Airport Security, Past and Post 9/11 Essay

Only from incidences of air piracy, terrorism, and changes in the social and political climate worldwide has airport security slowly morphed through the rulings of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). However the attacks of September 11th 2001 had changed airport security vastly in the matter of days. Michael Chertoff, the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division at the Justice Department during the attack of 9/11 stated, â€Å"Like many people at the time, I thought it was a pilot error. † Chertoff was the head of Homeland Security in 2005 to 2009. To his thinking, since the end of the Cold War, three developments have profoundly changed the world and therefore the world of security threats. One was that globalization radically changed the potential impact of a network or even an individual, offering the ability to travel, communicate, and exchange money. Two, the technology revolution has allowed people to cause massive destruction with just the push of a button. The third was the increase of â€Å"ungoverned space† where there is no true rule of law, has enabled terrorists to recruit, plan, and train undetected. During a discussion, Chertoff outlined the shift in the nation’s approach to security, one he argued happened before the attacks of 9/11. The actions of that day only served to highlight â€Å"something we hadn’t recognized and which the law had not adequately accounted for,† and underscored the need for a new framework aimed at combatting terrorism. What are the events that had shaped airport security before the attacks of September 11th 2001? Airline hijackings were very frequent in the mid to late 1960s. They most commonly were committed by individuals seeking transport into Cuba. This caused airlines to apply policies of screening all passengers and bags before they are to board the aircraft. The FAA applied this new policy in an effort to avert the carrying of weapons used to compel hijackings. During the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, multiple high-profile terrorist hijackings and attacks were carried out overseas and shocked the traveling public and the airlines, arising potential problems of acts of terrorism toward the airline industry within the U. S. However incidents in example of those were still perceived as an event that would never happen to or in the United States. This perfectionistic thinking was shattered in 1987 when a Pacific Southwest Airlines’ ex-employee made use of an expired identification badge to pass through security, board a company jet liner with a weapon and shoot his supervisor, the pilot and co-pilot leaving the aircraft to go down with 38 people aboard. Not only was this not a terrorist event, but it came from within the ranks of the airline industry itself. This event, attached with the 1988 bombing of PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, demanded attention to the need for additional airport security measures. This stimulated the President’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism (1989) and the following passage of the Aviation Security Improvement Act of 1990. Since these incidences, the FAA has applied numerous measures to protect against this and other types of acts of air piracy and terrorism in the U. S. Some of the measurements were practical while others included physical and electronic security measures. The Abundance of the focus had been on regulating the access of persons into the operations areas at airports, therefore limiting access to aircrafts. In 1989, the Federal Aviation Regulation was written into law. It mandated that an airport must be able to implement control over an employee’s right to gain access to the airport’s operations area using an access control system. In detail, this regulation states that any airport with a regular passenger aircraft service (one flight per day) that consumes 60 seats or more must be able to; (1. Ensure that only the persons authorized to have access to the secured areas by the airport operator’s security program are able to acquire that access. (2. ) To ensure that such access is denied immediately at the access points to the individuals who do not obtain the authority of access. (3. ) Set apart persons who are authorized to have access to only particular portions of the secured areas and persons who are authorized to have access only to other portions of the secured area. (4. ) Have the capability to limit an individual’s access by time and date. This then new regulation produced an outbreak of airport access control systems. Systems in which were designed to incorporate unified access control and photo ID systems that operated as a single common database to accomplish the requirements of the Federal Aviation Regulation. Regrettably, the requirements had pushed the envelope of the technology available at the time, and many of the systems that were installed had provided less than satisfactory results. ? The FAA also is in the process of formulating a rewrite of FAR 107. A Notice of Proposed Rule Making has been issued that includes language that could significantly impact access control at airside. If passed as now proposed, the rule would require airports to be able to immediately assess alarms from monitored doors at airside and to create a log of the alarm, alarm verification and the response to each alarm. Short of placing law enforcement officers on each concourse, the solution is the installation of large numbers of CCTV cameras that are integrated with the access control system to provide automatic call-up at the monitoring location. Other future security issues being addressed with regard to airside operations security center around handling and screening of passenger baggage and air cargo. One area of major concern and concentration is on addressing the threat of unscreened/unaccompanied baggage. President Clinton created the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. In the wake of the crash of TWA Flight 800 he asked the commission to focus its attention first on the issue of security, including an action plan to deploy new high-technology baggage screening and explosives detection systems. One system that will be implemented to protect aircraft against bombings is the electronic passenger/bag reconciliation system. Such systems have been in use in Europe for several years, but probably are several years from being implemented throughout the aviation system in the U. S. They utilize an electronically encoded tag or barcode that is attached to the luggage, and a magnetic strip, barcode or other scanable medium on the back of the boarding pass, to match the luggage with passengers boarding the airplane. As a passenger boards the aircraft, the boarding pass is swiped through a card reader, which supplies passenger information to the system database. If a passenger checks a bag and does not board the aircraft, a computer resolves this mismatch in the tracking database and issues an alarm indicating this disparity. The bag then is retrieved from the aircraft and scanned for content. This system prevents anyone from checking