[109160] in Cypherpunks
March 13 column - airport security
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Fri Mar 12 07:42:21 1999
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 07:14:34 -0500
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Reply-To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
--- begin forwarded text
Resent-Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 22:37:26 -0700
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 21:38:47 -0800 (PST)
To: vinsends@ezlink.com
From: Vin_Suprynowicz@lvrj.com (Vin Suprynowicz)
Subject: March 13 column - airport security
Resent-From: vinsends@ezlink.com
Resent-Sender: vinsends-request@ezlink.com
FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED MARCH 13, 1999
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Back to the drawing board
During recent surprise exercises to find out if all the expensive,
confoundedly demeaning security procedures at America's commercial airports
are really doing any good, federal agents made the not terribly surprising
discovery that they could sneak through supposed "security" doors 46 times
at four major airports, and even board empty airliners at will.
"Without displaying any identification, the agents roamed the air
operations area, passing 229 employees, but were challenged only 53 times,"
according to retired Adm. Cathal Flynn, the Federal Aviation
Administration's associate administrator for aviation security.
Unstated is the obvious corollary, that even after being discovered the
agents were always able to talk themselves out of trouble by flashing
easily-counterfeited ID cards.
Adm. Flynn has subsequently warned airport officials nationwide by letter
that, if this problem cannot be solved, it may become necessary to order a
guard posted at every airplane.
Hundreds of planes per airport, 24 hours a day?
That's ridiculous. Though his real life adventures are by now well melded
in the public mind with the fictional embellishments of his popular "Rogue
Warrior" novels, the original claim to fame of 30-year Navy Cmdr. Richard
Marcinko, a Vietnam special forces veteran who later helped run SEAL
counter-terrorist operations in the 1970s and '80s, stemmed from his
similar "red team" assignment to test out security at such facilities as
American embassies abroad.
Cmdr. Marcinko writes that it turned out such facilities could often be
easily penetrated by someone who spoke English, wore a uniform, and simply
acted as though he belonged there, by such simple expedients as entering
through a patio "smokers door" left propped open for the convenience of
employees not allowed to smoke inside the building.
And that's without even mentioning the U.S. Marine embassy guards in
Moscow who were recently discovered to have Russian girlfriends --
girlfriends not reluctant to share their pillow talk with their KGB
handlers.
If security measures enforced by armed U.S. Marines with orders to shoot
to kill can be so easily defeated in such relatively small, highly secure
facilities, the notion that legions of civilian "Fred and Ethel Mertz"
security staff in ill-fitting uniforms running us through metal detectors
and asking us to remove our belt buckles can secure airports with dozens of
miles of unsupervised perimeter fencing is absurd.
"It's like putting a steel door on a grass hut," one airport official
told the Dallas Morning News last week.
Airline flight crews tell me they're routinely picked up at their motels
by drivers whom they have never met before, and driven (their personal
luggage uninspected) through gates that open automatically in front of
these vehicles, directly to their planes. Any four people who showed up in
that motel parking lot at the right time, with good haircuts and wearing
the right uniforms, would receive the same courtesy.
But rather than panicking and slapping on ever more expensive, intrusive
layers of this so-called "security," might it not finally be time to ask
why millions of airline passengers are inconvenienced waiting to pass
through metal detectors and body searches -- conditioning Americans to
tolerate as routine these ever more repressive violations of our persons
and property -- if the whole procedure turns out to do no good?
Yes, planes have been hijacked in the past. Planes will probably be
hijacked in the future. But just because meteorites are certain to keep
falling doesn't mean we all walk around wearing crash helmets. First, the
risk is minimal. Second, the helmet wouldn't do any good anyway.
No one is saying airports should have no security. But one begins to
wonder if the threat of "terrorism" isn't more often used to compromise our
Fourth Amendment rights for the mere convenience of those trying to fight
the War on Drugs, or even the War Against Moving Money Around.
Routinely harassing millions of blameless passengers to stop the
theoretical one-in-a-million criminal isn't the American way. Israel's
security services seem to have solved that nation's historically much
larger problem by merely salting their flights with the occasional armed,
plainclothes officer.
Perhaps it's finally time to seek out methods both less intrusive and
more effective (or -- gasp -- even to get government out of the loop
entirely, allowing the different, independent airlines to try their own
schemes, under the goad of free-market liability insurance premiums) ...
rather than merely doing more of what we already know doesn't work.
Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers" is available at
$21.95 plus $3 shipping ($6 UPS; $2 shipping each additional copy) through
Mountain Media, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas, Nev. 89127-4422. The 500-page
trade paperback may also be ordered via web site
http://www.thespiritof76.com/ wacokillers.html, or at 1-800-244-2224.
Credit cards accepted; volume discounts available.
***
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it. -- John
Hay, 1872
The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not
get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases
to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and
soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don't adjust! Revolt
against the reality! -- Mordechai Anielewicz, Warsaw, 1943
* * *
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-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
