I spent last week in Barcelona at the Open Group’s Security and Jericho (deperimeterization) Forums. The meetings were reasonably interesting, but what really impressed me was the Spanish attitude toward airport security and physical security in general. Maybe the Spanish just have an unusually high risk appetite, given that Encierro is their idea of a national pastime, but for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel like I was being subjected to a bunch of pointless, insulting “security” measures at the airport.

On arrival from Heathrow, I walked up to the immigration booth and realized I hadn’t filled out an arrival form. I grabbed one but the immigration officer waved me off, flipped my passport open to a random page and stamped over what I think was an old Singapore stamp. He didn’t even run it through an electronic reader.

After that I collected my bag, walked through the Nothing To Declare lane without breaking stride, and was into the public concourse and in search of an ATM machine. Total time to deal with border control, including thinking I was missing a form, was about 15 seconds.

Once I was loose on the streets of the city, I continued to be impressed with what I saw. Spain is definitely no stranger to terrorism. They suffered the Madrid bombings just over 18 months ago and have been living with the current form of the ongoing sometimes-violent Basque Separatist movement since 1968. Somehow, though, the Spanish have managed to avoid falling prey to the sort of security paranoia that has befallen the United States. Or maybe they realized that the terrorists they’re most worried about already live there, something the United States still doesn’t seem to get.

This is similar to what I saw during my time in the United Kingdom, both before and after the Good Friday Agreement turned the IRA from political terrorists into plain old organized criminals. The police were present and often incongrously heavily-equipped (MP-5 submachine guns and tactical body armor worn over their shirts), but non-intrusive in my activities. Perhaps my experience would have been different if I weren’t a white male, but I never observed them pulling aside anyone else, either.

The biggest difference between Spain and the UK is that in the UK, you can’t turn around without running into a CCTV Camera. The British sure do love their CCTV Cameras and the “You are being monitored on CCTV” signs that go with them.

But the people are not overtly scared of terrorism in either place that I could see. Ironically, I think it’s because the threat is real. As a result, people can’t let it inflate in their minds until every building is a target and everyone who’s not From Here is a terrorist.

Here in America, on the other hand, the threat isn’t real. The only terrorism campaigns this country has seen in the past fifty years targeted the Civil Rights Movement forty years ago and abortion providers five to ten years ago. Modern Islamic terrorism is nothing but a brown-skinned bogeyman. The odds of dying in a terrorist attack are so infintesimally small that you would be much better off spending that mental energy on planning how to spend your lottery jackpot winnings. Throw in the fact that the sort of countermeasures that are most reassuring to the populace (armed guards and other forms of security theater) are also some of the least effective.

Personally, I think this is a key part of why people are so irrational in their fear of terrorism. They can’t conceptualize how remote the odds are so they tend to believe two things. First, people believe in movie plot security. People think that if Jack Bauer faced a situation last week on “24,” it is plausible.

I remember a lecture when I was at university talking about the percentage of people who believed that movies and TV shows were real. In some Third World nations, over 90% of those surveyed believed that the soap opera “Dallas” was real. I forget the rate for people in the United States but I remember being a bit incredulous at it. And that was before “Reality” TV further blurred the line between reality and entertainment.

Today, we have to take our shoes off to pass through security in a US Airport because one guy tried to hide some semtex in his shoes.

Second, people believe that the countermeasures they see are necessary. Seeing an armed guard in Yellowstone National Park doesn’t mean that there is a threat of terrorists trying to blow up Old Faithful. It means the State of Wyoming has a few hundred thousand dollars in Homeland Security funding they need to spend.

It’s not that the threats aren’t real. I fully believe that there is no shortage of people in the world who would like to commit acts of violence against the United States. What I don’t believe is that they are targeting Old Faithful, or that a few uniformed guards are going to make a difference in anything but the body count if they do.

And this is where security gets hard. How do you tell people that while there definitely is a bogeyman, they shouldn’t worry because he’s not hiding under their bed at night?

