Jeff Johnson, CNSNews.com
Thursday, Dec. 27, 2001

"Our security right now at airports is no better than it was on September 10th," according to Dr. Neil Livingstone, chairman and CEO of Global Options, LLC, "because we're doing all of the dumb things and none of the right things."

"We have not broken the old molds," according to J. Kelly McCann, president and CEO of Crucible Security Specialists. "People are doing the same stupid things. They're just doing more of them."

Authorities are holding a man identified as 28-year-old Richard Reid, who reportedly tried to detonate a plastic explosive molded into one of his shoes on American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami Saturday.

Reid was subdued by passengers after he fought off the flight attendants trying to stop him from activating the device.

McCann cites, as an example of ineffective security measures, being asked for his driver's license five times when he last flew, rather than the usual one time.

"They didn't make me feel like they wanted to gain more information from me," he said. "They were just looking at my picture, which, whether you do it once or five times, it's like redundant stupidity."

Both men agree that passenger profiling is the most effective way to deal with the threats of air terrorism and air piracy before an aircraft leaves the ground.

"What you don't want to do is let the suspicious passenger on to begin with without very intense scrutiny," Livingstone said. "You cannot wait to deal with the problem once he gets on the aircraft.

"He (Reid) never should have been allowed on the plane. This guy fit the profile exactly," he added.

The characteristics Livingstone says should have aroused suspicion about Reid include that:

- He was a young male of uncertain ethnic origin - His behavior was reported as "strange" by other passengers - His appearance did not match the name on his passport - His passport had been issued only three weeks before the flight - He had only one, small, carry-on bag - He bought a one-way ticket - He paid for the ticket with cash

"Now, you tell me why you let that guy on a plane?" he asked.

Livingstone is extremely critical of the Department of Transportation (DOT) and particularly the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is responsible for developing the profiling criteria.

But Les Dorr, a spokesman for the FAA, says procedures have been in place for several years that required airlines to examine items such as shoes for potential threats.

"What has changed is that on Sunday night, we issued a Security Directive that contains more precise instructions on dealing with potential threats," he said. "Some of these measures may be obvious to passengers, like asking them to run their shoes through the x-ray machines, and some of them may not be so obvious."

Dorr stressed that the FAA cannot discuss specific procedures without divulging their detection methods to terrorists. The FAA has never publicly commented on what criteria make up its profiles to single-out passengers for greater scrutiny.

The security experts contacted by CNSNews.com say, however, that effective passenger profiling is being halted by "political correctness."

"It's a buffoon that says that profiling is not legitimate ... everyone who has been involved in this thing since September 11th has evident Middle Eastern characteristics," McCann said, adding that his comment is neither racist nor xenophobic. "It's a statement of fact, and to not at least acknowledge it is ignorant."

Livingstone concurs.

"What we're doing right now is, in order to be politically correct about young, [Arabic] males, we're discriminating against everyone else," he added. "We're putting them in great jeopardy, and harm's way because of our prissiness on this subject."

McCann points to Israel's government-operated airline as an example of how passenger profiling should be conducted.

"El Al uses specifically engineered questions designed to evoke an observable response," he explained. "Based on that observable response, they send you either forward to go onto the plane, or they send you to another person who asks you a different set of questions."

McCann adds that the process becomes progressively more emotionally intense, almost always revealing the dubious intentions of a would-be hijacker.

He warns that as such techniques become more effective, and more widely used, the public should expect terrorists to develop new methods of attack.

"Security is dynamic. They will always [be] going to seek the vulnerabilities that they will find, and we will always seek to eliminate those vulnerabilities," McCann said. "There's never one answer that lets you say, 'Okay, we're done, finally.'"

It is in every air passenger's best interest, he cautions, to pay attention to their surroundings and especially to people exhibiting "concealing" or "furtive" behavior.

"It could be their appearance. It could be their emotions. It could be their effort to conceal or disguise something that they've got on their person," McCann said.

It's also important to note, he says, that passengers, not security personnel or sky marshals, eventually stopped Reid from executing his plan.

"My attitude is: Whatever I've got to do to subdue this guy who is meaning me and my fellow passengers harm, that's what I'm going to undertake," McCann added.

"If that means rip this tray off and hit him in the back of the head with it ... guess what? If that means take my $4,000 laptop computer and smack him on the head with it ... guess what?" he said.

Each individual must decide for themselves, before any potentially life-threatening incident begins, how they will react, McCann says. He adds that often it will take only the actions of one brave person to spark others to assist.

"When it's life or death like that, what would you prefer?" he asked rhetorically. "I'd prefer to collar the guy ... and figure it out later than I would have him pressing the doomsday button."

Copyright CNSNews.com

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