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Editorial - October 2003 |
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Testing airline security |
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Published October 22, 2003 |
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Amateur testing of our systems “do not show us in any way our flaws,” a top security official said after a college student successfully placed box cutters onto two airliners without getting caught. What’s his definition of a flaw? The student put box cutters and other suspicious materials on two aircraft without being detained. Then he e-mailed airport security officials and told them exactly where he planted the cutters. Nothing happens for five weeks. “We know what our vulnerabilities are and we are testing them. This does not help,” a security official said in a story carried earlier this week by the Associated Press. Seems that it does help to test these systems, however misguided 20-year-old Nathaniel Heatwole was when he set out on his mission. As more information surfaced in Washington, top officials in the Bush Administration said it will single out for response any threatening communication and will seek to better train its employees on how to recognize such messages. And, more pressure is coming from Congress. Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said he told Transportation Security Administration chief James Loy that the panel would review the agency's operations, including airline passenger screening. Heatwole, a junior at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C was charged in federal court in Baltimore with taking a dangerous weapon aboard an aircraft. It will be up to the courts to determine how this act — one that Heatwole admits is one of “civil disobedience” — should be punished. But the fact is Heatwole succeeded in showing that airline safety is still in need of improvements more than two years after the Sept. 11 attack on America and all of the many expensive security measures that it brought to the airlines. We certainly don’t like to hear about flaws in airline security but we should learn from mistakes, not brush them aside and say it wasn’t serious because it was just a test. Maybe we should put Heatwole on the security force that is supposed to be checking on these problems.
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© 2001 Lincoln Times-News |
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