This was a question often asked when I first worked at TSA, and it was answered pretty much this way: The time and expense required to use bomb sniffing dogs on every passenger would be huge, and the false alarms would be many. A dog can only work a relatively short amount of time, and it must work relatively slowly, and each dog requires its own handler.Jonathanaf wrote:What I don't understand is how this highly-explosive powder can be detected. Is it possible just to train dogs and have them sit at security and sniff people up and down?
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The machines that TSA uses are "good enough" and will catch a very high percentage of attempts to sneak explosives through, so much so that a terrorist would have to try many times in order to get one bomb through. The fact that the only two instances that we know of where terrorists succeeded in getting a bomb on a plane, which then failed spectacularly, have occurred on flights that originated where security might be somewhat less stringent than what we have may have something to do with it.
Passengers in the US, and the airlines that carry them, would revolt if forced to really endure strip searches and bomb sniffing dogs, we want our security cheap and dirty, and quick, and everyone complains when it slows down or inconveniences them, it's always the other guy that needs to be inconvenienced.
The system, even here in the US, has holes that can be exploited if they are known - and it is worse in other countries, which is how Reid got his shoe bombs on the plane, and probably how this yoyo got his crotch bomb aboard. In Reid's case, shoes were not being checked and he got aboard with enough PETN to severly damage the plane. If he hadn't had such sweaty feet, he might have killed some folks. In this other case, even if he was patted down, they would have avoided contact with the area the bomb seems to have been in, and this exploited a known hole and allowed him to get it aboard.
When I was with TSA I used a couple of those holes to "sneak" stuff through security in inter-airport testing, but I knew the system intimately by then, and knew what to do and how to do it, and I still didn't succeed every try.
Look at all of the flack around the issue of the backscatter machine which would drastically reduce the possibility of this kind of thing happening - "It's an invasion of privacy"; "It's pornography" and such things - just let me tell you how much I get turned on by mannequin like views of hairless torsos.
There is absolutely no way we will ever close all of the holes, some of them are unanticipated and some are known but low percentage, but no system is ever perfect and therein lies the rub. The closer we get to perfect the less we will be satisfied with the delays and restrictions imposed and the harder the bad guys will try to find and exploit other holes.
To me the ideal thing would be if we went back to a simpler time, where each of us was responsible for our own selves and the right to swing a fist stopped at the other person's nose.
Sorry [/rant]