I suspect that they are having similar problems attracting airport screeners. Thousands of human lives depending on your ability to do your job... one error on your part could end in nothing less than disaster... and you are pulling in nearly, what, $300 a week? Gosh. I guess they would need to give applicants the answers to the test just to get enough applicants able to actually pass it.

And the problem doesn't end there. A company that does this to the grunt employees usually also offers less than stellar conditions for lower and middle management, compounding the problem by filling these ranks with underachievers, KFC management program dropouts, little Napoleonic patriots, and people who couldn't pass the psych exam to get into the police academy.

That's really his name? That's.... odd. For some reason I can't get past that. Anyway.

This sort of stuff is what happens when the administration takes a massive surplus and turns into a massive deficit. No money available for salary, training, equipment, or benefits. You have to wonder how serious the administration really is about airport safety. On top of that, as Jeff said, the pressure must be huge-- one slipup and who knows what could happen.

The Homeland Security Dept. has been around for what, two years now? Is the color-coded alert system the only thing they've done in that time?

The security at Frankfurt airport was even tighter than before, and they've always been one of the strictest airports I've been through. Because I was making a connection, I only went through three security checkpoints. They were taking baby strollers apart to put through x-ray. Every passenger had a wand reading, each belt was removed and inspected, and they felt our collar and cuffs.

The staff was friendly and multilingual, but the atmosphere was so serious that two children in different lines went into hysterics when it was their turn to move forward. Yes, they were also frisking the kids.

I wonder if they'll check our buttons in future.

When I departed Houston, my luggage was opened after I checked it through. TSA left a note to notify me. I'm glad my 321 page manuscript was still there, and that it didn't look like coded messages.

This year I've been to four countries, flown to the east, west, and south USA coasts, and the security measures from airport to airport are inconsistent. There's no way to plan ahead and allow time for procedures.

It takes commitment to fly nowadays. If you're a parent traveling with kids, it takes extra courage.

The NEBO plant had a bunch of test equipment, it's own power substation, and a number of very real potential hazards (although they had moved fuel rod production to a different site by the time I was working there). Practically speaking, during any emergency occurring in the off-hours, the first 30 minutes or so would find the multi-million dollar site in the hands of a guy making less money than a starting Janitor.

Personally speaking, the security job did help me learn the lesson that no matter how low paid a job is, there is still some meaning about "doing it right". Unfortunately, I think most of the people working there never learned that lesson. I heard a number of stories about airport security back than 96 a big increase in responsibilities and hardly any more pay than industrial security.

I have to say that none of the horror stories about the quality and training of airport security surprises me in the least. It is mostly a repetitive low-paid and low-status job, although I think the government involvement has potential to improve the pay and status part.

Ironically my security guarding does help me from time to time. I volunteered to be on the company emergency response teams (fire and earthquakes are the two main threats in Silicon Valley). As an applied cryptographer and programmer it also gives me some insight into the users of systems that I design.

Maybe security personnel should have to pass a practical examination, as well? Like, "Here are ten actors playing travelers, and here's their luggage. Go to it." One of the fake travelers should be carrying plastic knitting needles; the examinee who finds them and makes a sensible response gets to train for a supervisory position, at a higher rate of pay.

Carve that into stone and place it over the doors of every university economics department.

Vallecitos?

The main plant is largely a paper-work factory now - GE has not sold a new plant since 1980 or so. I happened to work at NEBO during a transition when they laid off most of their manufacturing people and started hiring engineers and the like. At the point, the NCR was churning out around 1000 regulations per year (~3 a day). Someone had to make sure the current plants were in compliance, or figure out what changes had to be made.

As an aside, I learned that GE is not a good a company to work for -- at least not as a peon during that time. It was very hierarchal, and they treated most employees as cogs contrasted with giving upper managers special treatment. They did not seem to value their mid-level professionals very much (engineers, programmers, etc.) At the time, I described it to my friends as "2nd Wave" employment practices (referring to Toffler's book: Third Wave).

