Airport Security Part II

As I have recently been in airports in India, Malaysia, and the Philippines, I am continuing my discussion form last month on the absurd, contrived and even artificial displays of security in airports around the world. Though I don’t want to minimize the real and effective measures of security that some of the airports I was in had in place (especially Kuala Lumpur), there still seemed to be a number of procedures and processes in place that were either ill-conceived or worse, arbitrary.

The best example of this scenario I can give you in the practice of some airports which require you to have your luggage screened for dangerous items right after you enter the airport. The curious thing about this procedure is that the luggage screening machine is right in the middle of the airport floor, and that in most cases you are given your luggage back to then take it to the ticketing counters to check it yourself. In India and Manila, for example, airport security staff (manually) put a very thin plastic security band around the middle of your checked luggage which states that this piece of luggage has now been ‘security screened.’ For the life of me, I cannot imagine why the authorities who concocted this process would not think that someone could easily put an explosive or some other device in their luggage after it went through the scanner and it was given back to them?!? Granted, there might be a secondary screening after the bag is checked at the ticket counter (which I doubt), but why make it so easy to bypass this first layer of security?

In the world of privacy and security, the most effective defenses are a series of layered security hurdles, be they electronic, physical or a series of both. The point is to set up a series of inline hurdles that a bad guy needs to clear before being able to cause damage to your organization. And those hurdles should be progressively more difficult as the more determined the bad guy is, the more work he should have to do to get to the prize. The initial barriers of defense are fine for the lazy, stupid or inadvertent criminal, but the last barriers should be very difficult to overcome (e.g. biometrics).

All this has a price. Contrived security measures make a mockery of the whole notion of having security in place at all. At best, it causes inconveniences and extra costs for both travelers and the airport system in general. At worst, it gives bad guys easy insights into exploiting the systems and also gives travelers a false sense of safety. And that is the most expensive price of all to pay.