Airport Security

Greetings everyone. Hoping everyone had a good holiday season and all that stuff.

It's been a while since I made a post on here. 2009 was an interesting year for me. In the fall of 2008 I took a job back home in Saskatoon with a company I used to work for. I thought being home all the time was what I wanted; aside from travelling every week. Turned out I got bored VERY quickly, and the job was not incredibly stimulating. Aside from being able to play hockey a lot more frequently, being home in Saskatoon was not what I wanted. I quit that job in June of 2009, and went back to doing what I love - SAP consulting. I took a job that now finds me in Calgary every week for the foreseeable future. Needless to say, I am back to really enjoying myself again.

Now that I'm back to flying every week, the issue of airport security is once again something I pay attention. I'm sure many heard about the thwarted terrorist attempt on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. My opinion is the guy on the plane was not a terrorist. Just a guy who realised he was heading to Detroit mid-flight figured he would rather blow himself up.

All kidding aside, the issue was the bomber snuck through security, and was thwarted by passengers on the plane. The result was another measure of airport security along with the small bottles and taking off your shoes; a limit on carry on bags to small personal items (laptop, purse). This only applies to International flights into the United States as I don't see any changes on my frequent flights from Calgary to Saskatoon.

I believe that the approach to airport security needs to change significantly. One idea that has been thrown around since 9/11 is profiling "high-risk" groups and screen them accordingly. However, this concept is politically unpopular because it can be easily spun into racial profiling. My opinions on the politics of this aside, I believe there is a better method.

One of my favourite comedians, Bill Maher, jokes that as a society we know how to do security if we are willing to spend the money. "Have you ever been to a casino? You can't do math in your head without being booted into the desert!". Granted, a casino is generally a much more profitable venture then an airline and has the money to spend on security. However, a casino does not run every patron through long lines and an X-ray machine before entering. What they do is use tools such as player's cards and people on the floor like pit bosses to monitor behaviours. For instance, a irregular betting pattern at the blackjack table may indicate a player is counting cards.

In a casino, if you are not trying to cheat, count cards, or steal you will be left alone except to be given free stuff if you gamble enough. The airline's model of scanning everyone and randomly searching people more extensively is ok, but a behaviour monitoring strategy would be much more effective.

Airlines, like casinos, collect a lot of information on their passengers through check-in and loyalty programs such as Aeroplan. If you fly internationally, they record the passport number and every movement of a passenger is tracked in their databases. Now I am not an expert in psychology, but being a information systems guy that there is ways to "mine" this vast amount of data to identify patterns of behaviour by passengers to differentiate your run of the mill business traveller to someone who is involved in criminal activity.

Using this concept airport staff may be able to use more intelligent information to pull higher risk people out of the line for more detailed searches. That way, you don't have to pull 75 year old women, or Al Gore out of the line for random searches that only serves to waste valuable time.

My two cents anyway...

Cheers.