Readers of the Atlantic will appreciate our obsession with security theatre, as most memorably demonstrated by Jeffrey Goldberg's regular attempts to get arrested for showing T.S.A. representatives Hezbollah flags, among other things. There is no T.S.A director -- Obama's two nominees have withdrawn for a variety of reasons. And it's hard that a day doesn't go buy without some seeming bungle or another. Harry Shearer's Le Show is a great repository of incidents and anecdotes. But a new classified policy that airlines will begin to implement today is step in the direction of sanity and safety.
After the Christmas Day bombings, President Obama ordered a bow to
stern review of T.S.A. and airline screening procedures.
On January 4,
the TSA issued an emergency order, classified, that subjected virtually
every passenger from 14 countries to secondary screening of some kind.
The new policy, for the first time, makes use of actual, vetted
intelligence. In addition to the existing names on the "No Fly" and
"Selectee" lists, the government will now provide unclassified
descriptive information to domestic and international airlines and to
foreign governments on a near-real time basis.
This means, to make up
an example, that if the National Security Agency picks up chatter that
someone from Yemen who has traveled recently through France, a young
man, plans to crash an airliner, that information, properly vetted and
sourced, would be passed along, and individuals who fit that particular
category -- young men from Yemen who've traveled recently through
France -- will be subject to any number of secondary security checks,
ranging from full body scans to physical patdowns (that might have
caught the Christmas Day bomber) to a few individual questions.
The Jan 4. directive was a blanket: this new directive, which is
technically a classified amendment to an existing emergency directive,
is a filter. The government reserves the right to expand and contract
and refine the filter on a daily basis. As trust is critical to
security, trust remains the biggest potential area of weakness:
enforcement is largely up to entities that the U.S. does not control,
including foreign governments and airline carriers owned by private
citizens. The U.S. government has ways of covertly monitoring
compliance, and there are many more T.S.A representatives oversees now
than ever before. But it is, of course, in the interest of every
country who does business with the U.S. and every airline who wants to
fly to the U.S. to establish protocols. The Israeli airline, El Al,
uses a similar threat matrix to screen its passengers, but it also has
the luxury of being able to strictly monitor how its employees (and
Israeli government agents) do their jobs.
Is this profiling? Depends on your definition. I'd say if it is
profiling, it's the right kind of profiling because it will be based on
intelligence, not prejudice (although intelligence sometimes falls
victim to prejudice -- that's a topic for a different day), and the
inconvenience will be modest -- much more modest than it is now.
Administration officials would not disclose details about the
directive, nor would they provide information about the threshold level
of specificity needed to generate the extracts that would be sent
abroad. An inter-agency team, including representatives from the DNI's
Counterterrorism Center and FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, will
determine, on any given day, what (if any) threat information needs to
be sent out.
Will this get every bad guy? No. In Donald Rumsfeld's parlance, it will
do a better job of getting the known unknowns... but the unknown
unknowns will have to be caught by the rest of the security system,
which is sophisticated in some areas and spotty in others, and relies
heavily on deterrence.
With April Fool’s Day winding down, I’m glad to discover that the BBC has a much better sense of humor than American news networks, even in 1957. Via 
Now a new moment, full of fresh promise but also with novel perils, has arrived in the nuclear story, and all the old questions have to be asked again. As if responding to some secret signal sent out by a restless zeitgeist, the globe is seething with events large and small in the nuclear arena. Here in the United States, certainly, all the policy pots on the nuclear stove are at a boil. Soon, the Obama administration will complete its overdue Nuclear Posture Review, a statement that Congress requires of the president every four years on the disposition of the country's nuclear forces.
The necessary conclusion is clear: proliferation can't be stopped unless possession is dealt with concurrently. In the seventh decade of the nuclear age, the time for half-solutions is over. The head of state with his finger on the button of some aging cold war arsenal, the head of state itching to put his finger on such a button, the nuclear power operator, the nuclear smuggler and the terrorist in his hideout dreaming of unparalleled mass murder are actors on a single playing field. In this respect, too, the nuclear dilemma has become indivisibly global.
