Michael Zantovsky: The Old New European

Terror has struck again. Although all it managed to do last Christmas was to light up its undies, hundreds of innocent people were only a few seconds away from dying. While technically a failure, the attack has nonetheless succeeded in creating a massive bout of soul searching, casting doubt upon intelligence sharing between agencies in the U.S., as well as between the services of major western countries—adding yet another burden on the special relationship between Britain and the US. Equally seriously it has threatened to make the ordeal at worlds’ airports of frequent fliers and holiday makers alike even more painful, humiliating, and expensive than it already is through the introduction of even more sophisticated, time consuming, unwieldy, and costly machines including full body scanners. The danger that a few perverted minds among airport security staff will get their kicks from the frontal nudity on their screens is perhaps not a very serious issue. The continuing tendency to use exclusively technological means to prevent attacks by diseased and/or poisoned minds is.

Most terrorism experts will agree that this particular version of the arms race puts us into a hopeless position. The weapons of the attackers are cheaper by orders of magnitude than the technology of the preventers. There is a vast number of ways and means an attack can be staged; it is simply impossible to design technology for each and every one. And it is enough for the attackers to succeed just once, while the defenders have to succeed each and every time. And, if the terrorists succeed in having vast numbers of passengers frustrated, nay terrorized by their airport experience, they have won without managing to explode a single bomb.

There are countless ways to disguise, smuggle through, and assemble an explosive. One thing that cannot be easily disguised is the bomber’s mind, high on adrenaline, racing with doubts, insane with fear and hatred. Experience in countries better left unnamed shows that an airport security team of interviewers, trained to look for signs, symptoms, evasions, inconsistencies, and deceptions can do the job faster, less expensively and more effectively than any piece of hardware. Technology is still employed but not relied upon for infallibility.

The downside, and the reason why the obvious solution has not been employed in other parts of the world is that people might feel profiled, singled out, intruded upon, humiliated, having their identity challenged, their privacy invaded. Granted, it can get fairly unpleasant if one has the bad luck of sharing some external characteristics with a potential terrorist or if one is simply nervous of flying. Apparently, most of us would rather do the full monty.