That we “throw technology” at whatever problem comes our way troubles experts such as David Gillen, professor and director of the Centre for Transportation Studies at the University of British Columbia. In the case of the Christmas Day bomber, there were warnings and Abdulmutallab was flagged as a threat, but he still got through security. Body scanners wouldn’t have changed the fact that “there was a failure of information transfer,” Gillen says. Even the best-trained screening personnel are fallible—on a bad day, they could miss a suspicious image that shows up on the X-ray machine. They could turn their gaze just as a terrorist starts to sweat. Even the catalogue of banned items is inadequate because there are always more potential things that could be used as a weapon. “The prohibited items list,” says Salter, “always chases the last failure.”
That’s why all this security one-upmanship makes Gillen so uneasy. “The optimal level of service is not an infinite amount of security,” he says, “Otherwise we would be flying around on hospital gurneys all the time.” He and others advocate implementing measures in proportion to the actual threat level Canada faces. While Ben Gurion is indeed impenetrable—it hasn’t had an attack since 1975 (“And believe me, people have tried,” says Sela)—the political reality in Israel is much harsher than in Canada. Salter says the level of interrogation and surveillance required there would be excessive here. Observers also contend that the more screening that travellers have to go through, the more terrorists win—even if they fail to blow up anything—because we have fallen victim to fear and paranoia.
The last thing anyone wants is for another plane full of people to have a terrorist in their midst and not know until the bomb literally starts smoking. Measures such as bans and body scanners are, in the best-case scenario, an annoying waste of time and money, and in the worst case, exactly appropriate. There’s another uncomfortable, undeniable truth in this “post-Dec. 25” climate. No matter how many security measures Canada pursues, 100 per cent safety is an elusive goal. “At some point,” says McKenna of the airline association, “you have to say there’s an acceptable risk.”
Even if we make every airport a fortress, there are plenty of other public spaces that terrorists could strike. Having inviolable airports only shifts our vulnerabilities elsewhere. In some perverse way, that terrorists have so far been mostly obsessed with attacking North American aircraft has simplified the security effort; their fixation has confined the danger zone. For now.
