A thorough review of aviation security in the United States is in order that would begin from the ground up because existing security measures are inflexible and too limited, according to a RAND analyst.
For such a review, the federal government should consider employing several non-governmental research institutions to make their own recommendations for an aviation security system beginning from scratch rather than based on 40 years of “accumulated security measures,” Brian Michael Jenkins, a terrorism expert, says in a report this week.
An independent federal commission has strengths–in that it can give credibility to novel ideas and educate the public–and weaknesses–in that it has limited political clout and typically can’t do deep dives to evaluate various security architectures, Jenkins writes in his report, Aviation Security: After Four Decades, It’s Time for a Fundamental Review. However, such a commission could be used to judge the competing recommendations of the various non-governmental research organizations to help put forward the best idea or combination of ideas, he says.
Jenkins says that current demands and expectations on the Transportation Security Administration and aviation security in general are unrealistic. Americans and Congress want 100 percent security without any inconveniences, without impinging on individual privacy and civil liberties at lower costs and using fewer screening personnel, he says.
A national review would help overcome these contradictory demands and ideological and biased agendas that hang over any current discussion and action around aviation security, Jenkins says. He adds that such reviews could be undertaken every five years to ensure fresh looks at the issue.
While many security measures in place today are criticized for being reactive, Jenkins says this is essentially how security is done.
“The real problem is no that aviation security is unavoidably reactive,” he says, “rather over time, it has produced an accumulation of narrowly focused measures that are both inefficient and impervious to fundamental change.”
Jenkins says that TSA’s PreCheck program, which is a form of a trusted traveler program that relies on security vetting of certain frequent travelers in return for the potential to use expedited screening lanes, is a good step. He, like other advocates of trusted traveler lanes, believes that such a program enables screeners to focus on passengers that pose different levels of risk rather than get hung up on looking for bad objects.
“This would allow finite resources to be reallocated according to risk,” Jenkins says. Enrolling some passengers in PreCheck “would enable TSA to shift resources to assist ordinary occasional travelers and, more importantly, expand the organization’s capacity to focus on those posing greater risk,” he says.