On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 07:13:52PM -0500, John Kelsey wrote:
| Your list left out the obvious technique, which I think is more-or-less
| used by El Al: Screen your passengers really well, probably using secret
| databases, various kinds of racial profiling, etc. Routinely turn
| passengers away, or make boarding the plane such an ordeal that they elect
| not to fly anymore. (One of the many problems with this is that most
| flights are within the US; make flying sufficiently nasty, and people will
| take trains, busses, or their own cars. I think this is already happening
| a great deal, which is one reason most airlines are doing so poorly.)
What are you going to screen for? The Israelis have a relatively
small set of populations who fly El Al or otherwise via Tel Aviv
(Jews, Muslim and Christian Arabs, Christian holy land tourists,
backpackers, businesspeople.) All attacks to date have fit a set of
profiles. (Passengers, as far as I know, are rarely actually turned
away, they're just submitted to more and more intense scrutiny. Which
is ok because there are air marshalls on most flights.
The US has more diversity in travellers, destinations, etc. Are you
going to throw British citizens of Jamaican heritage on your list
(Richard Reid)? What about hispanics (Jose Padilla)? Irish Americans
(Tim McViegh)? Saudis? Maybe its easier to assemble a list of people
who don't get searched extra hard (Mormons). But then you have the
problem that you can't train and monitor enough people to do the deep
screenings without a few bad apples getting through. Which means that
bad guys will know about the screening techniques. (See the "Carnival
Booth" paper.)
I think a resiliant system requires people roughly as well armed as
the hijackers might be in the way of a hijacking attempt. Air
marshalls or otherwise.
Adam
--
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
-Hume
