INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATION:
Federal Aviation Administration
TITLE:
Aviation Security: Case Study
SOURCE:
Excerpt from Terrorism and the Law, by Yonah Alexander and Edgar H. Brenner, Editors.
Transnational Publishers, Inc., 2001.
TEXT:
I will speak on the perspective of aviation security, both domestic and overseas, to give you a quick view and to remind you of major events within the last ten years. The perspective begins with a long series of acts against aviation over the 1980s but for the United States, the culmination was Pan Am 103. Even though it took place overseas, it was an act directed at an American aircraft leaving the United Kingdom and destined for New York City. That event triggered a large change in the way people in the United States considered the issue of aviation security. Until that point, there had been very strong resistance by air carriers, in particular, to instituting procedures and placing technologies to prevent the introduction of explosive devices and other dangerous items aboard aircraft. The interesting thing is that the technologies that were able to detect explosives (in the quantities that were sufficient to bring down aircraft) were just at the point of being developed, but were not quite yet there. So we relied on requiring a number of procedures both domestically and overseas for flights into the United States. One of the things that we did require, in fact, was that a passenger be matched to a bag; in other words, that a bag should not be placed aboard an aircraft unless there was a passenger with it. We did have regulations to that effect, but they were not followed from Frankfurt where, the result was, as you know, that a bag with a bomb in it, apparently, was introduced from a flight from Malta and transferred in Frankfurt to the Pan Am aircraft. The flight flew over to London. Then, en route from London to New York, it detonated. The procedures were down and in place but they were not implemented. And I would say that they were not implemented in great part because the air carrier in question did not take the threat as seriously as they should have; they were concerned more about saving money than they were at seriously looking at the requirements. As a result of that, there was a large explosion, of course, in Congress, as well as above Scotland. And there were several pressure groups created by the relatives of the people who died. These pressure groups have been extremely successful in raising interest, and the efforts have resulted in the promulgation of laws and regulations regarding aviation security. A very useful history in that respect: the disaster gave rise to a group of public interest people that actually changed things.
What is kind of interesting is that Pan Am 103 really set the trigger for implementing effective aviation security measures. What happened then was that a lot of money went into research to develop the technologies that were on the verge, but were not quite theretechnologies that were able to detect bombs in suitcases that would be placed aboard an aircraft. And structural changes were made within the Federal Aviation Administration, raising the importance and the profile of aviation security within the body. And for those of you who know about government organizations: even though you may have something within the Federal Aviation Administration called security, it’s very important to know exactly where that security organization fits within the structure to understand how influential it will or will not be.
Before 103, security constituted a very small organization with very little power and influence. After 103, it became one of what are the seven principal lines of business within the Federal Aviation Administration with an associate administrator who is my boss: one of seven equals within the agency. Then, people took security much more seriously from an organizational perspective.
There were many other things that were required by Congress in the Aviation Security Improvement Act of 1990 that we had to do, including ways in which we put agents out in the field, to whom they reported, and an oversight body external to the agency over our Research and Development.
An interesting result was that some years later, in 1996, we had TWA 800, which ironically turned out not to have been a terrorist action. At that point things were in place for some real action to be accomplished. Now, all the time between 1990 and 1996, the Federal Aviation Administration developed useful technologies, and we had a larger number of people in the field, both domestically and internationally, to monitor aviation security. But in terms of putting the technologies that were really effective out there in the airports, we still got a push back from the air carriers who, (a), said there were no serious threats, and (b), did not want to be burdened with the cost of the technologies and the additional cost in training quality people to work security.
What was ironic is that TWA 800, as I said, was almost certainly not a terrorist act. The trigger that had been setthe governmental trigger that had been set by one of the results of Pan Am 103 - was finally let go. You had a presidential commission run by the vice president of the country making sweeping decisions on changes in aviation security. This forced a complete (not to coin a phrase) "paradigm shift" in the way the country regarded aviation security. Not only the Congress, but the air carriers and the airports changed their perspectives. As a result, there were some decisions that were made that were rather importantone of which was that 100 million dollars per year was allocated by Congress (now for three years)to purchase explosives detection and other security equipment and get it out there. This circumvented, to a degree, the issue of the air carriers that they didn’t want to spend the money to purchase rather expensive equipment.
