How The 9/11 Terrorist Attack Made Air Travel More Secure With Less Privacy

The attack on the World Trade Centre Towers, the pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania by four hijacked planes can be dubbed to be the worst terror attack on the American soil.

That all ended when four hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Centre towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, leaving about 3000 people dead. The whole world was thrown into a dark state, with increased paranoia on air travels.

The result of this is the spontaneous changes in the airline industry, to forestall a repeat of the security lapse in the airlines, and of course it came with a price, more stress, and more security.

The then United States President, George Bush (Jnr) had two months after the ill-fated attack signed into law the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, a commission of federal airport screeners that would come in place of private companies that had earlier been hired to handle security at the airports. In the new legislation, all checked bags would be screened, cockpit doors reinforced, with more federal air marshals put on flights.

This of course forever changed the dynamics of air travels.

What Are The New Threats And Privacy Concerns?

The enforced security measures may appear on paper to make things safer but then of course laced with new threats. Travelers were being asked to take off belts and remove some items in their bags for possible scan. Box-cutters that the 9/11 hijackers used was banned and many other things.

In all these, the airport requirements made checkpoints lines longer, making passengers to spend more time waiting, the implication is that passengers having to arrive earlier than they wanted to be able to make their flights.

There were a lot of rules travellers did not find particularly gratifying, such as limits on liquids because the wrong ones could possibly be used to concoct a bomb.

According to North Texas retiree, Ronald Briggs:

“It’s a much bigger hassle than it was before 9/11 — much bigger — but we have gotten used to it,” Ronald Briggs said as he and his wife, Jeanne, waited at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport for a flight to London last month. The couple, who travelled frequently before the pandemic, said they are more worried about COVID-19 than terrorism.

“The point about taking shoes off because of one incident on a plane seems somewhat on the extreme side,” Ronald Briggs said, “but the Precheck works pretty smoothly, and I’ve learned to use a plastic belt so I don’t have to take it off.”

The long lines created by post-attack measures gave rise to the PreCheck and Global Entry “trusted-traveller programs” in which people who pay a fee and provide certain information about themselves pass through checkpoints without removing shoes and jackets or taking laptops out of their bag.

But the convenience has come at a cost; privacy.

Security Theatre?

A lot of questions have been asked about the methods, ideas and effectiveness of the now stringent flight rules.

When the agency proposed in 2013 a plan to allow passengers carry folding pocket knives and other long-banned items on planes again, a proposal that left many flight attendants outraged, making the agency to ditch the plan.

After the widespread outcry, the TSA removed full-body scanners that produced realistic-looking images that some travellers compared to virtual strip searches, and replaced them with other machines that caused fewer privacy and health objections.

A published report in 2015 had implied that the TSA officers had failed 95% of the time to detect weapons or explosive material carried by undercover inspectors. Members of Congress who received a classified briefing raised their concerns to Pekoske, with one lawmaker saying that TSA “is broken badly.”

Critics, including former TSA officers, have derided the agency as “Security Theatre” that gives a false impression of safeguarding the traveling public. Pekoske dismisses that notion by pointing to the huge number of guns seized at airport checkpoints — more than 3,200 last year, 83% of them loaded — instead of making it onto planes.

Pekoske also ticked off other TSA tasks, including vetting passengers, screening checked bags with 3-D technology, inspecting cargo and putting federal air marshals on flights.

“There is an awful lot there that people don’t see,” Pekoske says. “Rest assured: This is not security theatre. It’s real security.”

Many independent experts agree with Pekoske’s assessment, though they usually see areas where the TSA must improve.

“TSA is an effective deterrent against most attacks,” says Jeffrey Price, who teaches aviation security at Metropolitan State University of Denver and has co-authored books on the subject. “If it’s security theatre, like some critics say, it’s pretty good security theatre because since 9/11 we haven’t had a successful attack against aviation.”

This summer, an average of nearly 2 million people per day has flowed through TSA checkpoints. On weekends and holidays they can be teeming with stressed-out travellers. During the middle of the week, even at big airports like DFW, they are less crowded; they hum rather than roar. Most travellers accept any inconvenience as the price of security in an uncertain world.

Travel “is getting harder and harder, and I don’t think it’s just my age,” said Paula Gathings, who taught school in Arkansas for many years and was waiting for a flight to Qatar and then another to Kenya, where she will spend the next several months teaching. She blames the difficulty of travel on the pandemic, not the security apparatus.

“They are there for my security. They aren’t there to hassle me,” Gathings said of TSA screeners and airport police. “Every time somebody asks me to do something, I can see the reason for it. Maybe it’s the schoolteacher in me.”

Inside Threats

In 2015, a Russian airliner crashed shortly after taking off from Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt. American and British officials suspected it was brought down by a bomb.

It was, however, the exception rather than the rule. Even outside the United States, terror attacks on aviation since Sept. 11, 2001 have been rare. Is that because of effective security? Proving a negative, or even attributing it directly to a certain flavour of prevention, is always a dicey exercise.

And then there are the inside jobs.

— In 2016, a bomb ripped a hole in a Daallo Airlines plane shortly after take-off, killing the bomber but 80 other passengers and crew survived. Somali authorities released video from Mogadishu’s airport that they said showed the man being handed a laptop containing the bomb.

— In 2018, a Delta Air Lines baggage handler in Atlanta was convicted of using his security pass to smuggle more than 100 guns on flights to New York.

— The following year, an American Airlines mechanic with Islamic State videos on his phone pleaded guilty to sabotaging a plane full of passengers by crippling a system that measures speed and altitude. Pilots aborted the flight during take-off in Miami.

Those incidents highlight a threat that TSA needs to worry about — people who work for airlines or airports and have security clearance that lets them avoid regular screening. Pekoske says TSA is improving its oversight of the insider threat.

“All those folks that have a (security) badge, you’re right, many do have unescorted access throughout an airport, but they also go through a very rigorous vetting process before they are even hired,” Pekoske says. Those workers are typically reviewed every few years, but he says TSA is rolling out a system that will trigger immediate alerts based on law enforcement information.

With all the different ways that deadly chaos could happen on airplanes after 9/11, the fact remains: Most of the time, it hasn’t. The act of getting on a metal machine and rising into the air to travel quickly across states and countries and oceans remains a central part of the 21st-century human experience, arduous though it may be.

And while the post-9/11 global airport security apparatus has grown to what some consider unreasonable proportions, it will never neutralize all threats — or even be able to enforce the rules it has written. Just ask Nathan Dudney, a sales executive for a sporting goods manufacturer in Nashville who says he occasionally forgets about ammunition in his carry-on bag.

Sometimes it’s discovered, he says, and sometimes not. He understands.

“You can’t catch everything,” Dudney says. “They’re doing things to the best of their ability.”