Pay peanuts - get monkeys

Peanuts and terrorism: Further to my post of a couple of days ago I read an article about what I mentioned then. El Al the Israeli airline. Why don't they have the same problems.

Pretty simple it seems and also they don't have the long security waits.

While most airports groan under the weight of another change in security, one word should keep popping out of the mouths of the bureaucrats and so called experts: Israelification. But it won't - because they think it is cheaper to carry out the same old checks they have always done and not understand that humans are better than machines.

How can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deal with far greater terror threat with much less inconvenience.

Israeli security takes only a few minutes - whatttt!!!

It seems they have a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death. Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel's largest hub, Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002

How. The first thing they do is to look at who is coming into the airport.

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Ben Gurion is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from? This also applies to everybody on board a bus.

Two benign questions. The questions aren't important. The way people act when they answer them is. The highly trained personnel are looking for nervousness or other signs of "distress" — behavioural profiling. Once you've parked your car or got off the bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.

Armed guards outside the terminal are trained to observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behaviour. At Ben Gurion's half-dozen entrances, another layer of security is watching. At this point, some travellers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer.

You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

The technique is that they look into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they work out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds. Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has got this far.

At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area. What if you have escaped the attention of the first four layers of security, and now try to pass a bag with a bomb in it?

What would every other airport do? Panic. Evacuate the terminal.

How many people are in most terminals? Sometimes thousands. It will take hours and cripple and disrupt everything.

A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options.

First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away.

Second, all the screening areas contain 'bomb boxes'. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives and wheels the box away for further investigation.

Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at the only one which Ben-Gurion Airport shares with the rest of the world — the body and hand-luggage check. But at Ben Gurion things are done completely differently.

First, it's fast — there's almost no queuing. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They just look at you. The madness is that even today with the heightened security the rest of the world will check your items to death.

But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes.

That's the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.

Of course they also use off-site security - how was the ticket paid for, what is the buyers background etc. It is a coordinated intelligence gathering operation that produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies.

It seems that there is little or no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States.

So. Eight years after 9/11, why are we still so stupid, so un-Israelified?

As I said we underrate humans. Pay peanuts get monkeys.