(No link on the TV reality belief statistics. Google let me down on finding them, but they were old enough to pre-date the modern Web)

I’ve been saying this for quite some time. I went to Turkey shortly after the bombings there a couple of years ago. Security was about the same as you describe. We don’t need or want to be ‘protected’. We can do that ourselves. It’s just a way of gaining control.

Responding to Terror

Once I was loose on the streets of the city, I continued to be impressed with what I saw. Spain is definitely no stranger to terrorism. They suffered the Madrid bombings just over 18 months ago and have been…

The first day I arrived in Madrid, back in the early 90s, three bombs were set off by ETA. We watched the smoke in the distance out of our office window. Other than that scary introduction, my years in Spain were almost totally terrorism free. What is it that’s different? It is very hard to pinpoint, because even though there were monthly ETA events, nobody in Spain lets it ruin their day.

One thing is a sense of perspective. Although the ETA would kill a few people now and then, the roads would kill more. On one long weekend, what they call a doble-puente (double bridge or 4 day weekend) over 600 people were killed. I come from a state where they celebrate that most such easter weekends, we had zero casualties, and the whole country is about 600 per year, so to me that was a number! The locals thought very little of it, although the carnage in one firestorm pile-up was shocking to them as well.

The UK is the same - when London went off last year, I was supposed to be crossing that area that morning but got up late. My mate and I watched the TV for a couple of hours, then left it off when we worked out that the scope was quite narrow. London’s had worse - much worse - and in a perverse sense, Londoners thought, well, that’s that, we knew it was coming, and now it’s done. I for one thought it could have been much worse.

For the Europeans, terrorism is just another risk - and quite a minor one. It’s a sense of perspective, borne of having to live the risk for the last 50 years or so.

[…] There’s a very good post over at Not Bad For A Cubicle on Airport Security. He is one of the few that I have seen writing on the subject who realizes that most of the highly visible security measures that have been implemented in the United States are also among the least effective. He also points out that the odds of dying in a terrorist attack, at least in the United States is so remote that your chance of winning the lottery may be higher. […]

Thought I’ll share some experiences too.

On a flight from Munich to Duesseldorf (Germany), I accidently kept a Swiss Army knife in my hand baggage instead of checking it in. The guy scanning the bag caught it and informed me of this and asked me very kindly to check it in. Luckly I had a bag that could be checked in and in went the knife. I wonder what the reaction would have been if this had happened at a US airport. Having been subjected to three ‘random’ extra checks (on just that many number of flights) on my way out of US, I don’t think things would have been so easily resolved.

In Spain, they have bag checks before boarding long distance inter-city trains starting from Madrid (and Barcelona I think). The guy asked for our passports, took a quick glance at our stuff and let us in.

Flight out of Colombo, Sri Lanka, couple of years ago (when the war against Tamil rebels were in full force) things were a bit different. Every one had to re-identify their lugguage before it was loaded into the flight. Every item in the hand bag was inspected physically by hand and passengers were given a pat-down just in front of the flight’s door! I haven’t yet heard of any report about anyone who have been caught during one of these searches. But then, maybe no one tried anything like that because such a process was in place?

Back in the late 1980’s I experienced pat-downs (three-person teams: one male screener, one female screener, one dude with an MP-5 submachine gun) along with what I still assume was some sort of observation period (stuck us all in a room for 30 minutes for no apparent reason right after the pat-down’s) on a flight from Munich to London. Then, they did luggage re-identification as part of actually boarding the plane. I don’t recall if it was pre- or post-Lockerbie, but the security level was definitely elevated that day.

In that case, though, there was a bag left over after the luggage re-identification and it was last seen speeding away in the bomb bucket along with a half-dozen very excited Flugzeugpolizei. So maybe they had been tipped and I just got to see the height of German airport security excellence, but it still impressed me.

I just need to say something about terrorists targeting Old Faithful. It is possible,(not to mention plausible) many famous people visit there, while I worked there we had a President, two former Presidents, a King, a Princess, and Rosy O’donnel! So I think that not only would terrorists take out a world leader, a few thousand of our fellow Americans, and a T.V. Icon; they would destroy one of this country’s most enduring, loved, and rocognized monuments.