and a laptop
* Cords and chargers for all those things
* This thing
* A pressurized can of deodorant
* A sharp, metal corkscrew
This is where things get funny. Or really not funny, depending on the humor you find in inconveniences at airports that actually make you less safe. We prefer "funny", but that's largely because of our mp3 player, our pretty decent noise canceling headphones, and our cell phone plan with unlimited text messages. Seriously, these three things are lifesavers in the face of airport delays. Sharper Image should market this combination as a "turn TSA incompetence into instant entertainment" kit.
So our guy shows up to LAX. Now, you'd expect someone in his position - someone trying to navigate their way through an airport without a ticket on their own name - to be circumspect. Maybe to try to minimize ID checks by going to a self-serve kiosk and checking no luggage. But not our guy. Sure he knows that checking luggage means a potentially unnecessary ID check, but apparently he reasons thusly: "If I try to check my luggage and the guy at the kiosk notices that I don't have my name on the ticket, I won't be allowed on the plane. Which would suck a lot. But if I don't check my luggage I'll have to carry it through the whole airport. Which would suck at least a little. So what are the odds that this joker will notice that the letters have been mixed up on my Middle Eastern looking name? Sure it matters if the guy on the terrorist watch-list is Muhammed, Muhamed, or Mohammed. But seriously - odds that this guy will even bother to notice the difference?"
Total time at kiosk from beginning to getting baggage ticket - less than two minutes.
Oh, and just for fun, our guy uses foreign, Israeli passport as his only ID in the airport. Appparently the goal was to see if there was anything he could do that would make anyone ask anything other than "may I please see your boarding pass (and ID)". Maybe some questions like: "why don't you have a boarding pass with your name on it", "why are you carrying a power strip in your backpack", or "how could you possibly think it was OK to bring a metal corkscrew on an airplane". Not to ruin the ending, but here's a quick summary of the results:
* Number of times boarding pass was checked: 5
* Number of times boarding pass was checked against ID: 2
* Total time spent by airport or TSA employees looking at ID and/or boarding pass: less than 30 seconds
* Number of times any official in any capacity asked any question other than "may I please see your boarding pass (and ID)": 0.
The trip back from Newark to LAX (or, if you wish, "the transcontinental American Airlines flight from an airport in the greater New York area") went about the same way, with a couple of caveats. Instead of 5, there were only 4 separate boarding pass checks this time - the extra one in LAX comes because they have people checking your boarding pass both at the bottom of the escalators and the to. Listen: even a single boarding pass check is idiotic from a security standpoint - who are you going to catch, terrorists who forgot to purchase tickets for the planes they want to hijack? Which makes the standard double boarding pass check - at the beginning and the end of metal detector lines- doubly stupid. The only terrorists they could stop are too clumsy to hold on to their boarding passes when they take off their shoes. We're pretty sure that stewardesses could take those guys. Which makes the LAX triple boarding pass checks (which only stop terrorists coordinated enough to grip their boarding passes during the metal detector line but clumsy enough to lose them in the little escalator steps) are probably not that helpful.
Anyway, the other difference between Newark and LAX is that Newark had the most perfect visual metaphor of all time. Seriously, best metaphor ever. The metal detector line was taking more than half an hour to get through. Probably because they were checking bags carefully - or at least carefully enough to cause massive delays but not carefully enough to notice a corkscrew in a backpack. Which makes us real bitter about that one time that TSA confiscated the tiny Allen wrench that we forgot to take out of our backpack after a biking trip. But back to the best metaphor ever.
So the Newark line is taking forever. And to the side, there's a TSA official who's supposed to be scanning the line looking for suspicious behavior. Real professionals, like the ones in Las Vegas casinos, are real good at this. They watch your body language, notice your breathing, follow your eyes - security type stuff. But not this woman. Oh no, not this woman. No. This woman is talking on her cell phone. Something about car insurance or something, but that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because - even though she doesn't know it - she's about to become the best metaphor of all time.
