Don’t read this editorial if you enjoy the illusion of airport security being effective.
As air passengers, we’ve all noticed increased security at airports throughout the U.S. since 9/11. We’ve taken off our shoes, emptied our pockets, subjected ourselves to developments in clothes-penetrating screening technology and waited in mind-numbingly long lines through security checkpoints. Well, apparently it’s all for naught.
According to a recent investigation of the Transportation Security Administration by undercover Homeland Security agents, 67 out of 70 bustling American airports failed to detect mock explosives or banned weapons smuggled by agents through security checkpoints. That’s a solid 95 percent of security tests failed, proving the process inept in case you missed our headline.
Meanwhile, a Muslim-American woman named Tahera Ahmad was denied an unopened can of Diet Coke during a United Airlines flight due to an apparent fear she would use it as a weapon. A neighboring passenger was delivered a can of beer, and another neighboring passenger told Ahmad to “shut the f*** up” when she protested the discrepancy. One wonders how that individual would feel about the effectiveness of our airline security if they’d seen the Homeland Security report.
Homeland Security didn’t disclose when the tests took place other than announcing it happened recently, but given the timing, agents could have snuck blocks of mock C4 and Bowie knives through security checkpoints while airline staff simultaneously denied a woman a can of Diet Coke.
Not only does this sound like a joke from a Saturday morning cartoon, but regardless of your views on Middle Eastern relations, this is a huge discrepancy in our security concerns.
The inadequacies in airport security could have had any number of consequences in the past two decades of security development, and they just about rendered every promise that security has improved and that Americans are safer an enormous lie.
Every debate over whether security at airports is beneficial has been overturned on the side of “it’s all pretty worthless.”
Oh yeah, TSA officials would like to announce that they’ve implemented measures to address the vulnerabilities, which is a promise that is hard to take seriously in light of this being the second recorded security test failure by TSA in as little as two years.
This is not to say that every airport security officer is some kind of doughnut-chomping mall cop, but we’re being poorly dissuaded from the thought.
American airports need to pick up the slack before someone with real, malicious intentions decides to make their own mayhem.
Or, let us all travel in peace if you can’t do your jobs.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 6/2/15]
