The Theatre Of Security
I do quite a lot of travelling, much (pretty well all of it really) by air. In recent years a couple of things have struck me.
One is that the standards of security applied to passengers varies wildly from airport to airport, country to county. Shoes on/shoes off. Laptops out of bags/laptops left in bags. Belts that set off some airport metal detectors and not others. It’s quite a long list. This isn’t really anything new. I used to work for an airline at a major international airport in the UK. Whenever I went airside I had my photo ID checked and went through a detector. On a visit to colleagues at a major international airport in the US, one of them drove me and my fellow visitor airside through a security check point where the sticker on the van was checked, but none of our individual IDs were, and the interior of the van itself wasn’t checked.
The second thing is that quite a lot of the stuff that’s been put in place since late 2001, and since the introduction of liquid restriction in particular, is, broadly, nonsensical. Or perhaps it’s better to say ‘only makes sense when viewed as a sop to passenger sensibilities, not as an actual security measure’.
The phrase that’s been coined to describe this is ’security theatre’, and The Atlantic carries as good an overview of it as any here.
Via Lyle.