Last month, Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab carried out a failed effort at bombing a packed passenger airliner that was making its final approach into Detroit.
This botched terrorist attack came at the height of the holiday travel season, and brought the dangers of the world that we live in back into the spotlight.
The past year has seen an elevated number of attempts made on the lives of innocents — both in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world — by those who seek to push radical agendas using fear and terror as a crutch.
Such an increase in the overall threat-perception has a particularly adverse impact on the free movement of people, and it is usually the case that the most convenient and popular modes of transport — air travel, in this case — are the worst affected.
To counter such apprehensions, whether genuine or perceived, various security measures have been initiated at airports around the world. However, most of these policies can be rendered ineffective by clever work-arounds that adapt to changing security policies; if liquids and gels are banned, amorphous substances are instead used as explosive material, as was the case in the most recent attempt. Reactive security isn’t an option either — passengers and air marshals can and should only be used as a last layer of defense.
If security onboard our airliners (and in our public spaces in general) is to improve, we must embrace the notion that without a perpetrator, there is no crime — we can take all kinds of measures to restrict the items and actions that are allowed on-board an airplane, but we must ultimately stop people with violent intentions in order to stamp out the menace of terrorism.
To this end, there is much to be said for non-intrusive scanning of passengers, right from the time they enter the terminal building all the way up to the time they board their aircraft. This includes engaging passengers prior to boarding in an attempt to detect deviant intentions, and behavior based pattern recognition by flagging abnormal activity. To be sure, some of these measures are already part of standard security protocol; others may require large amounts of training and funding.
However, this is the least of the costs we must bear for our freedom in a world that is increasingly seeing a tripartite tradeoff between privacy, security, and civil liberties. Reactively treating the symptoms of the malaise of terrorism is no solution; we must instead seek to diagnose the causes and agents that spread it and eradicate them at the earliest step possible, in order that our world may be secure, peaceful and more free than ever.
Kartik has a special interest in secure airliners, having had to travel halfway across the world to see this column in print. Check in on his jet lag at krt@asu.edu
