This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by psa188@juno.com. /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Share the spirit with a gift from Starbucks. Our coffee brewers & espresso machines at special holiday prices. http://www.starbucks.com/shop/subcategory.asp?category_name=Sale/Clearance&ci=274&cookie_test=1 \----------------------------------------------------------/ Life on the Front Lines of Airport Security January 9, 2002 By JOE SHARKEY JOHN D. CORNELIUS, a flight attendant for Alaska Airlines, already has a nomination in mind for 2002 Person of the Year. The nominee is a male airline passenger, identity unknown, who recently made the ultimate gesture of futility while being rudely prodded and frisked at a security checkpoint at the Seattle airport. "They started wanding and wanting to check everything, really giving the guy a hard time, and he just went and dropped his pants, right there in the middle of everybody," Mr. Cornelius said. "To myself, I'm like, right on!" Mr. Cornelius, the president of the Portland, Ore., local of the Association of Flight Attendants, the main flight attendants' union, offers some justification for this silent cheer. Through their union, flight attendants have complained recently that they are often singled out for extra, unnecessarily intense security. The union has complained that some flight attendants have been harassed, and that a few female members have been sexually groped, by newly empowered airport security screeners since Sept. 11. "If you are a screener and you've got a quota of people you're going to search, there is a tendency to follow the path of least resistance," Mr. Cornelius said, suggesting a theory. "And because they're professionals, flight attendants in uniform are going to be the least likely people to argue with you or complain about what you're doing. So it sends a message to the public that, hey, they're checking everybody, including the airline crews." Flight attendants, pilots and other crew members are not the only ones expressing unhappiness with the new airport security-checkpoint experience. As has been noted previously in this space, security-checkpoint hassles are among the top complaints that business travelers and other frequent fliers have expressed since Sept. 11. Some say they have curtailed travel because of it. The most recent prominent example of the scope of this problem occurred at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington last weekend, when a 75-year-old United States congressman, John D. Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, was taken into a room and ordered to remove his trousers after steel pins in his artificial hip set off a checkpoint metal detector. "They felt me up and down like a prize steer," Mr. Dingell said, according to The Associated Press. • "Pantsing" a congressman will undoubtedly add impetus to the current push by the airline industry to persuade the federal government, which takes over total responsibility for airport screening next month, to get behind a new passenger-profiling system that is being proposed as a way to separate the potential non- threats from the potential threats at airport checkpoints. The industry's trade group, the Air Transport Association, has become very candid about the word "profiling," by the way. To improve safety and address service complaints, "some element of lawful profiling is essential" at passenger checkpoints, Michael Wascom, a spokesman, said yesterday. A leading national passenger advocacy group, the Air Travelers Association, has said that it wants to work with the airlines and the federal government to develop a voluntary passenger identification-card system, in which prescreened passengers would use so-called smart cards encoded with biometric identifiers to expedite their passage through security checkpoints. Those without the ID cards would receive a more intense level of security. Much of the attention so far has been focused on the proposed technology - handprint, iris, facial and other identification techniques - that would underpin the system. But before technology is selected, Mr. Wascom said, the industry wants the federal government to commit itself to a passenger profiling system that employs "a unified, coordinated database" to collect passenger profiles from criminal, customs, immigration and federal intelligence records. Passengers with the ID cards would still go through security checks, but those who choose not to enroll in the program, or do not meet the criteria, would be subject to a "very rigid process before we let them onto one of our planes," Mr. Wascom said. He and other proponents say that the new system would allow security resources to be focused more on people whose profiles suggest a potential threat, rather than those whose profiles suggest no threat. "Right now, the system is designed to, in essence, treat everyone as an equal threat," Mr. Wascom said. The industry has proposed that the profiling system be developed under the aegis of the Office of Homeland Security, rather than the Transportation Department. The Transportation Department has signaled a reluctance to support passenger profiling, beyond a current system in place that randomly selects some passengers for extra searches based on criteria that specifically exclude personal and ethnic characteristics. In an interview on "60 Minutes" last month, Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta said, for example, that a 70-year-old woman from Vero Beach, Fla., ideally should receive the same level of security attention as a young Muslim male from Jersey City. The smart-card ID proposal has also drawn opposition from civil liberties and libertarian groups, who are worried about implications for individual privacy. And conservative critics insist that any program of airline security under federal control is unacceptable. Passengers with ID cards would basically "go through the same level of security that we have today," said Michael Boyd, the president of the Boyd Group, an aviation industry consultant firm. But those without the cards, he joked, would then merely "get a higher level of bad security, get the John Dingle treatment, where they're going to take your pants off." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/09/business/09TRAV.html?ex=1011633560&ei=1&en=fba706c7743e8b79 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson Racer at alyson@nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help@nytimes.com. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company