My wife and I were discussing last night and this morning the current heightened level of security screening taking place at the airports due to the recently foiled terrorist plots. She made some good points about how totally useless and wasteful much of this process is. As an example, she recently observed airport security pat down an elderly gray haired lady that was in a wheel chair. She asked me, “How many terrorist have you seen that were elderly, white, disabled, women?” It was an easy question, none!
Somehow during our conversation the idea came up that screening passengers should be handled with some of the same tools and methods that we use to screen email for SPAM or viruses. This would involve
1. Having a whitelist database of people who fly regularly and are identified as being non-threatening.
2. Having a blacklist database of people who are known or suspected of being dangerous. This would be criminals as well as suspected terrorist.
3. Having a method to quickly filter others as to the possible level of threat they may present and applying the proper level of checks against each level. For example, a little old lady in a wheel chair who is not on either the whitelist or the blacklist would still be considered low threat under most conditions.
For the above steps to be possible it requires that there be a method of clearly establishing identification at the security checkpoint. I feel there is current technology to utilize fingerprints, eye scans, or even DNA. In order to make security screening less of a burden we need to quickly identify those that are not a threat. This would give us more resources to search for those that are.
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