Three men have been convicted of plotting - in Britain - to blow up a number of airliners.
Will this legal landmark mean any changes in pre-flight security processes? Sadly, no. Details of the terrorist group's objectives and methodology have been fully understood for a long time, so if change was coming it would already have been implemented.
The undercover investigation by the intelligence services and the police that secured these convictions was a good example of how security should be assured. Actions were based on intelligence and a first-class surveillance operation. The threat was identified and dealt with - as it should be - at source, not at an airport.
Unfortunately the security arrangements that the industry and its customers suffer is based on the thinking of civil servants who sit in their offices dreaming up "what if" scenarios, then putting in place conspicuous arrangements designed to ensure that if anything goes wrong, no-one can blame them. "What if"-based policy inevitably demands a crude, non-selective barrier that treats everybody as criminal. "What-if" - an infallible justification for doing nothing - has replaced intelligence and smart policymaking.
Politicians connive in this crude system for the same self-preserving reasons as civil servants, but they have an additional motivation: fear of upsetting groups, no matter who they are. Meanwhile, the USA in particular, but other nations too, have required airlines to gather and declare an unprecedented quantity of information about travellers, but no use is made of it for the purpose of speeding them on their way with safety. Gathering information about travellers and comparing it with security and criminal intelligence should enable an agency to discriminate between individuals according to intelligence held. But politicians, although they sanction collection of this information, will not allow it to be used to make processes intelligently selective.
Meanwhile, border and immigration agencies continue to check - as always, but now with smarter tools - the movement of people around the globe. This duplication of activity serves only as a comfort blanket for security agencies. The most ridiculous of all processes is the repetitive checking of crews each time they turn up for work. Crews are fully background-checked and identifiable, yet they, also, are "what if" victims.
This week's victory for UK justice owes nothing to the monstrous, brain-dead "security" parasite spawned in ministries and living at airports.
Source: Flight International