The current system discourages screeners from thinking for themselves, says Issac Yeffet, a former security chief of El Al who's now a consultant based in Manhattan. "Let's say I'm a screener, and I open the luggage to do a search and find chocolate or peanut butter - I'm happy because I found what the machine flagged." Although the CTX highlights suspect items, screeners don't run bags back through the machine after the hand search to make sure they've correctly identified what really caused the alarm. No one's taught to think in terms of how a would-be terrorist might try to game the system. "I can assure you, from my experience and knowledge," says Yeffet, "that most of the explosives will be in a false bottom."

GE has no monopoly on this HR philosophy. I spent six years working for an "international package delivery company" that had the same attitude. In that six year period, it went from being a great place to work to a real hell hole. My last year there, they had their first "across the board cost of living increase" in ten years. I didn't get one, though, because I was already making too much money. See, my pay increases were based on performance measures, and I had always received excellent performance reviews. So, because I had been such a good employee, they rewarded me by freezing my pay scale.

(I could go on. In fact, I will.)

One night, a fellow employee found $70,000 in cash, in unmarked plastic baggies, that had fallen out of a broken package. She was alone when she found it. She turned it in. As a reward, the company cut her a Bravo Zulu award check of $25. The manager made a speech and presented it to her, along with a lapel pin, in a pre-shift meeting. As she looked at it, the employee said, "I'll know what to do next time."

He travels with tools including a large knife. He normally packs these things in checked luggage, but happened to dump it in his carryon. So, while in flight he's looking in his bag...and realizes he has a large knife in the cabin. So what does he do? He just zips up his bag.

Now if someone can accidentally bring a knife into the cabin of a plane, how good could the screening system be?

The whole "sharp object" nonsense not only doesn't make the aircraft more secure, it's a completely wasted effort -- the plane's better off if guys like me have our leathermen and such on us.

I'm much more worried about someone getting on the ramp and shoving a bag-bomb into the cargo hold well after all the screening -- by the way, do you know that to the fancy Invision CTX-5000 x-ray machines, peanut butter and semtex look the same?

Getting onto a ramp is trivial. Spend some time watching baggage and cargo flow, and finding the weak spots is trivial.

We're not only not willing to pay for better security, what little we are spending is fighting the last war. Hijacking a passenger airplane to use as a missle is a one time trick -- you can't ever go back to hostage taking, and there's no reason for the passengers to cooperate with you.

Money can help with security -- but it is brains that really do the job. Right now, the only thing that we've done that really helps the problem is the armored cockpit doors that make it much harder to take control of the aircraft.

I happened to be reading Elise's copy in the airport on our most recent flight (oops, almost wrote "last" -- remember, verbal insensitivity injures multitudes on a quotidian basis). In the background, Airport CNN was running. They got to the announcement by Son of Frankenstein that we had "eliminated the threat of Iraqi WMDs" just as I reached Bruce's explanation of the distinction between "threat" and "risk." Cue Twilight Zone theme.

Next up: Heimatssicherungsdienst eliminates the threat of giant telepathic oysters from the planet Quildefonse rigging the Super Bowl. Estimated cost, $1.4 billion, plus the cost of construction of a new, telepathically shielded stadium in Houston.

One question asked 93How do threats get aboard an aircraft?94 The possible answers were (a) In carry-on bags; (b) In checked-in bags; (c) In another person92s bag; and (d) All of the above. The correct answer is (d).

-- from the point of view of a screener, what's the difference between b and c? Or for that matter, between a and c? They're all bags, and if you're the screener, they're all other people's.

I do not, however, feel at all good about how airport security is handled. While I generally feel as safe most of the time as I did before 9/11, any time I really stop to think about what the risks are, I can see potential everywhere. Terrorism cannot be stopped, though certain major threats can be minimized.

AFAIK, the only useful airport security system in the world is Israel's double-interview system, which requires time, trained personnel, and the willingness to truly delay passengers and flights. All of these are un-American.

*sigh*

(Also What Mike Said. I haven't read Beyond Fear, but I have heard Bruce speak on the radio and he's brilliant on this topic.

I didn't miss that point, I simply ignored it as irrelevant. It is very difficult to impossible to screen without both false negatives (there was a weapon, you missed it) and false positives (there wasn't a weapon, but you thought there was.) The fact that a knife slipped through doesn't surprise me.

What would surprise me is if there aren't at least five people in the air *right now* with knives that they forgot they had, and that screeners missed. Imagine a false negative rate of .001%. Multiply out by the number of passengers per day/week/month/year.

Absolutes almost never exist in security. No matter how much you throw at the problem, Joe Badguy might get lucky and walk on the plane with a weapon -- and Jane Goodguy gets strip-searched when both the X-ray and chemical detectors light up, and it turns out she's clean.

The problem I have is not that we are screening. It is how we are screening, and what we are looking for. Spending the time and money to stop knives is time and money not spent looking for threats that are more dangerous to the plane, to the passengers, and to the people on the ground.

I think that assuming another hijacking can never take place is assuming a bit too much.

True. But I think that the chances of a "succesful" hijacking have dropped so low that spending the amount of time and money that we are is seriously degrading responses to other real threats, threats that are much more likely to be successful.

Remember: The new attack, launched on 9/11/2001, of using hijacked planes as missles on ground targets, went from effective to failure in less than ninety minutes, when the PA passengers figured out what had happened, and went to retake the plane. Anyone who saw what happened that day will not sit and let a plane be taken.

Thus, instead of having to frighten a cabin full of people, you now have to render them incapbable of resistance. This is a much harder proposition. Add in the locked cockpits, strict orders to *never* surrender the plane, and fighter cover that now has practiced procedures to destroy an airliner (and all aboard) that won't follow ATC orders, and you find that hijacking passenger airplanes isn't a useful strategy.

(Smart people will notice the word "passenger" in that last sentence.)

I expect, on the passenger aircraft side of the problem, that the next attacks will return to the "get a bomb on board" attack, or somebody will bag one with a missle, or somebody really clever will come up with a completely new attack. Note that passenger resistance and locked cockpits should be useless in these attacks (Thank Ghugle Ried was stupid.) Note that screening the passengers and doing credit checks are even less useful in stopping most of these attacks. Obviously, we don't know the counter to the unknown attack.

That's how you think secure. We think we have built one part of the fence very tall -- and we're assuming that the bad guys will still climb that part of the fence. No -- they're going to try to climb a lower part of the fence.

This is not to say we want no screening. But people who think budgeting isn't a part of security live in a fantasy world of infinite resources. A dollar spent block attack FOO cannot be spent to block attack BAR. This is a smartly spent dollar if FOO is the likely attack -- and less smart if it isn't.

We're spending far too much on preventing hijackings when we've already have two very useful counters in place, the cockpit doors, and a cabin of people who know about 9/11.

And, you know, if you let them carry knives/screwdrivers/whatnot, they'd be even *more* effective at preventing hijackings.

Issue every passenger a Taser gun as they get on board.

"Armed passengers are polite passengers."

The main river of Egypt is the ____.

The rules of Egypt were the ______.

They were buried in huge tombs called the _____.

Simple-minded for 8th grade, you say? Then I noticed, written along the bottom margin, the words "Nile," "Pharaohs" and "Pyramids." He told me that without having the answers, his students could never answer the questions.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire is proceeding apace.

He'd say, way to go Houston!

On the one hand, I'm a little disturbed that people are being shown drawings of x-rays rather than, say, actual x-rays. On the other hand, the test was hardly a gimme as both of these folks are quite intelligent (though perhaps not intelligent in the way that one needs to be intelligent to be a good screener. But we'll never know, because they were looking at drawings of x-rays.)

Every generation is shaky on history and geography. For some reason, those subjects get more interesting as you grow up.

MKK

Of course, so could people from Boston.