...or at least, not at the airport they don't. Nor are they concerned with how many milliliters of shampoo are in your carry-on. No diagrams illustrating different bottle shapes and where the 100 ml line may lay. No doffing and donning of shoes. Just 2 minutes of intense questioning by Israeli security, and then you're either done or you're not done. And if you're not done, you're really not done.
The difference between the Americans and the Israelis is yet again one of scale. In a country with 5 million people and one major international airport, it's easier to have top people doing security. But when you have 250 million people and many international airports, it's a little more challenging. It's hard to find quality people and the money to pay them. So what do you do? You look to see if you've faced other problems in a similar domain, and try and apply the same solution.
A TSA employee is to an Israeli security agent as a McDonald's hamburger flipper is to a gourmet chef. How do you create efficient, reliable security given a limited budget and unskilled labor? Break security down into a series of small, defined steps. Write the steps down in large type. Reproduce. Laminate. Bind. Distribute. It's security as a franchise, and it works well with clearly defined problems of limited scope, like exploding shoes. But when the problem has fuzzy borders and a broad scope, then you actually need well-trained, proactive people you can depend upon.
It all makes me wonder what the TSA is there for. Are they an actual security instrument, or are they just a sort of pacifier, a way we reassure ourselves that we can do something about a problem whose solution is too expensive or too difficult for us to tackle head on?
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