We have developed explosive detectors that are able to detect bombs in suitcases to the degree that is required and that do not have devastating impacts on the operations and the flow of passengers and bags aboard aircraft. This deployment is still underway, and it’s only about, I would say, 25 percent complete now. We’ll continue it over the next few years. What I’m talking about includes not just equipment for detecting bombs and checked baggage, but also equipment that will be detecting bombs and other dangerous objects at check points where carry on bags are inspected. Eventually, equipment will include things that are able to detect explosives on the person’s bodies.
In 1994 and 1995, we had the additional shock of the Ramzi Yousef affair in the Philippines. This was a plan by a gentleman who is called Ramzi Yousef (although that’s not his real name, that’s what he’s generally known as) who is currently in prison. He was involved in the World Trade Center business and then left the country, escaped the net that got most of his colleagues, went to southeast Asia, and was manufacturing explosives, bombs, and trying to put them on some 12 U.S. aircraft departing various locations in southeast Asia. He was planning to do that in early 1995, but he had a fire in his laboratory that was in his apartment in Manila at the end of 1994.
And eventually after a long series of pursuits and posted rewards for his capture, he was finally brought to justice in Pakistan, having been turned in by somebody who accepted their reward from the Department of State. He then was brought back here for trial for the World Trade Center affair. I give you all of this to tell you that this happened just before the TWA incident, kind of setting the immediate stage for the reaction to the crash and heightening people’s interest in improving aviation agency security at that point.
TWA 800 resulted in the U.S. government and the air transport industry actually carrying things out. Mr. Yousef actually had put a very small bomb on a Philippine Airlines aircraft, from a provincial airport to Manila. He got off in Manila: the plane flew off to on to Japan. The bomb detonated and killed one person, but the aircraft was brought safely to the ground in Okinawa. That was apparently a test run in preparation for 12 other rather major runs that he was planning. From our perspective, the security perspective, the interest is that he didn’t put the bomb in checked baggage as was done in Pan Am 103. He carried it; he carried the bomb either in carry-on bags or in his pockets, and presumably this was the path that was going to be used for the 12 events that he was scheduling.
What we have done domestically is take the 100 million dollars a year allocated by Congress and spent about half of it on checked baggage security, spending the rest on carry-on and checkpoint security. Combine that with a whole series of changes, upgrades, and improvements that will improve the process of protecting the aircraft from illegitimate and dangerous devices.
The system we have now domestically, touching on some interest of legal aspects, is as follows: note this has been accomplished so far voluntarily with air carriers who, as I have said, have followed a paradigm shift towards being more proactive and, at least on the surface, being much more interested in doing something significant to prevent terrorism.
What we do first is use a computer system that takes the information that’s in the reservation system (the passenger name record) and looks at it. The computer takes that information and excludes from consideration maybe 95 percent of the people about whom the system thinks we know enough so that we do not consider them a threat. The remaining people have their bags checked and submit to security checks or bag matching. This is the system that is now being implemented across the country.
The screening system raises civil liberties issues, because people will say, "Well, on what basis are you selecting the five percent of us for additional security measures?" Now, in the first place, the response is that additional security measures are not particularly burdensome. These do not involve nasty questions, a strip search, or being delayed. What they involve is that the bags will either be put through one of these x-ray viewing devices that we’re purchasing or being matched to the individual. In other words, the bags won’t be transported unless you get on the aircraft yourself.
But nevertheless, there have been some people in the community who have been objecting to this, on the grounds that we are unfairly selecting people of Middle Eastern origin, particularly Arabs or Arab Americans. The response to that is that we are not telling anybody exactly what it is that we use to make the selection of some or the nonselection of others. But these do not include ethnic, gender, race, religion, or any such characteristics. They merely include the mechanisms under which you engaged the purchase of your ticket. We have been allowed by the Department of Justice to have access to exactly how we select, and an independent review has approved the nondiscriminatory nature of the process. We’re performing ongoing studies to assure that there is no bias towards people of any particular racial or religious group.
The regulatory process that we’re undertaking involves making these security measures a requirement. Right now, it’s entirely voluntary among the carriers and is being carried out actually quite successfully.
