If you happen to be reading this while
standing in one of those disturbingly slow, zigzag
lines at airport security -- looking repeatedly at
your watch, wondering if this time you really will
miss the plane -- here's something to make you feel
worse: Almost none of the agony you are experiencing
is making you safer, at least not to any
statistically significant or economically rational
degree. Certainly any logical analysis of the money
that has been spent on the airport security system
since Sept. 11, 2001, and the security that the
system has created, must lead to that conclusion.
This is not to say that the uniformed screeners
aren't more professional than they were in the past
or that their presence doesn't create a degree of
psychological comfort, both for government
officials, who can claim to be doing something
to keep us all safer, as well as for those
passengers who continue to believe that engaging in
ritualistic shoe-removal gives them mysterious,
magical protection against terrorism. On the grand
scale of things, though, that's all it is: magical
protection.
In fact, outside inspectors have found,
over and over again, that federal screeners perform
no better than the private screeners they replaced.
Since they inspect only passengers and baggage, not
the airport and its perimeter, they haven't
eliminated the need for other forms of law
enforcement either. And even when they are doing
their rather narrow job correctly, their impact is
dubious. By their own account, federal screeners
have intercepted "7 million prohibited items." But
of that number, only 600 were firearms. So,
according to the calculations of economist Veronique
de Rugy, 99.992 percent of intercepted items were
nail scissors, cigarette lighters, penknives and the
like.
Yet this mass ceremonial sacrifice of
toenail clippers on the altar of security comes at
an extraordinarily high price. The annual budget of
the federal Transportation Security Administration
hovers around $5.5 billion -- just about the same
price as the entire FBI -- a figure that doesn't
include the cost of wasted time. De Rugy reckons
that if 624 million passengers each spend two hours
every year waiting in line, the annual loss to the
economy comes to $32 billion. There has also been a
price to pay in waste, since when that much money is
rubbed into a problem with that kind of speed --
remember, the TSA had only 13 employees in January
2002 -- a lot of it gets misspent. In the case of
the TSA, that waste includes $350,000 for a gym,
$500,000 for artwork and silk plants at the agency's
new operations center, and $461,000 for its
first-birthday party. More to the point, the agency
has spent millions, even billions, on technology
that is inappropriate or outdated.
In fact, better security didn't have to
cost that much. Probably the most significant
measure taken in the past four years was one funded
not by the government but by the airline industry,
which put bulletproof doors on its cockpits at the
relatively low price of $300 million to $500 million
over 10 years. In extremely blunt terms, that means
that while it may still be possible to blow up a
plane (and murder 150 people), it is now virtually
impossible to drive a plane into an office building
(and murder thousands). By even the crudest
cost-benefit risk analysis, bulletproof cockpit
doors, which nobody notices, have the potential to
save far more lives, at a far lower cost per life,
than the screeners who open your child's backpack
and your grandmother's purse while you stand around
in your socks waiting for them to finish.
But, then, this isn't a country that has
ever been good at risk analysis. If it were, we
would never have invented the TSA at all. Instead,
we would have taken that $5.5 billion, doubled the
FBI's budget, and set up a questioning system that
identifies potentially suspicious passengers, as the
Israelis do. Even now, it's not too late to abolish
the TSA, create a federal training program for
airport screeners, and then let private companies
worry about how many people to hire, which
technology to buy and how long the tables in front
of the X-ray machines should be (that last issue
being featured in a recent government report). But
every time that suggestion is made in Congress,
someone denounces the plan as a "privatization" of
our security and a sellout.
Which is why I conclude that we don't
actually want value for money. No, we want every
passenger to have the chance to recite that
I-packed-these-bags-myself mantra to a uniformed
official before boarding an airplane. Magic words,
it seems, are what make Americans feel really safe.
