(Toronto Star) Cathal Kelly - While North America's airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, the experts keep asking: How can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deals with far greater terror threats with far less inconvenience? "It is mind-boggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago," said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion International Airport has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that? The first layer of security that greets travelers is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked: How are you? Where are you coming from? "Two benign questions. The questions aren't important. The way people act when they answer them is," Sela said. Armed guards outside the terminal observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behavior. Inside the terminal, as you approach the airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer asks additional questions. "The whole time, they are looking into your eyes - which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not," said Sela. At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a special area. Five security layers down, you now arrive at the body and hand-luggage check. "But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America," Sela said. "First, it's fast - there's almost no line. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes....They just look at you...and that's how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys." Sela maintains that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab would not have gotten past Ben-Gurion's behavioral profilers. "You can easily do what we do. You don't have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit - technology, training...but you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security."
2009-12-31 09:20:07Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive