MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Questions now about new airport security rules announced this week by the Transportation Security Administration. Passengers from 14 countries are now subject to extra screening. Do these rules make flying safer, and do they violate civil liberties?
Here's NPR's Brian Naylor.
BRIAN NAYLOR: The TSA calls it enhanced screening, and it awaits anyone flying into the U.S. from or through Cuba, Iran, Sudan or Syria, which the State Department lists as sponsors of terrorism, or from other so-called countries of interest. Those nations are Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen. Travelers from them will encounter pat-downs by airport screeners, or use of full-body scanners which see through a traveler's clothing.
Douglas Laird is an airline security consultant. He used to be security director for Northwest Airlines. He supports the use of enhanced screening for all travelers heading for the U.S., but he has doubts that screening travelers just from a 14-nation watch list will do much good. He says terrorists will easily adapt.
Mr. DOUGLAS LAIRD (Airline Security Consultant): What the terrorists will do to defeat the 14-country rule is they will get an identity, a different identity -they'll get a genuine passport in their assumed identity - and they will come from another country. It's as simple as that, so that the 14 countries - to me, it's more of a symbolic statement than it is actually useful.
NAYLOR: With the exception of Cuba, all the nations on the list are Arab or Muslim nations. Nawar Shora, legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, calls the new guidelines troubling. He says they'll lead to increased scrutiny of Arabs and Muslims. If searching for a terrorist is like looking for a needle in a haystack, Shora says the new guidelines affecting millions of travelers make the haystack bigger. And he says they're not like to make Americans any safer - in fact, just the opposite.
Mr. NAWAR SHORA (Legal Director, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee): This gives extremist orchestrators more reason to get the sheep, so to speak, to say, look, they are against you. They are discriminating against you. They're fighting your country or your God, or whatever. You know, pick your reason. And this ultimately hurts us. We need to engage with these people, win them over, de-radicalize the radicals.
NAYLOR: It's not just travelers coming from the 14 nations who will be affected by the enhanced screening. Citizens of those 14 nations will also face the more rigorous regime when traveling from countries that are not on the list.
Privacy advocates also have problems with the new requirements. The full-body scanners travelers will increasingly encounter produce an image that, if not anatomically precise, leaves little to the imagination. Chris Calabrese is with the American Civil Liberties Union.
Mr. CHRIS CALABRESE (American Civil Liberties Union): This kind of virtual strip search not only exposes our private body parts, it also reveals intimate details, like a colonistomy bag, someone perhaps wearing an adult diaper, really embarrassing and invasive stuff.
NAYLOR: He says terrorists will likely figure ways around the scanners, perhaps by concealing chemicals and powders in body cavities that the scanners will not detect. Full-body scanners are now in use at 19 U.S. airports, and hundreds more scanners are on order. But terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University says more and better technology isn't the fix to the problem, nor by itself is the answer a better way to gather and analyze intelligence. It's going to take all of that, he says, and some new thinking.
Mr. BRUCE HOFFMAN (Terrorism expert, Georgetown University): In the final analysis, it's very difficult to change unless you're forced to change, and I think that the Northwest Airlines plot on Christmas Day is appropriating forcing changes and forcing a reevaluation that one could argue was long overdue.
NAYLOR: Hoffman says the U.S. security apparatus has been in a response mode. He argues the national security architecture in place on Christmas was appropriate to the threat posed on 9/11. Now it needs to evolve, he says, to counter tomorrow's threats.
Brain Naylor, NPR News, Washington.
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