She's in one of those white TSA uniforms, literally screaming into her cell phone. She's supposed to be watching the crowd, but she's ignoring them while trying to hear and make herself heard over a bad connection. Things are not going well. She still can't hear. So to fix that, she... are you ready?... she bends her head down, plugs her other ear, and turns around. Yes. She puts her finger in her open ear and literally turns her back on the crowd. TSA uniform, screaming into the cell phone pressed against one ear, finger pushed into the other ear - and then to make the whole thing picture perfect she turns her back on the people she's supposed to be watching.
It. Was. Awesome.
But here's the relatively serious side to this gorgeous, gorgeous metaphor: it illustrates why stupid security regulations are positively dangerous. The intuitive position is the opposite - that every little bit of security, no matter how stupid, helps. Three checks, four checks, why not five checks? But the opposite is actually true - useless security checks actively decrease the effectiveness of even well-planned and well-implemented security checks - and we were already pretty skeptical that any of those existed.
Even in the ideal case, multiple checks mean that each individual guard thinks that he or she be just a little more careless because of redundant security. But American airports do not even represent the ideal case. Instead, most airport employees know that most of their jobs are just designed to waste passengers' time or to thin out lines. So like this woman, we imagine that most airport employees quite all but totally ignore their responsibilities because they know it's not really their job to stop a terrorist.
And yet one hopes that there are at least a couple of security officials who have real jobs. And here's where the problem comes in. These are the people who are ones supposed to be, like, checking IDs against boarding passes or finding corkscrews in backpacks. But it's not as if they know which TSA jobs matter and which don't - all they see is a montage of obviously fake security posts. So they - like everyone else - stop paying attention because they can't tell the real jobs from the fake ones. Except their jobs do matter, and so their neglect actually comes at a cost.
So you multiple checks which make employees think that someone else will do their job. You have useless jobs which make employees think that even if no one else did their specific task, it wouldn't matter. Obviously, this is not a situation condusive to careful scrutiny on the part of security officials. To say nothing of how it makes airports a circus of incompetence that only people like us think are funny.
In the past, we've specifically ridiculed the absurd LAX security ritual. And we're not necessarily in favor of an Ann Coulter style "profile Arabs and leave the white women alone" approach to airport security.(we'd advocate a more Israeli "wildly inconvenience everyone within a 10 mile radius, awarding bonus points for rudeness" setup). But there must be a purpose to inconveniences - perhaps maybe making flights safer. At least at LAX and Newark, the inspections are being conducted by bored and careless workers going through the motions of a routine that would be useless even if it was actually being implemented correctly. It's the worst of all possible worlds: incredibly chaotic and objectively less safe.
Why does someone need to check boarding passes at the beginning of the metal detector line if another official is going to do the same check at the end of the line? You know what? We have a better idea. Take the boarding pass inspectors from the beginning of the line (there were three there last week), dress them up as civilians, and have them randomly bump into passengers. Maybe if they push hard enough and get really lucky, a bomb will fall out of a terrorist's pocket! Right now, as near as we can tell, once you have a boarding pass, a laminated high school ID from a Cairo boarding school and a note from your mother will pretty much get you into any LAX terminal. At that point, a ticket purchased with consecutively-numbered twenties should be more than enough to get you on a plane.
We leave you with this story. This very true story. Before the flight out of LAX, someone from the airport Chili's came on the intercom and made the following announcement: "if you just left the Chili's restaurant and you took a black roller, please check to make sure it is your roller. We have a black roller that someone accidentally left here. There is no name in the bag, but there are some clothes inside as well as a laptop. So if this is your bag, please come back to claim it." Let's review. Unidentified bag left unclaimed in a restaurant attached to a gate servicing international flights. So of course the Chili's employees opened it to see what was inside. Because what everyone really, really needed was firm evidence that the staff at the Terminal 4, Gate 42A Chili's is in charge of making security evaluations about abandoned luggage at LAX.
This guy spends last weekend in New York. Itinerary: American Airlines - Los Angeles to Newark and back - direct flights both ways. Or, as security officials might refer to it, "transcontinental American Airlines flights to and from a New York airport". Our guy buys and pays for these tickets a week before the first flight, using a crumpled, year-old voucher. As if all this isn't suspicious enough, when he buys the tickets something goes wrong and his name gets misspelled.
