LGM travels every month for business, and airport security is just downright onerous. The last TWO times we went through the Boise Airport, our general counsel - an officer of the court - was selected for the full pat down. The last time that happened to ‘ol Dave, he stood next to another woman who was going through the full search - and the woman was in a wheelchair!

What you see at the airport these days is not “security” but “security theater.” Not familiar with security theater? Here is what I am talking about:

Security theater has been defined as ostensible security measures which have little real influence on security whilst being publicly visible and designed to demonstrate to the lesser-informed that countermeasures have been considered. Security theater has been related to and has some similarities with superstition.

Look, I had a lot of statistics classes in college, and attacks on planes and airports as a percentage of the number of flights that leave or travelers who fly, are so rare, that they can hardly be measured in a meaningful way. So how can we even measure whether the TSA measures are reducing the “threat” to global travel? We can’t.

So I read the New York Times with great alarm today. Clark Kent Ervin, the first Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, is advocating something so onerous, and so destructive not only to the American way of life, but to global commerce, that I think it is imperative that the busieness community make sure nothing like this EVER comes to pass. Here is Ervin’s plan:

” . . . what if we moved the screening checkpoints from the interior of airports to the entrance? The sooner we screen passengers’ and visitors’ persons and baggage (both checked and carry-on) for guns, knives and explosives, the sooner we can detect those weapons and prevent them from being used to sow destruction.”

SO - if you thought that 9/11, and the post 9/11 security measures put a damper on air travel, and global commerce, wait until Ervin has his way. This would be an absolute disaster for the world economy. Unless you want to wait outside of JFK for three hours in the middle of winter so you can take a hop to Boston . . .

What needs to happen with airport security is a shift of the risk proposition. We need a system that makes it risky for a terrorist to be a terrorist. That will make it less risky to fly. Armed airport police, with German Shephards, makes it A LOT riskier for someone to walk into a terminal and start firing a weapon. This is the way it works in Rome. Let’s try that. We could also let the airlines adopt security measures as they see fit, rather than the one-size-fits-all TSA approach. You see, it is more difficult to commit acts of terrorism in the face of multiple, disparate, evolving security systems, than a single, slow moving, underpowered, bureaucratic TSA system.

If Ervin’s measured are implemented, the one thing of which terrorists can be absolutely assured is that once they are in the airport, EVERYONE in it will be unarmed. That’s perfect if you are a terrorist.

Let’s not lead the sheep to the slaughter and kill global commerce with an ill conceived plan like this.