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Insecurity Complex
The Travel Critic · March 30, 1998

Ever wonder why those airport security guards are perpetually cranky? I did, and the answer almost cost me a night in the slammer.

Last week, I approached a security guard at Ontario International Airport in California and asked if I could observe travelers being searched as they entered the terminal. By watching the screening, I hoped to find out why they're usually such meanies - maybe learn a bit about the stresses of the job.

But a supervisor promptly threatened to have me hauled off to jail - just for standing there.

With the Federal Aviation Administration's new computerized security program up and running and plans for still more security measures proposed by Vice President Al Gore's blue ribbon commission, I thought the issue deserved a closer look.

But it became evident I'd have to look somewhere other than over the shoulders of the airport sentries.

"You news media types wouldn't get the story right, anyway," the supervisor said, in the nicest possible way, before ordering me to move along.

So I turned to some more talkative experts for answers. Why are these guards so…unfriendly?

Security expert Mike Hooper has a few ideas. First says Hooper, working conditions aren't all that fabulous.

"The training can be diluted, and the pay is often minimum wage," says Hooper, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Pennsylvania State University. "As far as their rudeness goes-well, I can't address that. I guess that's something they learn themselves."

Also, Hooper says, these folks are working with a rather imperfect system. "There are some pretty widely-known methods of penetrating the system."

Among Hooper's favorite tricks for getting around the new-and-improved security checks: sneaking innocent-looking effects, like keychains and wallets, through the tray that eludes the x-ray machine. Who knows if those items are disguised weapons?

"But there are other ways to get through. Lots of other ways," Hooper assured me.

Since the detection system's not exactly airtight, the guards focus on other tactics, says Philadelphia aviation attorney Arthur Wolk. "The screening process is not about detecting, it's about intimidating. If someone's hell-bent on bringing down an airplane, you can forget about the checkpoint."

Anne Desautels can verify that security guards go at their jobs with a rather daunting zeal. A few weeks ago, she was stopped in San Diego for inadvertently bringing a two-ounce can of pepper spray through the airport checkpoint. Desautels, a frequent traveler who describes herself as an "Irish-American schoolgirl lookalike"carries the aerosol for self-defense. She had forgotten to get rid of it before traveling.

Within seconds of being discovered, six cops swooped in and ordered her to surrender the spray. One officer yelled at her until she dropped the can.

"They would not even allow me to mail the device home. It was 'surrender or arrest'," she says. "It was embarrassing. I thought it was overkill."

San Diego isn't exactly known as a hotbed of terrorism. Nor is it a center for unusually aggressive Irish-American schoolgirls. But neither is Spokane, Wash., where I once witnessed two stone-faced security guards force a woman in her early twenties to empty her carry-on bag, rifle through her personal belongings and make her repack.

The security checks-especially the FAA's new automated security screenings -are quite menacing to the thousands of people who have found themselves on the wrong side of them.

The program initiated in January called CAPS, short for Computer Assisted Passenger Screening, uses information from airlines' reservation systems to identify travelers for whom "additional security measures" are needed.

The program raised red flags from the start, chiefly because of concerns that the computers single out people based on their ethnicity or national origin. The American Civil Liberties Union says it already has recorded hundred of complaints about the system.

Although the FAA declines to reveal the CAPS criteria for getting searched, the agency points to a report by the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division which says the new automated system violates no civil liberties. And spokeswoman Rebecca Trexler says the agency will continue to monitor the system to ensure it doesn't impinge on travelers' civil liberties.

There are those who might say the harassment, headaches and humiliation are worth it-after all, it's better to be safe than sorry. And I'm sure Trexler is correct when she says the FAA doesn't want to injure anyone's civil liberties.

But it looks like the new security precautions are more smoke and mirrors than substantive improvement.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.