SILLY SEASON FOR INEFFECTIVE ANTI-TERRORISM MEASURES (2)

WHAT’S WRONG WITH U.S. AIRPORT SECURITY?
One pilot says TSA agents are like 'mall cops who engage in a form of theater that suggests security but doesn't deliver'
　
By Daniel Rubin

The Philadelphia Inquirer
July 11, 2010
　
Soon after December 2001, when an al-Qaeda operative named Richard Reid tried to light plastic explosives stuffed into the heel of his boot, our nation's response has been to invite everyone to shuffle through metal detectors in socks or bare feet.
　
To some, the sight of Americans fumbling for their footwear after passing through security is a sign the terrorists have won or, at the very least, an admission that we're stuck fighting the last war while our enemy plans new tactics.
　
That's the view of Fred Gevalt, one of a pair of critics of our approach to air security who hit the talk-show circuit while I was away.
　
Gevalt, a pilot and former publisher of a civil aviation periodical, spent two years producing a documentary film that sees the Transportation Security Administration as a classic example of big government at its worst. The film, released on DVD last week, is called Please Remove Your Shoes.
　
"I've just watched them get bigger and bigger, and their empire-building is out of control," Gevalt said of the TSA. "At the end of the day, what do we have? Like a lot of government programs, something that's extremely intrusive, expensive as hell, and doesn't work."
　
He views the screeners as window dressing, mall cops who engage in a form of theater that suggests security but doesn't deliver.
　
Another critic of the way we secure our skies is a former insider - Stewart Baker, who served as policy chief for the Department of Homeland Security. His new book is Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren't Stopping Tomorrow's Terrorism.
　
It's not bureaucracy, he argues, but the privacy lobbies - on both the left and the right - that have thwarted better intelligence-gathering and security.
　
Most of the problems I've been writing about in Philadelphia - invasive or insensitive screenings of the very young, the elderly, and the disabled - might have been reduced had privacy advocates not slowed deployment of full-body scanners and stopped the gathering of information about who has made reservations to fly, Baker said.
　
[According to Baker] The TSA is only allowed to know about 5 percent of the people the government keeps terrorism-related intelligence about. As a result, screeners wind up treating someone like Ryan Thomas, a 4-year-old wearing orthopedic braces, as if his parents might be radicalized Muslim converts who supported suicide bombers on the Internet.
　
"That," Baker said, "would make anyone a little rigid."