Travel anywhere these days and you encounter security systems that just did not exist 20, perhaps even 10, years ago. For obvious reasons, airports are especially nervous and have many layers of security.
Interestingly, when the UK's airports tightened up their procedures a couple of years ago, prompted by threats of terrorists carrying aboard bottles of ingredients for home-made explosives, the complaints were not about the new security measures but about longer queues at security.
In general, we seem to be resigned to the disruption. Security checks really have become a rite of passage.
If you look at the approaches to security in different countries, and their ever-changing nature, you wonder if there is any logic to the system. In the USA, for example, at one stage travellers had to remove their shoes at airports. Then there are different attitudes to belts – take them off or leave them on. In the UK, some airports ask you to remove laptops from luggage for separate processing while others do not.
Another puzzle is that today's security checks sometimes seem to be related to yesterday's threats. Terrorists are not stupid. Start checking for shoe bombs and bottles of liquid explosive and they will find other weapons. It is good to learn, then, of a 'round table' under the auspices of the International Transport Forum.
The ITF's event on "Security, risk perception and cost-benefit analysis" at the end of last year was an opportunity for transport operators and security experts from different countries to compare notes at a more conceptual level, away from the operational meetings that we all hope happen all the time.
The ITF group considered ways of estimating the probability of various terrorist events. Even the name of these calculations, "best-information subjective probabilities", reflects the difficulty of the task. The point of 'BSP' seems to be that it differs from the public perception of the probability of particular events. That number is enshrined in something called the citizens' subjective probabilities, or CSP. The "subjective" bit gives away the nature of these numbers.
As in a lot of the public perception of risk, muddled public understanding can lead to a state of affairs in which, as the report puts it, "the probability of infrequent large scale attacks is overestimated compared to the BSP". In other words, people get twitchy about nothing.
The report goes into the business of working out these probabilities, but the real point has to be what you do with them. One notion discussed at the event expressed the view that, as the report put it, "cost-effective air passenger screening policy must be risk-based, and that current policy is only risk-based in name". Should security systems focus on "detecting dangerous passengers rather than dangerous objects"?
There is little sign of an end to terrorism. So airport security will be with us for the foreseeable future. Reading this review of the state of play, you have to ask yourself if today's approach really is, as one view it reports puts it, more a case of "security theatre", so called "because the measures are quite visible but their effectiveness is questionable".
Put in another way, today's security systems are all show. They are "largely ineffective in improving security, and too expensive in terms of attaining intermediate goals (such as screening rates) that are easy to measure but give little indication of the true degree to which security is improved".
Politicians seem happy to go along with this on the grounds that they seem to be "doing something". A more open approach to security might produce a system that is less expensive and more effective.
http://www.internationaltransportforum.org/Proceedings/Border2009/09Perkins.pdf
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