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Sharpen the Profile
Opinion · March 11, 2002

The federal government is making a fool of itself by reducing its airport security screening efforts to senselessly random passenger checks.

In an apparent effort to placate special interest groups that fear profiling will result in widespread racial or religious discrimination, the authorities are imposing screening quotas that are unlikely to thwart a future terrorist attack. They should be doing the very opposite by creating more sophisticated profiling systems that catch real criminals.

Evidence that the government has dumbed down its security checks is everywhere. Just pick up the newspaper or turn on the TV to get the latest story of grandmothers, pregnant woman or septuagenarian Congressmen being pulled aside and given a degrading once-over by airport security. The fledgling Transportation Security Administration admits that it's modified its current profiling system, better known as the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS) to select passengers out of the blue.

But the indiscriminate checks are pointless.

Just ask Echo Garrett, a traveler based in Marietta, Ga., about the futility of the searches. On her most recent flight between Atlanta and Cincinnati, Ohio, the 5-foot-3-inch consultant reports that she was tagged by security and searched twice. An airline employee told her not to take the screening personally, because "we have to search one from first class." Garrett says she doesn't understand why. "From an efficiency standpoint, if you really want to stop potential terrorist attacks, why would you waste your one shot in first-class on a petite red-head woman?" she wonders.

There are signs the government agrees that the current system is a flawed, but it's moving at a bureaucratic pace to fix it. Tests are currently underway of biometric technologies that use facial recognition, fingerprinting and eye scans to identify passengers. According to people familiar with the efforts, the systems may be linked to software that won't just spot known terrorists but also predict who is likely to be a terrorist.

One consulting firm has even developed an antiterrorism program that scours airline reservations systems for suspicious patterns and identifies passengers before their flight leaves. Although its application was successfully tested in Europe, the government has been slow to take the software for a spin in the States. If it had acted sooner, say people close to the project, it might have prevented alleged shoe bomber Richard Reid from ever boarding his flight.

The American public appears to support these high-tech solutions. A recent survey by marketing research firm Protocol Communications found that travelers favor the use of more sophisticated screening technology over personal searches at the airport. It said airline passengers believe smarter software is less of an invasion of privacy than being examined in person.

But technology and bureaucracy aren't the tallest hurdles to reaching a sensible screening system. The real enemy is the privacy-rights lobby and other special interest groups who think upgrading the government's profiling mechanism is an affront to our civil liberties. Once the details of the next generation of CAPPS emerges, these activists will likely fight to prevent it from being implemented.

Allowing them to succeed would be a mistake. While privacy concerns can't be ignored, it's also clear that a profiling system of some kind is essential to the nation's airline security. We should do everything in our power to sharpen the profiling systems to make them as intelligent and effective as possible - not dull them down.

Our lives could someday depend on it.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.