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29 July 2007

The UK's security and police services have been highly successful in preventing terrorist attacks. Unfortunately the knock-on effect is chaos at the UK's airports where the strict passenger checks cause bottlenecks, particularly at already over-crowded Heathrow during holiday times. Security experts believe the current screening regime is a knee-jerk response, advocating instead a multi-layered approach, making best use of technology, to filter out high-risk individuals. The travelling public is losing confidence in the authorities because of their apparent heavy-handed and contradictory approach

The UK's security and police services have had tremendous success in thwarting terrorist atrocities. Unfortunately, every time there is a heightened security alert, passenger departures usually grind to a halt in Britain's main airports. Travellers wait for hours to check in; have their one item of hand baggage scanned; remove belts, coats and shoes; hand in bottles containing more than 100 ml of liquid (but be allowed to keep cigarette lighters and musical instruments); and be frisked. All these items can be bought in the duty free area - they can't all have been examined before going on sale. And transit passengers from countries outside the EU will soon be allowed to carry bottles of wine through the airport.

Some miss their flights and lose their suitcases. Over 100,000 items of luggage went missing at Heathrow during the August 2006 security alert. According to its own soon-to-depart chief executive, Heathrow is already held together by sticking plaster, bursting at the seams, and its conditions make him cringe. With the August holidays upon us, it's timely to question, yet again, whether the current screening regime should continue unchallenged.

Apparently not, according to professional airport security experts who, in addition to the well-publicised complaints by the BA and Ryanair chiefs, believe that many of the restrictions imposed at Heathrow and other UK airports are unnecessary and there is a better way of doing things. Writing previously in Contingency Today, BAA's own former head of security and now consultant to foreign authorities, Norman Shanks, criticised the high level of hand-searching done "just to meet a target ratio". He believed that the requirement to hand search 50 per cent of departing passengers (which the Department of Transport refuses to confirm publicly) might actually reduce rather than enhance security, because of the impossible level of constant alertness demanded of security staff, whose attention would inevitably waver.

Just as damningly, while chairing the TranSec Aviation Security Conference held earlier this summer in Amsterdam, another expert, Chris Yates, Principal of Yates Consulting, said: "Six years on from the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington DC, security is little better. The cosmetic changes, including the nonsensical ban on sharps which has now thankfully been lifted, the equally ridiculous present restriction on cabin baggage which should be lifted, and the vaguely ludicrous limitation on the quantity of liquid, gel or paste products, which gives rise to much confusion and ire amongst the travelling public, has and continues to cost this industry dear. These cosmetic measures generate no appreciable gain in security and underscore the fact that regulators are devoid of answers to modern day threats."

Chris Yates continued, "Since the emergence of the alleged August 10th 2006 UK bomb plot, this industry has, yet again, been forced to accede to knee jerk measures that have a direct impact on both public confidence and the bottom line. The restrictions presently in place serve no meaningful purpose and cannot be sustained in the long term. Regulators must take onboard technological advances, harness those advances and deploy or require deployment accordingly."

Checking of arrivals' passports raises concerns as well. The head of Interpol, Mr Ronald Noble, recently lambasted the UK for its failure "to check systematically the passport numbers of incoming travellers against Interpol's global Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database which has more than 15 million entries (including more than seven million passports). On the other hand, all countries systematically check our bags to see if we are carrying bottles of water or other liquids. These priorities seem misplaced.

"It is the failure to systematically check passports against a global database of stolen passports, not immigrants or foreign-born doctors, which poses the single greatest terrorist threat to the entire world," Mr Noble went on to say pointedly.

The Home Office refused to comment on Mr Noble's criticism but assured me that the UK has good bilateral information-sharing arrangements with other countries, which, by implication, rendered Mr Noble's allegations irrelevant. The Home Office refused to name the countries for security reasons.

Oddly, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced shortly afterwards that the UK's new Border Security Force would in fact share information with Interpol. Whatever information sharing arrangements are in place, the UK must surely check departures and arrivals' passports with the US database that acts as a terrorist watch list for airlines, law enforcement agencies, border posts and US consulates.

According to reliable reports earlier in the year, the number of files in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), the data about individuals that the intelligence community believes might harm the United States, has risen from less than 100,000 in 2003 to 435,000. It is hardly reassuring to hear that this rapid growth is overwhelming operatives. "The single biggest worry that I have is long-term quality control," says Russ Travers, who is in charge of TIDE at the US' National Counterterrorism Center. "Where am I going to be, where is my successor going to be, five years down the road?"

Trying to get the Department for Transport to give straightforward answers to direct questions is like trying to nail custard to a wall. When I asked if the target ratio of hand-searching 50 per cent of departures was still in place, I received the delphic reply: "We do not comment on screening regimes. But we issued guidance and advice for airports to work with local police to respond as appropriate. It is up to airports as to whether they maintain them, in consultation with local police." What on earth is going on if the Department for Transport refuses to comment on and delegates responsibility for the implementation of its own guidance?

