By Steve Sailer
01/05/2010
Basically, Israeli airline security consists of Larry David-style suspicious staring into everybody’s eyeballs (although that never seems to work for Larry, because everyone else on Curb Your Enthusiasm is even stronger willed than he is).Commenter Cordelia points to this excellent article from the The Star of Toronto:
What Israel can teach us about security At Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, screening is done in 30 minutes. The key? Look passengers in the eyeSo, airport security in Israel is handled much like immigration in Israel: for the benefit of the majority.… "It is mind boggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago," said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He has worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world.
"Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don’t take s — from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, 'We're not going to do this. You're going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport.'"
Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel’s largest hub, Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?
The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Ben Gurion is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?
"Two benign questions. The questions aren’t important. The way people act when they answer them is," Sela said.
Once you've parked your car or gotten off your bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.
Armed guards outside the terminal observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behaviour. At Ben Gurion’s half-dozen entrances, another layer of security is watching. At this point, some travellers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer.
"This is to see that you don’t have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious," said Sela.
You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?
"The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds," said Sela.
Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has gotten this far. …
Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at the only one which Ben Gurion airport shares with Pearson — the body and hand-luggage check.
"But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America," Sela said.
"First, it’s fast — there’s almost no line. That’s because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They're not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you," said Sela. "Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes … and that’s how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys."
The goal at Ben Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in 25 minutes tops.
And then there’s intelligence. In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies.
"There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States," Sela said. "Absolutely none."
But even without the intelligence, Sela maintains, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — who allegedly tried to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day — would not have gotten past Ben Gurion’s behavioural profilers.
So. Eight years after 9/11, why are we still so reactive?
Sela first blames our leaders, and then ourselves.
"You can easily do what we do. You don’t have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit — technology, training," Sela said. "But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept."
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