DHS announced new restrictions on air freight Monday. Cargo from Yemen and Somalia will be blocked, and large printer cartridges will be banned from domestic passenger flights and from international passenger flights coming into the U.S.
I wrote a news story for the current print and IPad editions of the magazine on the Yemen-based printer cartridge bomb plot that motivated these latest restrictions. Buried in a GAO report, I found that last spring TSA decided it would be too costly to meet an August deadline set by Congress to require all cargo on passenger planes coming into the US be screened. “The TSA’s conclusion: ‘The effect of imposing such screening standards in the near future could result in increased costs for international passenger travel and for imported goods and possible reduction in passenger traffic and foreign imports,’ according to a June 2010 report by the Government Accountability Office.” TSA said they had taken a number of other steps to ensure cargo safety on passenger planes.
The larger question I tried to get at in the piece was whether the Yemen bomb scare would change TSA and DHS’s calculation of risk. Today’s restrictions suggest that they have chosen to make some after-the-fact tweaks for appearances’ sake instead.
In fact, screening is at best an imperfect defense. It is not at all clear that any screening–x-ray, chemical swab or canine inspection–would have detected the Yemen printer cartridge bombs. Neither, for that matter, will safety be much enhanced by banning large printer cartridges on passenger planes. U.S. officials believe Ibrahim al Asiri, a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen based franchise of Al Qaeda, is making increasingly sophisticated and hard to detect bombs. Only hand searching the billions of pounds of air cargo that travels on passenger flights every year would stand a chance of catching his latest works of destruction, and that would bring the international air cargo business to a near halt.
Perhaps at some point the government and Americans will be ready to have a frank discussion about security vs. cost. For now we’re stuck with ad hoc, after-the-fact measures designed to give the appearance of action, while the real calculations of risk are made behind the scenes and buried in government reports.