Doubts about the consistent application of DfT advice across UK airports came to light at the latest meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority when member Richard Barnes, who chaired the meeting, said:  "Every police force is required to produce a joint agreement with their airport operators by the end of November, but they are finding this difficult when there appears to be no common approach to the extent to which operators contribute to policing costs and too many different interpretations of requirements under current legislation."

Mudding the waters further is a secretive EU dimension. As former BAA security chief, Norman Shanks, says: "The common rules in the field of the EU's civil aviation are developed by officials from the member states behind closed doors, and the specific details of the common rules are not publicly available in the Official Journal of the European Communities."

Although the strangely reticent DfT would not name the organisation, which sets the common rules, it is in fact the EU's civil service, the European Commission, which would seem obvious so why the DfT refused to name it is anyone's guess. Representing the UK behind the "closed doors" is the DfT's Transport Security Directive. Although each country is free to set its own additional rules, such as the UK's one item of hand baggage, it seems the UK would be unable to dispense with any of the EU common rules, such as the 100 ml liquid limit, without agreement from its partners.

Everyone knows there is no such thing as a one hundred per cent secure system and nobody doubts the sincerity of the authorities' desire to protect the travelling public's safety. Passengers may be blissfully unaware of concerns about watch lists and passport checks, but they definitely suspect they might be the victims of over-zealous UK (and EU) officialdom, which treats all travellers through its airports as potential terrorists. They point to the apparent contradiction of being able to buy bottles, powders, belts, shoes and pens in the departure lounge. What is the difference between one and two items of hand baggage?  And surely a cigarette lighter in deranged hands is more dangerous than suntan lotion in a sealed, unopened bottle? And why are musical instruments allowed through? And soon non-EU transit passengers can keep their bottles of wine? The House of Commons Transport Committee recently expressed concerns too that the lengthy departures' queues were a security risk.

Passengers' doubts are shared by nearly everyone in the airline industry. Speaking at the June 2007 International Air Travel Association (IATA) annual general meeting, its director general, Giovanni Bisignani, said the "passenger security system around the world is a US$5.6 billion uncoordinated mess". One delegate said he found it "incredible that BAA had no contingency plan in place to deal with a raised level of security." Delegates were unanimous in advocating better use of technology and behaviour pattern recognition to identify and select passengers for more intensive searches. The technology is available to scan passengers as they walk along a corridor, risk assessments could start using data when online bookings are made, biometrics, and better use of IT for information sharing were among the measures which would together form a layered, more selective risk management approach. IATA members, to their credit, are busy developing and testing technology in line with its Simplifying Passenger Travel Programme.

Clearly the DfT is aware of the technology which is, or will soon be, available. The summary report of miSense, a recent sixteen-week comprehensive trial involving the biometric data of 3,000 passengers at London Heathrow Airport, has just been published by BAA. The miSense trial included capturing biometric data from irises, fingerprints and facial images; simulation of ePassports; giving passengers smart cards containing radio identification chips; self-service border clearance gates; and tested the capability to submit immediately online biographic data from a traveller's passport and travel itinerary to the Border & Immigration Agency for background checks prior to departure.

Given BAA says miSense successfully demonstrated many aspects of biometric technology, why hasn't it made more of its success? We'd all welcome evidence that there is light at the end of the queue; that BAA is at least thinking about a new approach?

Shortly after the miSense trial report appeared, the Prime Minister announced that the way forward is electronic screening of all passengers as they check in and out of our country at ports and airports - so that terrorist suspects can be identified and stopped before they board planes, trains and boats to the United Kingdom.  After a review of counter-terrorism screening, the Home Secretary will enhance the existing E-borders programme to incorporate all passenger information to help track and intercept terrorists and criminals as well as illegal immigrants.

Although all would welcome the government's reaffirmation of the vital role technology will play, no mention was made of reviewing, say, baggage checks and restrictions, behaviour pattern recognition, advanced baggage and people scanning technology, to name just a few, and how all this could dovetail with the E-borders' technology.  Surely it's pointless to review E-borders in isolation from the other components that together would make for a coherent, multi-layered security regime?

The UK's new minister for transport, Ruth Kelly, recently met major airlines to discuss airport security, particularly the requirement that since August 2006 UK passengers are restricted to carrying a single piece of hand luggage.  In refusing to lift the restriction now, Ms Kelly gave some ground by conceding:  "In time we are willing to make further changes, for instance on the one bag rule. But currently the ball is in the industry's court. It is up to it to work with us to develop a process that would enable a change without compromising the safety and security of passengers". The meeting came to the agreement that a small working group will be set up to examine ways how this might be achieved.

Let's be frank, the current situation is a mess at UK airports, especially Heathrow. While the government's E-border review is a big step forward it is illogically restricted, in effect, to passport checks. The establishment of a government-airline working group is also a step in the right direction. However both these initiatives are hardly likely to satisfy the numerous expert critics of current arrangements, prevent the steady erosion of confidence in the authorities by passengers, and encourage visitors to the UK.

What better time than now, when there are fresh ministerial eyes, to widen the government's E-border review to include the checks on departing passengers, in order to restore public confidence and demonstrate, one way or the other, whether there really is a smarter and faster way to treat passengers leaving Heathrow?

Jonathan Rush
Editor
Contingency Today