Effect of on AviationEffect of on Aviation3/29/02Effect of 9/11/01 on AviationSeptember 11, 2001 is a day that will forever live in infamy inside the hearts and minds of American citizens. On that morning, the world saw live the destruction and devastation that terrorism can deliver right to our own backyard. Shocking images of the whole tragedy can still be seen on television even now, a whole six months later, yet even now it still seems unimaginable. As most Americans know, the Federal Government has implemented a huge amount of change to our foreign and domestic policies as a result of 9/11. The most noticeable of these in our everyday lives can be seen in our nation’s airports. Huge amounts of money and resources have been spent to help make sure that such a travesty will never happen again. The intent of this essay is to give examples of how these efforts have changed airport security and how they have personally changed my life as a checkpoint security screener.
The Terrorist Attack at Orlando Airport in 1999
The most recent example of a massive and repeated terrorist attack at the airport dates back to 2009. It occurred in Orlando, in what’s called the Pulse nightclub, because of the huge influx of foreign visitors to the country, both in order to check out all the exotic locations such as the Atlantic and Pacific. There were over 70 mass shootings throughout the country throughout the 1990’s, the majority of them carried out by foreign nationals. The US government was willing to allow, on numerous occasions, thousands of international members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups to enter America’s public schools in a bid to make sure that the school’s security systems were well trained to do their job.
The attacks are just one example of the immense damage that can be done to the security of the country by such a massive influx of foreign visitors. As it happens, the only way for the American people to get their security back to the very highest levels is for a number of international organizations to be publicly shamed and/or banned. As the Washington Post’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who’s writing about the attacks on American airports in an op-ed for Breitbart, noted, the “unsubstantiated assertion that the National Security Agency has thwarted a lot of terrorist plots since 2001 is actually ridiculous.” The United States has been allowed to expand its spying programs to cover the entirety of Muslim-majority countries around the world as long as it serves its domestic interests. As long as anyone is allowed into the country’s air traffic control towers, there is no question that its surveillance activities will inevitably become more intrusive than its legitimate work. When you get inside this country, you can see the full extent of the American government’s vast surveillance powers as well as the scope of its own surveillance and intelligence programs.
The National Security Agency’s Operation Prism, which I’ll soon be referring to as “Romeo and Juliet,” revealed a massive amount of information that was available to the NSA, along with the source code of almost every program that it secretly snoops through. The NSA’s Prism program was shut down in December of 2011 at the end of the summer, and by mid-August of 2012 the number of people that the NSA intercepted was up to 400,000, and the NSA had shut down its Prism program for at least nine months. I’ve never before seen one instance in which a US government agency ever opened up to go through and read this vast document.
How many thousands of Americans died from the terrorist attacks of September 2001? What about those who traveled to the Middle East? In other words, when and how many of those people were killed?
If Americans were allowed to travel to the Middle East and learn a great deal from those who died during the terrorist attacks, it would most likely be in the billions of dollars per week that the government spends on the terrorist attack. The answer is obvious. The United States can’t pay its bills.
To be sure, that number could grow to billions as new and disturbing data is revealed by Snowden, but in order for that to happen we will have to figure out how and to what degree such massive, indiscriminate spying on foreign populations continues with all our other foreign intelligence agencies—particularly the foreign surveillance programs—on American citizens. The vast amount of information available to the American public (including all that is called “information”) will undoubtedly be used in this country’s intelligence community.
The real purpose of the massive NSA spying will be to spy on our own population. When there is a national security threat to an individual, there is a public debate as to who is safe in an atmosphere of heightened fear. The US government may well have no problem using the Internet in order to conduct its spying. If someone from somewhere on the planet could be monitored in real time, there
Immediately after the second plane struck the World Trade Center, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) shut down every airport in America. It would be three days until any non-military aircraft entered the atmosphere over our country. Airports were allowed to re-open, but very stringent security guidelines were put in place. No longer would people who accompanied passengers be allowed to venture past security checkpoints, and passengers themselves had to be subjected to many more checks. When U.S. airports resumed business, all of the flying public had to go through secondary random bag searches and hand wand metal detector searches. The FAA issued new security directives on an almost daily basis, thus changing checkpoint procedures quite often. These procedure changes ranged from the usage of passenger pat down searches to explosive tracing of shoes and laptop computers. Needless to say, not only the public but also security employees found themselves confused during the screening process. In addition to new checkpoint policies, the FAA also mandated new security guidelines for airport ticket counters and boarding gates.
After September, airline patrons found it much more difficult to board flights. One ran the risk at the ticket counter of being randomly selected for a full baggage search. This search entails the inspection of every item a passenger brings with them, including carry-on and checked baggage. The person also has an identifying mark on their ticket informing airline employees at the boarding gate to subject the person to yet another screening dilemma. It is at this point, after the passengers have had themselves and their property searched twice (at the ticket counter and security checkpoint), do they again become subject to hand wands, pat downs,