I’ve learned that being, among other things, in charge of our rule making process, that rules are not made in a day. In fact I’ve been kind of shocked by how long it takes some rules to be put into place. When I came on board, I discovered that there are some major security rules regarding screening procedures for screening that prevent the wrong people from having access to sensitive areas of airports. These rules were started in 1987 and 1988, and they’re still not complete. The notice of proposed rule making for this set of upgrades to our security rules for airports and air carriers was published some two years ago and finally will come to fruition in a final ruling in about four or five months.
In general, rule making in the Federal Aviation Administration takes a long time for a number of reasonsone of which is, you have to have a lot of interaction with stakeholders before a rule can clear the Federal Aviation Administration. Another difficulty is that the Federal Aviation Administration is part of the Department of Transportation. So when we clear a rule from Federal Aviation Administration and this takes quite awhile, it then goes over to the office of the Secretary of Transportation, where it also stays a significant amount of time. From our perspective, this provides a great deal of difficulty because if there are serious security issues, it may take a long time before you could get your rule through. And when you get the rule through, objective situations that required a rule may have changed substantially; this is one of the issues we have deal with. Eventually, a rule has to pass through the Office of Management and Budget, too, because you have to understand how much the rule is costing the country in relation to how much it benefits the country. You also have to make sure you don’t adversely impact small businesses.
On one occasion we actually produced a rule in 24 hours. Now, that was when we discoveredbecause of a TV news program around Thanksgiving two and a half years agothat people were getting access to airports in the guise of security screeners or ramp operators by presenting false information. The right procedures weren’t being performed to check on this. We found out that actually, in 24 hours, you could put through a rule you considered an emergency. And the emergency was that the American public (or about 100 million people) learned about the matter on TV, some 24 hours earlier.
So there are good things you can do with rule making, but these are generally matters of extreme urgency. The question of bag-match or screening of baggage through our high technology equipment is something we were told was a high priority of the vice president in December of 1997. We were excoriated because we couldn’t put the rule out in two months; we gave it to them in three months. But because of the cumbersome process, the notice of the rulemaking was published here just recently.
I haven’t touched upon the international aspects of counter-terrorism as it relates to aviation security. There, a lot of the leverage you have comes from the International Civil Aviation Organization, which published recommended security measures. Voluntary measures are supposed to be applied by all countries to prevent unwanted things from happening: for example, bags not accompanying people internationally. These measures have been in place for a number of years. They are not being appliedeverywhere, but more and more countries are signing up to them, particularly our partners in Europe. We also have bilateral agreements with many foreign countries regarding aviation security. Bilateral agreements are with those countries from whom you can fly directly into the United States. These are touchy issues and have to do with sovereignty and a large range of other international issues.
We require a certain level of security on aircraft coming into the United States directly from many cities overseas. Some of these cities are considered to be relatively high risk because of past terrorist activities in those areas. So we exert leverage over other foreign countries saying, you must apply such and such security measures to our carriers leaving your land and coming to our country. If you don’t want to do that, we won’t let any of your airplanes land in this country. This is the ultimate leverage which is generally, not spoken but which is used implicitly.
There is a current rule-making going on now in which we actually require identical security measures for U.S. and foreign carriers coming into and leaving this country. Foreign countries consider this interference in their sovereignty and consider that we’re doing only for economic reasons to level the economic playing field. They argue that U.S. air carriers are much more serious targets and require higher security measures in general. There are exceptions, like Sri Lanka and Israel, but, in general, U.S. air carriers are higher profile targets. Other countries say: "Well, if you want to protect your carriers at a higher level, that makes sense because the threat is higher. But don’t make us spend money on this, since our threat is lower." We are involved in a rule-making process to require identical measures. This has very interesting international implications, and I don’t know how the matter is going to be resolved.
Well, I’ve gone through a number of legal and quasi-legal issues, trying to give you general idea of what’s going on in civil aviation security in this country, and to a degree in the world. We are in a transition period ranging up from virtually no effective technology to some very effective technology. This ramp up could take another few years. The good thing about it is that our adversaries don’t know exactly where all our equipment is and how good it is. If nothing else, it functions as a deterrent at least in the short term. In the longer term we had better make sure the equipment gets out there and it all works. We are doing this.
EXCERPTED FROM:
Terrorism and the Law, by Yonah Alexander and Edgar H. Brenner, Editors. Transnational
Publishers, Inc., 2001.
Copyright © 2001 by Transnational Publishers, Inc.
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