A little blurb on airport passengers screening in the Washington Post caught my eye today:
AMSTERDAM — The airline industry has presented its vision for a security ‘checkpoint of the future,’ which would speed up safety checks by sorting passengers according to the level of risk they pose.
Under the system, airlines would make use of passport and other information to categorize a passenger as a frequent traveler, normal or ‘enhanced risk,’ and then steer them toward different checks. All passengers would walk through scanning corridors without stopping, unpacking their bags or stripping off clothing unless they trigger an alarm…
With the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) having diffused my main privacy concerns by rolling out (or at least promising to roll out) filtering software on full body scanners, I can actually picture myself walking through one without slowing down like the article hints above.
Of course the machines still have not been proven effective and the raft of legal concerns that would come with profiling passengers based on travel patterns and other behaviors is cause for concern.
But there is something that appeals me to about not even stopping on my walk from the airport ticket counter to the gate. Surely a world that decoded the human genome, sent a man to the moon, and developed cures for countless diseases can find a way to more smoothly and effectively screen passengers in a manner that properly balances civil liberties with security while providing more than just the false illusion of security.
The status quo will be hard to break, but I hope that as screening continues to evolve we can do away with the ridiculous security theatre currently on display in the United States and embrace a type of screening that refrains from burdening passengers for no other reason than to justify the existence of a bloated federal agency or provide a false sense of security to those who refuse think about the issue critically.
That would be amazing to just quickly walk through security.
Loosely related to your security topic, TSA has started piloting a “PreCheck” program. You go through a security background check. Members of Global Entry and NEXUS are presumably also included.
First change is a new scanner device to help authenticate printed boarding passes (which in my opinion is the only actual improvement of “Pre-Check”). Boarding pass barcodes will soon have a digital signature of some sort, but American Airlines have not yet changed their boarding pass yet.
You get your own private lane, which presently is empty while other lanes back up. In that lane, screening looks a lot like pre-9/11 security, without the shoe, laptop and liquid baggie security theater, and with regular metal detectors not AIT. TSA still enforces the no-water rule.
The other lane is all AIT, regular metal detector lanes are closed. You can, for now, still opt out. I have an unconfirmed suspicion based on overheard snippets of conversation between two TSOs at a checkpoint at DFW where this pilot is underway, is (a) that everyone else will go through the AIT machines only going forward, and (b) that the ‘opt-out’ privilege will be taken away. All by the end of October.