High-tech, A-Team security

Michael Smerconish: High-tech, A-Team security
1.7.10
By Michael Smerconish - Daily News
Philadelphia Daily News
Daily News Opinion Columnist

I'M AT 27,000 feet over the western U.S., and there's something wrong with the view - and I don't mean the landscape of the Grand Canyon.

This is my second cross-country flight less than a week after Umar Abdulmutallab's attempted Christmas bombing.

Changes were apparent in both. First, I was waiting to board a Southwest flight from Fort Myers to Philadelphia. My family and I cleared the routine screening - shown our licenses and boarding passes, removed belts and shoes, took off outerwear, walked through metal detectors. But after all that, there was some random secondary screening just before we boarded.

Despite the fact that my race, religion and ethnicity don't match the terror profile (not to mention that my suburban brood is all traveling together), I was one of those patted down. For the guy in front of me, it was only his hat. For me, it was all limbs. I participated without objection.

In my hand I held a brand new Kindle, which the pleasant TSA agent told me was his wife's favorite new gadget. As the agent continued my patdown, he brushed up against my front pants pocket and asked what I was carrying. I hold him it was my BlackBerry. A moment later, I was pulling my iPod and laptop out of my carry-on bag.

THANK goodness he was avoiding my genitals. If this search were more than window-dressing, he should've been telling me to turn my head and cough. Abdulmutallab had his explosives sewn into his underwear. Nothing I underwent would stop another would-be terrorist from doing the same.

As I stuffed the Kindle, Blackberry, iPod and MacBook Air back in my bag, it occurred to me: We need to work smarter.

The president is undertaking a review of what went wrong in Detroit. Well, if he is willing to look outside the box for some solutions, I have a blue-ribbon committee in mind for him to appoint: Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Jim Balsillie and Steven Levitt.
Jobs is the engine driving Apple. Brin co-founded Google. Balsillie is the brains of RIM, the Canadian company behind BlackBerry. Levitt is the brilliant economist from the University of Chicago who wrote "Freakonomics" and "Superfreakonomics" after being recognized as the nation's most influential economist under 40. In fact, for a little Philly brainpower, I'd probably include Comcast's David L. Cohen in that mix.

These are the guys who live on the cutting edge of the 21st century. They make it possible for us to send and receive hundreds of e-mails a day, text our kids, view family photos, keep a calendar, check Phillies' scores and get the weather all using one wallet-sized device. And they can make the Jetsonesque technology in our back pockets work on the front lines of the war on terror.

After all, we now know that the near-tragedy on Christmas Day wasn't an outright intelligence-gathering failure. In August, the National Security Agency intercepted correspondence in which al Qaeda leaders discussed an attack to be perpetrated by a Nigerian. The future attacker's father reported his son's growing radicalism to Nigerian and U.S. officials.

That report prompted the CIA to collect biographical information on the man, including his intention to study Islamic law in Yemen. Eventually, the young Nigerian's name was added to the TIDE list, but not to a no-fly list.

The red flags were there. They just weren't adequately shared and examined across the large and lumbering U.S. intelligence-gathering operation. "Had all the clues been assembled, he would by then have been on the no-fly list, which would have barred him from taking his next flight to the United States," Mark Mazzetti and Eric Lipton wrote in the New York Times last week.

That the solution to our problems seems to lie in better data management, better screening devices and the use of some street smarts is now undeniable.

I'm thinking it's time to perfect and implement a super-Google for passengers who are subject to secondary screening so they can be asked questions about their backgrounds and travel plans. Not to mention a common language and presentation so officials from multiple U.S. agencies can efficiently access and use it.

And who better to make such high-powered security measures a reality than people like Jobs, Brin, Balsillie, Levitt and Cohen? The TSA guy who frisked me last week may as well have had two cans with a string while in my bag I had the means to feed my mind with info for a lifetime.

Bottom line: There's a disconnect between the way we're protecting airplanes and the age in which we are living. It's time to put technology to work for the good guys.

Listen to Michael Smerconish weekdays 5-9 a.m. on the Big Talker, 1210/AM. Read him Sundays in the Inquirer. Contact him via the Web at www.smerconish.com.