So it's the morning to leave, and this 20-25 year old Middle Eastern male needs to get on a transcontinental American Airlines flight to a New York airport with a ticket that's not even on his own name. He's a bit of a tech geek, so his backpack is crammed with, among other things:
* Cell phone, an mp3 player, and a laptop
* Cords and chargers for all those things
* This thing
* A pressurized can of deodorant
* A sharp, metal corkscrew
This is where things get funny. Or really not funny, depending on the humor you find in inconveniences at airports that actually make you less safe. We prefer "funny", but that's largely because of our mp3 player, our pretty decent noise canceling headphones, and our cell phone plan with unlimited text messages. Seriously, these three things are lifesavers in the face of airport delays. Sharper Image should market this combination as a "turn TSA incompetence into instant entertainment" kit.
So our guy shows up to LAX. Now, you'd expect someone in his position - someone trying to navigate their way through an airport without a ticket on their own name - to be circumspect. Maybe to try to minimize ID checks by going to a self-serve kiosk and checking no luggage. But not our guy. Sure he knows that checking luggage means a potentially unnecessary ID check, but apparently he reasons thusly: "If I try to check my luggage and the guy at the kiosk notices that I don't have my name on the ticket, I won't be allowed on the plane. Which would suck a lot. But if I don't check my luggage I'll have to carry it through the whole airport. Which would suck at least a little. So what are the odds that this joker will notice that the letters have been mixed up on my Middle Eastern looking name? Sure it matters if the guy on the terrorist watch-list is Muhammed, Muhamed, or Mohammed. But seriously - odds that this guy will even bother to notice the difference?"
Total time at kiosk from beginning to getting baggage ticket - less than two minutes.
Oh, and just for fun, our guy uses foreign, Israeli passport as his only ID in the airport. Appparently the goal was to see if there was anything he could do that would make anyone ask anything other than "may I please see your boarding pass (and ID)". Maybe some questions like: "why don't you have a boarding pass with your name on it", "why are you carrying a power strip in your backpack", or "how could you possibly think it was OK to bring a metal corkscrew on an airplane". Not to ruin the ending, but here's a quick summary of the results:
* Number of times boarding pass was checked: 5
* Number of times boarding pass was checked against ID: 2
* Total time spent by airport or TSA employees looking at ID and/or boarding pass: less than 30 seconds
* Number of times any official in any capacity asked any question other than "may I please see your boarding pass (and ID)": 0.
The trip back from Newark to LAX (or, if you wish, "the transcontinental American Airlines flight from an airport in the greater New York area") went about the same way, with a couple of caveats. Instead of 5, there were only 4 separate boarding pass checks this time - the extra one in LAX comes because they have people checking your boarding pass both at the bottom of the escalators and the to. Listen: even a single boarding pass check is idiotic from a security standpoint - who are you going to catch, terrorists who forgot to purchase tickets for the planes they want to hijack? Which makes the standard double boarding pass check - at the beginning and the end of metal detector lines- doubly stupid. The only terrorists they could stop are too clumsy to hold on to their boarding passes when they take off their shoes. We're pretty sure that stewardesses could take those guys. Which makes the LAX triple boarding pass checks (which only stop terrorists coordinated enough to grip their boarding passes during the metal detector line but clumsy enough to lose them in the little escalator steps) are probably not that helpful.
Anyway, the other difference between Newark and LAX is that Newark had the most perfect visual metaphor of all time. Seriously, best metaphor ever. The metal detector line was taking more than half an hour to get through. Probably because they were checking bags carefully - or at least carefully enough to cause massive delays but not carefully enough to notice a corkscrew in a backpack. Which makes us real bitter about that one time that TSA confiscated the tiny Allen wrench that we forgot to take out of our backpack after a biking trip. But back to the best metaphor ever.
So the Newark line is taking forever. And to the side, there's a TSA official who's supposed to be scanning the line looking for suspicious behavior. Real professionals, like the ones in Las Vegas casinos, are real good at this. They watch your body language, notice your breathing, follow your eyes - security type stuff. But not this woman. Oh no, not this woman. No. This woman is talking on her cell phone. Something about car insurance or something, but that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because - even though she doesn't know it - she's about to become the best metaphor of all time.
