Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Memoirs of an Airport Screener. I'm just going to copy the entire blog post here, it's too good.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/07/memoirs_of_an_a.html

This person worked as an airport security screener years before 9/11, before the TSA, so hopefully things are different now. It's a pretty fascinating read, though.

Two things pop out at me. One, as I wrote, it's a mind-numbingly boring task. And two, the screeners were trained not to find weapons, but to find the particular example weapons that the FAA would test them on.

"How do you know it's a gun?" he asked me.

"it looks like one," I said, and was immediately pounded on the back.

"Goddamn right it does. You get over here," yelled Mike to Will.

"How do you know it's a gun?"

"I look for the outline of the cartridge and the..." Will started.

"What?"

"The barrel you can see right here," Will continued, oblivious to his pending doom.

"What the hell are you talking about? That's not how you find this gun."

"No sir. It's how you find any gun, sir," said Will. I knew right then that this was a disaster.

"Any gun? Any gun? I don't give a fuck about any gun, dipshit. I care about this gun. The FAA will not test you with another gun. The FAA will never put any gun but this one in the machine. I don't care if you are a fucking gun nut who can tell the caliber by sniffing the barrel, you look for this gun. THIS ONE." Mike strode to the test bag and dumped it out at the feet of the metal detector, sending the machine into a frenzy.

"THIS bomb. This knife. I don't care if you miss a goddamn bazooka and some son of a bitch cuts your throat with a knife you let through as long as you find THIS GUN."

"But we're supposed to find," Will insisted.

"You find what I trained you to find. The other shit doesn't get taken out of my paycheck when you miss it," said Mike.

Not exactly the result we're looking for, but one that makes sense given the economic incentives that were at work.

I sure hope things are different today.


I was talking with Russet about the latest round of airport security crap this morning. Basically I think that if you drink some of what you want to take on, you should be able to carry it on. If it's explosive enough to be dangerous, even if it's a binary agent, it's going to taste so horrible or smell so bad that you're not going to be able to drink it. Russet made a joke about drinking it as say yes, I'll drink this NITROGLYCERIN! then shake it up and blow the checkpoint to hell. She has a point, I mean, it would be so very difficult to rig a vest full of explosives, walk into a security check point, and detonate them.


Anyway, back to this airport screening. Schneier's last line, "I sure hope things are different today" I think is a false hope. FAA security inspectors apparently are still able to smuggle massive numbers of fake weapons past check points. In fact, they no longer report that because that information would aid terrorists. Yeah. Right. Schneier has a later entry about a museaum exhibit of 20 years of shivs being taken from prisoners in a maximum security prison. If inmates can make or smuggle shivs into a maximum security prison, we're going to be safe by keeping pocket knives out of airplanes? Give me a break.


Let's have a little reality check. If a group of people try and commandeer a plane, the pilot is not going to open the cockpit door. And you will see a group of passengers who will attack and, through sheer weight of numbers, overpower the would-be hijackers. There's no way that a group will ever be able to take over a plane like they did for the 9/11 attacks. We know what happened and no one is going to let it happen again if they're on a plane where a hijack attempt is happening. There's a good chance that people will die, but it will be a lot less than if the plane struck a building.

It was a one-time event. It will never be duplicated in that fashion. The terrorist's best way to pull off the same attack will be for them to be the ones flying the plane from take-off to impact, and I don't think they would last through the years of service of being a co-pilot before they become the commanding pilot of a plane.