(The following editorial by Brian Jenkins was posted on the San Francisco Chronicle website on April 7.)
SAN FRANCISCO — Attacking the vital but vulnerable lifelines of travel and transport is a basic principle of terrorist strategy. The federal government has shored up defenses in some areas (commercial aviation) but lags in others (surface transportation and port security). The Department of Homeland Security is still struggling to formulate an overall strategy for how much transportation security is enough and how to allocate finite resources.
The threat is real. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, we have learned of at least two other projects to crash hijacked aircraft into airports in London and Singapore. Terrorists fired missiles at a commercial airliner in Kenya in November 2002 — and missed. But they hit a civilian cargo aircraft in Iraq a year later.
In the last two years, terrorists worldwide have killed nearly 300 persons on trains, subways and buses, according to research from the Mineta Transportation Institute. For those determined to kill many indiscriminately, subways, trains and buses offer ideal targets. The terrorists’ objective is often slaughter: Two-thirds of the surface attacks were intended to kill; 37 percent have resulted in fatalities; and 74 percent of the fatal attacks involved multiple fatalities, Mineta Transportation Institute figures show.
Protecting transportation is a huge and complex task. The institute’s numbers tell the story: There are nearly 4 million miles of roads, over 100, 000 miles of rail, almost 600,000 bridges, over 300 seaports, 5,000 public-use airports, more than 400 commercial airports, 500 train stations, and 2.2 million miles of pipeline in the United States. The number of airline- passenger boardings annually is approaching 1 billion; subway, train, and bus boardings add another 26 billion. Nine million cargo containers enter U.S. ports every year, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection; nearly half of these arrive through Los Angeles and Oakland.
Moreover, American attitudes require that security tasks that affect us personally be performed in the most difficult way. Americans prefer their security to be passive and egalitarian. They distrust measures that intrude into private space or that have recall — tapping data bases to permit passenger pre-screening; memory chips in travel documents; anything that smacks of profiling. Revelations of government misuse of data do little to build trust. That leaves us with the kind of assembly-line security we now go through at airports.
So what needs to be done? First, we need to avoid complacency. Every month that passes without a major terrorist attack on a U.S. target, the more tempted we are to believe that it is over. It is not. Our terrorist foes’ operational code calls for them to strike when we are inattentive.
The absence of attack invites budget cuts. Though passenger loads are going up, the number of screeners has been reduced. The lines will grow or the quality of screening will suffer. And watch out for hard-pressed airlines seeking ways to reduce security burdens.
Improved technologies for surveillance and screening for explosives, chemicals and pathogens in air cargo and ship containers are on the way, as is a system to protect commercial aircraft against missiles. Deployment needs to be pushed.
Surface transportation and port protection are behind in funding (understandable after the emphasis on air travel post-Sept. 11), but the attacks on Madrid trains last year force us to devote more resources to protecting public transportation on the ground. Yet we cannot impose the same commercial aviation model on the quilt of surface-transportation systems. A “best practices” — rather than regulatory — approach must prevail. It may, for example, be necessary to X-ray every bag going on an airplane, inspect bags on some commuter trains, but examining every purse and parcel carried on a busy subway is simply not realistic. Nor is the threat the same in Duluth as in the District of Columbia.
We must also make security efficient, reducing manpower requirements, time spent waiting for security checks at airports and security-related delays at borders and seaports, even while enhancing security. Security cannot be permitted to throttle our economy.
Finally, we need to be realistic. Terrorists will continue to plan and carry out attacks. Some may succeed. We cannot eliminate all risk. The risk to individual citizens, however, remains low. As a consequence of improvements in aircraft design and safety, despite the Sept. 11 tragedy, 2001 was the safest year to fly since 1946; 2004 was safer still. Trains remain far safer than private automobiles. Terror is just that — the exaggerated fear that terrorists hope to create. It should not persuade us that travel is perilous.
(Brian Jenkins is director of the National Transportation Security Center at the Mineta Transportation Institute in San Jose.)