She's in one of those white TSA uniforms, literally screaming into her cell phone. She's supposed to be watching the crowd, but she's ignoring them while trying to hear and make herself heard over a bad connection. Things are not going well. She still can't hear. So to fix that, she... are you ready?... she bends her head down, plugs her other ear, and turns around. Yes. She puts her finger in her open ear and literally turns her back on the crowd. TSA uniform, screaming into the cell phone pressed against one ear, finger pushed into the other ear - and then to make the whole thing picture perfect she turns her back on the people she's supposed to be watching.
It. Was. Awesome.
But here's the relatively serious side to this gorgeous, gorgeous metaphor: it illustrates why stupid security regulations are positively dangerous. The intuitive position is the opposite - that every little bit of security, no matter how stupid, helps. Three checks, four checks, why not five checks? But the opposite is actually true - useless security checks actively decrease the effectiveness of even well-planned and well-implemented security checks - and we were already pretty skeptical that any of those existed.
Even in the ideal case, multiple checks mean that each individual guard thinks that he or she be just a little more careless because of redundant security. But American airports do not even represent the ideal case. Instead, most airport employees know that most of their jobs are just designed to waste passengers' time or to thin out lines. So like this woman, we imagine that most airport employees quite all but totally ignore their responsibilities because they know it's not really their job to stop a terrorist.
And yet one hopes that there are at least a couple of security officials who have real jobs. And here's where the problem comes in. These are the people who are ones supposed to be, like, checking IDs against boarding passes or finding corkscrews in backpacks. But it's not as if they know which TSA jobs matter and which don't - all they see is a montage of obviously fake security posts. So they - like everyone else - stop paying attention because they can't tell the real jobs from the fake ones. Except their jobs do matter, and so their neglect actually comes at a cost.
So you multiple checks which make employees think that someone else will do their job. You have useless jobs which make employees think that even if no one else did their specific task, it wouldn't matter. Obviously, this is not a situation condusive to careful scrutiny on the part of security officials. To say nothing of how it makes airports a circus of incompetence that only people like us think are funny.
In the past, we've specifically ridiculed the absurd LAX security ritual. And we're not necessarily in favor of an Ann Coulter style "profile Arabs and leave the white women alone" approach to airport security.(we'd advocate a more Israeli "wildly inconvenience everyone within a 10 mile radius, awarding bonus points for rudeness" setup). But there must be a purpose to inconveniences - perhaps maybe making flights safer. At least at LAX and Newark, the inspections are being conducted by bored and careless workers going through the motions of a routine that would be useless even if it was actually being implemented correctly. It's the worst of all possible worlds: incredibly chaotic and objectively less safe.
Why does someone need to check boarding passes at the beginning of the metal detector line if another official is going to do the same check at the end of the line? You know what? We have a better idea. Take the boarding pass inspectors from the beginning of the line (there were three there last week), dress them up as civilians, and have them randomly bump into passengers. Maybe if they push hard enough and get really lucky, a bomb will fall out of a terrorist's pocket! Right now, as near as we can tell, once you have a boarding pass, a laminated high school ID from a Cairo boarding school and a note from your mother will pretty much get you into any LAX terminal. At that point, a ticket purchased with consecutively-numbered twenties should be more than enough to get you on a plane.
We leave you with this story. This very true story. Before the flight out of LAX, someone from the airport Chili's came on the intercom and made the following announcement: "if you just left the Chili's restaurant and you took a black roller, please check to make sure it is your roller. We have a black roller that someone accidentally left here. There is no name in the bag, but there are some clothes inside as well as a laptop. So if this is your bag, please come back to claim it." Let's review. Unidentified bag left unclaimed in a restaurant attached to a gate servicing international flights. So of course the Chili's employees opened it to see what was inside. Because what everyone really, really needed was firm evidence that the staff at the Terminal 4, Gate 42A Chili's is in charge of making security evaluations about abandoned luggage at LAX.
