Unimpressive

I'm continually unimpressed with airline security. Our two strongest weapons against terrorist attacking planes, as far as I can tell, are the passengers rising up to defend themselves and the terrorists own incompetence. Has there been one single instance when the actual airline security catches a terrorist trying to bring a bomb onto the plane? It seems like we would have heard about such an instance. You may be able to argue the increased security decreases the number of terrorist attempts, but we can't know that for sure.

Over Thanksgiving, airline security found my Swiss Army Knife in my toiletry kit. I forgot it was there in a side pocket. The sad part? They found it on my way home to Los Angeles - meaning it was also there on my way up to San Francisco.

Plus, this guy was in a terrorist database. How hard is it to hire someone to run a database search of the daily passenger list against one big terrorist database and pull all the close matches, do an eyeball check, and just pull those people into a separate security line to do a more extensive search. They do that anyway with random searches - I've been pulled aside before. And why not have someone on staff at the airport who can access the FBI or whoever and cross check whether the passenger meets similar criteria to the name on the terrorist database? If, say, the passenger has a similar/same name and both are Nigerian (via passport) and 23 years old and from the same hometown, I'd say there is a pretty high likelihood a double check is in order.

Would this be costly? It doesn't seem like it. We used to do database searches like this at my old litigation consulting job looking for documents. I'd guess a team of 3 people could do this per airline per day. You'd have to pay them more than the idiots working the xray machine, but I think it'd save a lot of time and money and catch more terrorists.