Israel thinks technology is silly?
Well, good for them. Ben Gurion Airport has 11.5 million passengers per year.
That's about how many passengers fly out of Terminal C at Boston Logan. Logan has 4 other terminals. The United States has approx. 140 other airports with international clearance.
Just how DO you manage 1.5 BILLION people per year???
How DO you manage 33% of the entire world's air passengers???
Maybe the answer is not so simple, eh?
That's a really important point. There are things that Israel and El Al can do that just cannot be done here in the US, for lots of reasons. Everyone who travels on El Al is scrutinized. Everyone who flies into or out of Israel is scrutinized much more closely. But that's one airline, and one airport, in a nation that's
much smaller than most US states. I don't know -- I haven't looked into it beyond
this list (which surprised me!) -- but I doubt that the domestic air travel in Israel, outside of military flights, is anywhere close to what we have here in the US. And I haven't even touched constitutional issues...
Scanners, including whole body, explosive sniffers, and the conventional magnetometer, aren't a stand alone solution; they're part of the security mosaic we're trying to build here in the US. And it is VERY MUCH a work in progress. Mix them with alert, professional personnel monitoring them, and alert, properly trained people observing the passengers and crowds -- authorized & willing to make appropriate interventions ranging from a visible police/security presence through to using lethal force, and anything in-between.
Now -- a word on profiling. Profiling has gotten a really nasty name here in the US, and it's undeserved. LEGITIMATE profiling is a necessary and appropriate part of law enforcement and security. And that may indeed mean stopping someone
in part because of their race, religion, or nationality. We all profile throughout our lives. I'm partial to redheads with enough bodyweight to have curves -- but not quite ruebenesque. That is a profile! It's using a profile when Bob markets his photography skills or internet hosting services to martial artists, too. In my current assignment, if I spot a Latino male, between 14 and 25, dressed in oversized clothes of certain brands and styles, especially if they've got particular haircuts... We're gonna have a chat. I'm using a profile; it's based on my training and experience to identify gang members. If I was on patrol, and I noticed a young black male (teens to 20s) wandering down certain side streets well off the beaten path, where the residents are almost exclusively white and over 60... Yeah, he's someone I'm going to chat with. You do the same thing when you call 911 about a "suspicious person" in your neighborhood; you know he doesn't fit. If my SOLE criteria were "black male" or "Latino male"... those are the profiles that are bad and wrong. The same thing applies to behavioral profiling. If you observe certain behaviors that have been documented as being related to security threats or crime... there's nothing wrong with reporting and acting on it.
