A new series on the Traffic Security Administration, running in the Seattle Times, reminds us of something that is obvious to anyone who has flown after 9/11: centralized government property protection is always a bad idea. An excerpt:
Four months ago, at Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport, a conveyor belt jammed at 9 a.m. For 90 minutes, hundreds of bags piled up while planes waited to leave. In passenger concourses above, TV newscasts reported on the terrorist railway bombings in Madrid the day before.
TSA managers huddled to discuss the expected deluge of luggage once the belt was fixed.
Their solution? Examine what bags you can, the managers told screeners, and send the rest through — unscreened.
The screeners, stunned, didn’t say anything. But they didn’t go along, either. They inspected every bag they touched, using scanning machines or hand searches to look for bombs or other weapons. Meanwhile, two managers grabbed at least 80 unscreened bags and heaved them onto a conveyer belt headed for the bellies of waiting planes.
“I thought to myself, ‘You sorry-ass dog. Your ass is not on that aircraft, how do you know what’s in that bag?’ ” one screener told The Times.
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I am definitely not a fan of the TSA, but I think that supervisors of a private safety firm would have reached the same conclusion. An outside terrorist could not have known about the conveyor breakdown, so there would be no greater chance of a bomb being in the accumulated luggage on that day than any other (i.e., a .000000001% chance). If you multiply the magnitude of a loss caused by a bomb by the probability of a loss caused by a bomb, I would suspect that the dollar figure would be lower than the guaranteed losses caused by the delay in searching the bags.
(The reason I qualify my statement by saying an “outside terrorist” is because an inside terrorist could know about the breakdown or even have engineered it himself, and thus change the probabilities. On the other hand, if an inside terrorist had the sort of access that allowed him to sabotage the conveyor undetected, he probably could get a bomb onto a plane in a much more subtle way.)
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