Air Travel Security: Practical Industry Suggestions From Us

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Gadi Evron <ge () linuxbox org>
Date: December 29, 2009 8:42:09 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Air Travel Security: Practical Industry Suggestions From Us

Dave, for IP.

        Gadi.

I am just a security guy, as are many others who will read this. Perhaps it is time us "simple" security guys got 
together and write some recommendations for air travel security? Get our voice out there as an organized professional 
group, which can in turn lobby for our professional recommendations.

Then we can edit them, vote on them, and submit them to the government for consideration in the upcoming brouhaha of 
committee discussions.

I am collecting ideas on my blog, here:

http://gadievron.blogspot.com/2009/12/air-travel-security-practical-industry.html

But feel free to comment on IP, naturally!

Here are mine, just to get the ball rolling:

Strategic:
0. Review useless technologies which are there for beyond the security theater purposes (which do matter) and start 
eliminating bad projects. Your purpose in security theater was to maintain air travel and keep people calm, right?
1. An investment in better intelligence (no brainer)
2. Create a "always strip-search" list rather than just "no fly" list., so that lesser threats can be dealt with 
responsibly without compromising the usefulness of the no fly one. I am sure they already have one, but they should 
layer this rather than deal with extremes.
3. Hire better agents (education/ability... better pay). Should be a small increase per person, but it will cost a lot 
in total. Then again, how much do all the current b/s additions cost?
4. Yours?

Tactical:
1. Copy Israel's air security training manual for agents. Israel's tactics may not be able to scale to the US level, 
but the training can.
2. Stop panicking and alienating people, so they are calmer and you can more easily identify suspicious people, so that 
this new training is more effective. Heck, do it anyway. Send TSA agents to some workshop on being nice. Or make shifts 
shorter.
3. Put "human sniffer" walk-through machines in every airport, for international flights.
4. Buy the better brand of baggage screening && X-ray machines for international flights (remember the liquid issue 
with checking for explosives in the last scare?)
5. Some people suggested to start profiling and leave PC behind, but I'm not touching that.
6. Yours?

Some of these are very high cost. Some of these are (on scale) very low cost.
Some of these should replace other high-cost idiocies, such as creating two new mega-airports, which is sound 
security-wise, but will only add an hop to the threat to jump over, with the same silly tests in yet another airport, 
rather than add a filter. Or full-body scans which will be of limited help, and insult us all.

What are yours? Join the discussion!

Gadi Evron.




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