a bag with an explosive device onto a flight they do not board. The new Terminal One international facility at JFK Airport in New York will be one of the first U. S. acilities to be equipped with this type of electronic passenger/bag match system. Another area of baggage security that is changing is the screening of bags and parcels that are loaded onto aircraft. In the past, general screening of baggage for domestic flights has not been performed. Until the last several years, advanced electronic screening of international outbound baggage was limited. But an increase in terrorist acts, including the bombings of the World Trade Center and the federal building in Oklahoma City, has convinced government and industry that additional bag screening is necessary. As technology improves, this screening someday could include not only explosives, but also devices that present other types of threats. Since the machines are too expensive and large for airports/airlines to provide enough equipment to scan all bags with high-tech screening, a three-stage screening process has been established. Stage one utilizes more conventional high-speed x-ray scanners to look inside luggage and parcels. In stage two, suspect bags are routed to conveyor queues while x-ray images are re-evaluated. They then are routed either to a bypass conveyor or to third stage screening, which consists primarily of one of two types of advanced technology screening equipment. One type uses computed tomography, a scanning technology similar to a medical CAT scan. Another type uses dual-energy x-ray scanning to produce a three-dimensional image of the contents. As machines become faster and less expensive, airports will have enough machines to scan all luggage. New airport terminals under design are providing space for multiple machines and will be the first facilities to provide 100 percent screening of all bags. Since space requirements for these machines are so significant, the security consultant should be involved in new building design early on to ensure that adequate space is provided for the machines and baggage staging. One method or system being considered as a means to streamline the need for extensive bag screening is passenger profiling. This methodology utilizes a passenger profiling database containing certain passenger criteria to classify luggage for screening, thereby eliminating the need to scan all bags with high-tech screening equipment. Use of this database information could classify a passenger as low risk and may eliminate the need for advance bag screening of bags checked by that person. One major airline has developed software for this purpose which has been tested at a major hub airport location, but the system is very controversial and may or may not be implemented for general use. If and when the system is implemented, it will have extensive systems integration impacts that will require integration of airline common use erminal equipment host computers, bag handling equipment, airport security systems and explosives detection systems. This will require the security consultant to interface security systems with airline operations systems that in the past have been a non-issue when designing airport security systems. Since most of the systems mentioned above are information technology based, it will require the consultant to become increasingly knowledgeable about local area networks, wide area networks and the world wide web. Changes also are taking place with technological advances in systems utilized at the security screening checkpoint where passengers and their carry-on baggage are screened prior to boarding the aircraft. One such advance is in the method used to watch the exit lane. New systems are being developed which will assist with the arduous task of watching the exit lane in order to improve security at this portal and to decrease operating costs. Presently, this task is done manually with a posted security guard, but a person in this position is subject to distractions, can daydream or at slower nighttime periods may fall asleep for short durations. New systems use electronic detection to supervise the direction of traffic through the lane and produce alarms when a person enters the lane from the wrong direction. These systems may be used to supplement the existing guard post or may replace the guard position, thereby decreasing the operations cost. What are the major focuses of landside/non-regulated security issues at airports now and through the year 2000? A primary area of concern is parking facilities. Security concerns and public safety awareness has increased with the rise in crime over the past several years. Crime in parking facilities has risen proportional to crime rates in most cities. Parking facilities present opportunities for crime since vehicles are left for extended periods of time, and people traversing to and from their vehicles are subject to isolation and are more vulnerable. Crime concerns at parking garages include vehicle theft, vandalism, vehicle break-in and crimes against persons. Security directors at colleges, hospitals, shopping malls, manufacturing plants, sports facilities and other places with large parking facilities have been focusing on security in this area for the last few years. In order to provide increased public safety, airport operations and police departments are beginning to take a more serious look at the need for implementing additional security methods and systems in their public and employee parking facilities. What types of systems will be installed to reduce crime in airport parking facilities? Systems similar to those that have been installed at parking garages and lots associated with the other types of public and private sector facilities previously mentioned. There is and will continue to be a very heavy emphasis on CCTV systems because they act as a good deterrent to crime, as well as a tool to verify alarms. But with so many cameras required to watch large parking garages having multiple parking levels and many aisles, integration of other systems will be required to automate and simplify the process of trying to watch and utilize large numbers of cameras. Systems that already are widely used in other types of public parking are becoming more common at airport parking facilities, including emergency phones, ambient noise alarms and wireless personal assistance alarms. Additional systems including such items as intelligent video motion detection are in the process of being developed and will be used in the future to further assist with automated camera watching. Other areas of concern for improving landside security at airports include supervision of roadways, security at station platforms for automated train systems, security for vendors, protection of ATMs and guarding of toll plaza booths. In concert with both landside and airside security issues are the expansion and improvements to the communications and emergency operations centers that monitor and control most of the systems mentioned in this article. Upgrades to these facilities generally require relocation of or modifications to nearly all these systems.