Ask the pilot

Pay extra to avoid long security lines when you fly? Plus: No singing on the way to the airport!

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Business, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

April 28, 2006 | There's good and bad news from the trenches of airport security.

On the positive side, several airports are expressing an unexpected reluctance to join the Transportation Security Administration's long-hyped "Registered Traveler" program. Under the proposed scheme, fliers would pay an annual fee and submit to a series of background checks and biometric scans. After being issued a special identification card, these passengers would be entitled to their own dedicated security lines offering speedier access through concourse checkpoints.

Several airports that originally welcomed the idea, including Boston, San Francisco and Detroit, are now balking. Some have announced they will not participate. Shorter security wait times, combined with TSA's downscaling of Registered Traveler privileges (participants would still be subject to random secondary screening along with everybody else), have left many people wondering what, exactly, the benefits would be. Airports, which would be responsible for setting up their own designated lanes, are leery of investing in a program with only marginal appeal.

A pilot program has been underway since June 2005 at Florida's Orlando International Airport, managed by Verified Identity Pass, a New York company headed by Steven Brill, creator of Court TV and founder of Brill's Content magazine. Registered Travelers are paying $80 per year.

TSA claims that upward of 20 airports are still signed on, and Brill's VIP has already agreed to contracts in at least four locations, including Cincinnati and San Jose, Calif. But without the support of the largest and busiest, Registered Traveler is doomed. Which, if you ask me, is the best thing that could happen to it.

Airport security is not a consumer good. By implementing Registered Traveler we effectively commodify public safety while throwing up yet another pillar of support for the ever-growing security-industrial complex. Those who can afford it receive preferential treatment, while those who can't, or choose not to, languish in line. All the while, security isn't improved one whit.

Rather than deal with its own incompetence, the government is offering you the privilege of paying $80 to a private contractor to scoot around it. This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with taking advantage of people's patience. Instead of encouraging fliers to pay to avoid bottlenecks, the whole system of concourse security ought to be overhauled to get rid of the bottlenecks. Those allegedly shorter lines at Detroit and San Francisco notwithstanding, here we are more than four years after You Know What, and still airport security is in many ways a scene of makeshift, improvised chaos -- a melee of barking guards, clattering plastic bins and annoyed people milling around in their bare feet.

While it's heartening to learn that not every American is hungry to embrace a bad idea, the news out of England isn't so promising. There as well as here, the many gratuitous security measures put in place in recent years, hand-in-glove with ample willingness to part with civil liberties, were bound to land the people someplace weird, if not outright dangerous. It's been a long and tottering ride along the proverbial slippery slope, but it seems the Brits have arrived.

If you're like me, you'll find yourself reading this story more than once, each time convinced that you're missing something.

Let me get this straight: A fellow in England named Harraj Mann is seated in the back of a taxi on his way to the airport. He's listening to music, and decides to sing along to the Clash's 1979 hit "London Calling." A short while later, Mann is escorted from his flight by authorities and interrogated for three hours. All because the song's lyrics make vague reference to "battle" and "war" -- and because, we have to assume, Harraj Mann is of Middle or Near Eastern descent.

As everyone knows, any jihadi would, in preparation for imminent martyrdom, be sure to preannounce his mission by singing aloud in the back of a taxi. And he wouldn't be wailing out some verse from the Quran; he'd be crooning along to the Clash. We can all sleep soundly knowing ever-vigilant cabbies are on the prowl, quick to recognize that dastardly combination of a dark complexion and a fondness for late-'70s Brit punk.

The lesson here, thanks to a demented fixation on terrorism and security, is that it's not only verboten to mention certain words or phrases at the airport -- but now you shouldn't say them on the way to the airport either.

Next page: Text-messaging a snippet from "Tommy Gun" that goes, "One jet airliner and 10 prisoners"