Israel Matzav

Napolitano calls the experts

This may be the first thing that the US Department of Homeland Security has done right: They've asked Israel for help.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Jane Holl Lute has requested from Israel information on aviation security and security measures taken in Israeli airports. Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz met with Lute on Wednesday and told her that Israel can assist the United States in dealing with terror threats on civil aviation.

Megan McArdle, who knows nothing about Israel, publishes a lengthy comment from an 'Israeli friend' who claims that Israel's security system could not work in the US.

1. Scale

Scale is an issue, but nobody in the thread has touched on why. The Israeli security model is (as noted in the article) more about the passenger than their baggage. This approach is both effective, time-consuming, and "racist": the profilers have a conversation with each passenger; as I'm an Israeli Jew, I always get the abbreviated treatment -- focusing more on where my bags have been since I've packed them. As a foreigner, you get a much more in-depth grilling. As a Muslim? They want to know your shoe size, and then a whole 'nother screener comes over and asks you everything all over again, just to see that you keep your story straight. Like they say in the article, the conversations they have are not so much about what you say as how you say it. The screeners are taught to iterate a few levels deep into your story and see that it doesn't break down under scrutiny.

Naturally, this process supposes that A) the threat is foreign and mostly limited to one ethnic/religious group, and B) screeners have this sort of time.

In the US, racial profiling is... unpalatable, and if each passenger / family got even a perfunctory 1-minute Q&A session with a TSA security officer, the system would crash. The US is dealing with a larger threat profile, and a whole different order-of-magnitude of traffic.

The threat IS mostly foreign. And if you hire enough screeners to do the job, they will have the time. They also won't be spending it wanding 11-year olds' "I'm going to Grandma's house" suitcases. But good security costs money. Do you want to be safe? Then you have to hire enough screeners - intelligent screeners - to do the job.

As to more than one minute being unpalatable, there are plenty of people who spend more than one minute in security in the US today. Because my tickets now originate out of Israel, I get 'randomly picked' for further examination every time I travel on a domestic flight in the US, and frequently when I'm flying internationally from the US as well. It takes much longer than a minute. And I'm pretty clearly not a terrorist. Why not focus that 'extra scrutiny' on people who might be terrorists instead of 'randomly' picking 50-something-year old dual citizen lawyers who have been to the US ten times in the last three years without causing problems, just because their tickets happen to be issued by Ziontours in Jerusalem?

2. The security screener's job: manpower, training, history

Normally these are intelligent men and women, usually students or twentysomethings, who pass a series of exams and then pass a several-month course. The hours are craptastic but the pay is decent, and a lot of students prefer it to shiftwork or waitressing. Passing the course is difficult but not arduous, and in the end you are really being taught guidelines on interrogation and then set loose to use your judgment -- if you have a red flag to raise, then you just call over a senior screener who has more years of experience.

The reality is that there are few enough openings that the program can be selective. I'd say, as a generalization, screeners here possess above-average intelligence, whereas your average TSA screener seems to be a working stiff, blindly following some not-too-complex screening algorithm in a three-ring binder. The number of screeners requisite for staffing all of the US airports precludes the TSA from exclusively employing screeners with the ability to make "judgment calls". There just aren't enough smart people with the desire to work a screener's job in the US.

Yes, the Israeli screeners are intelligent, as I have noted several times. You can find enough intelligent people to work as screeners in the US if you're willing to pay them enough money. It's that simple. The answer is that if you're willing to pay for it you can get reliable security that will target people who need to be targeted and let Grandpa and his hip replacement sail through security. Doesn't that make sense?

What will Janet Napolitano say when the Israeli consultants tell her that the only way to protect American airports is to hire twice as many screeners with four times the intelligence that the current screeners have and let them target the people who - based on a profile - are the most likely to be carrying a bomb in their underwear? Will she say, okay, we'll do it? Or will she say, no, we'd rather die than have no American-born white kids under the age of 12 searched but have every single Muslim traveling on a Pakistani passport searched? Which would you choose?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:27 AM