President Obama announces plans for tightening airport security.

Just as the “twelfth man” can help a football team achieve a victorious season, so too can the public help with security. And these days, it’s more and more important that we are watchful as travelers, particularly when we fly.

There is no doubt that FBI agents and others have successfully foiled the attempts of bad guys in cases we’ll probably never learn about. But in the case of the tennis shoe bomber, the underpants bomber, and the hijackers aboard the United flight that landed in a Pennsylvania field on September 11, travelers were the final line of defense.

In each of those cases, passengers swung into action after the plane was aloft. However, it’s much more in our interests to sniff out potential trouble and contain it before take-off. To do so, we can be proactive in these ways:

1. Pay attention early. Lift your head from the newspaper/laptop/text message in the check-in and boarding areas and look around at those who will be getting on the plane with you, particularly if you are traveling to a major U.S. city.

2. Speak up. If someone seems to have erratic or unnatural behavior in the waiting area, quickly and quietly alert the gate agents and ask them to call security. If the agents at your gate are too busy to approach, find an agent at a nearby gate, or ask a newsstand vendor to call security for you.

3. Trust your instincts. If security fails to act on your request, and you’re still uncomfortable about the person who has caught your attention, politely insist on changing flights and tell the gate agent why. Your concern will protect you and also raise the attention level of those in charge.

4. Gather proof. Your phone can grab a helpful, quick image of a suspicious individual or an abandoned package, which you can show to security officials to help them identify and follow-up on the subject of your concern. (No need to get too close, though.)

5. Be sociable and observant. Engage your seat-mate in a friendly little chat as soon as you are seated, before the plane pulls away from the gate. Ask where they’re from, what they’ll be doing in your destination, where they started their journey … the usual traveler questions. If you feel something is abnormal — someone is too jittery, evasive or uncomfortable — then alert the flight attendant, especially if others also seem wary of your seat-mate’s irregularities. Remember, the plane will not leave the gate until all passengers are seated so as a last resort, simply stand up until you are satisfied that flight attendants have solved the problem.

As travelers we can’t become airborne vigilantes, but we must realize that in a complex and fluid situation such as air travel, the authorities simply cannot see everything ….

… even if they do capture the naked images of every passenger with those invasive, full-body scanners.

Peg Prideaux, CTC
010810

When should government employees be able to see naked images of your family?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from television shows such as
Law & Order and CSI, it’s that once something exists on a hard drive, it can never really be erased.

This is the first thought I have whenever the topic of full-body X-ray scan comes up. It’s the new-new thing in airport security, designed to thwart the latest danger to air travelers, which is, among other threats, your 16-year-old daughter.

To protect the traveling public, airport security is going to take pictures of her, naked, to make sure she has no weapons.

She won’t “feel” naked because the camera will look right through her clothes to record her image.

“Don’t worry,” officials say, because after the security team studies the photos, the digital images will be immediately destroyed. That’s because
(a) guys always tell the truth about deleting photographs of naked girls,
(b) no one will try to hack into the hard drive containing all the pictures, and
(c) stolen material never gets posted to the Internet.

Obviously, airport scanner security will have to be stronger than other systems that have leaked social security numbers, bank passwords, and confidential memos from secret Congressional investigations. Because if it’s not, your daughter’s picture will be out there for everyone to see, for the rest of her life.

Look, security is certainly a good thing, but so is common sense. Are X-ray images a benefit to travelers, or are they a public accident waiting to happen? What do you think?

Peg Prideaux, CTC
110409

P.S. If you’d like to see a sample of an airport X-ray image, brace yourself and then click here.