re: #37 marjoriemoon

I don’t know how El Al knows, but they know. Maybe from the time you purchase your ticket. Maybe from the interviewing processes. Maybe because they have disguised security everywhere. All of the above? And then some, but they haven’t had a hijacking in 60 years so they’re doing something right.

The security perimeter at El Al starts well outside the airport, and there are successive layers that every passenger passes through on the way to their plane. By the time you enter the lobby, you’ve already been partially categorized, the other passengers in the car you arrived in have been noted, the car’s underbody has been imaged, and you are about to embark on a journey through a series of psychological evaluations and challenges designed to provoke predictable responses depending on what your intent may be.

I’m gonna point something out here that perhaps I shouldn’t - Charles, feel free to delete this if you feel it crosses a line. But the way our airport security currently works is a nightmare, and creates a juicy, completely vulnerable target for terrorists whose intent is to cripple the nation’s air transport system, and it does this precisely because it doesn’t pursue a layered approach to security, but rather establishes a single physical checkpoint where security theater plays itself out. And this is precisely the security checkpoint, which on a typical weekday is often an enormous clusterfuck where thousands of people are tightly packed as they pass through a narrow chokepoint, fiddle with their shoes, get into arguments over shampoo bottles and otherwise clot up into a huge knot of humanity, none of whom have been through any sort of security scrutiny yet and any of whom might be about to detonate a bomb, or release a cloud of toxic chemicals, or simply pull guns out of their bags and open fire.

The result would be catastrophic to air transport for weeks, possibly months, possibly forever as officials tried to figure out new and creative ways to inconvenience travelers. And our own policies have make the pickings easy, in this case. I’m actually stunned that this hasn’t been attempted yet, and won’t be surprised when it almost inevitably happens.

Back to Flaming Underwear Guy: none of these measures should have been necessary in his case. Simple, day to day intelligence measures should have denied him a visa in the first place. This is similar to the way the Israeli system works - the outermost perimeter is as wide as the whole planet, and when someone gets placed on a no-fly list in Britain - as this guy was - then our foreign services ought to be aware of it, so when they guy’s dad calls in - on several occasions - and mentions that sonny boy has gone rogue and poses a threat, his visa can be deactivated at once. Not when he arrives at the airport, buys a one-way ticket with cash and doesn’t even have a passport.