Airport Security
Hair gels, lipstick and terrorism

Sunday, August 20, 2006

CRITICS OF the Department of Homeland Security (including this page) have done a lot of second-guessing (well-deserved) of the agency since its inception. So it's only fair to mention that the department's response to the recent London terrorist threat was measured, calm and efficient.

Within hours of the revelation by British officials of a plot to blow up airplanes using liquid explosives, the Transportation Security Administration moved quickly to impose strict restrictions for carry-on luggage. The often-maligned workers who screen the luggage enforced the often-confusing new rules with surprising effectiveness under difficult circumstances. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff acted with reassuring calm, provided as much information as he could and adopted a nuanced approach to raising the terror alert -- a welcome departure from the department's early tendency to issue the-sky-is-falling bulletins. The traveling public also deserves credit for understanding that issues larger than inconvenience are at play.

Beyond the immediate convulsions, however, big questions about airline security remain. Have authorities been slow to deal with the danger of unknown liquids given the revelation of a similar plot 11 years earlier? Is enough attention being paid to developing new technologies that could help detect danger? Why do there seem to be inconsistencies in security measures from airport to airport? Are there other threats, such as shoulder-fired missiles, that aren't receiving sufficient attention? What about security on cargo planes?

Everyone, it seems, has an answer, but there are no easy solutions. Methods used by Israeli authorities are held out as a panacea by those who fail to recognize that the United States not only is far bigger but has a different culture. Some argue that airlines can do more by requiring passengers to provide fuller information, such as passport details, or even undergoing criminal background checks -- yet even some of the Sept. 11 hijackers could have passed that test.

The answer must be that there is not one answer. There need to be various lines of defense, no one of which will be sufficient and all of which must be subjected to constant challenge and adaptation. We are encouraged by indications that the TSA is recognizing this and by signs (most recently its training of officers to spot potential trouble by observing behavior) that it is trying to get beyond the culture of contraband. Homeland security remains a work in progress.