If the TSA is guilty of conducting “security theater,” then the show of security being put on by NASA at Space Center Houston is definitely a farce performed by the junior high school drama club.
I’m on a vacation of sorts in Houston and decided to take my son to the Space Center. The Space Center is a tourist attraction located right next to Johnson Space Center. The only security you have to pass through is a weapons checkpoint just outside the building doors. An unarmed security guard and a sign ask if you have any knives, chemical sprays, firearms, etc. When I went through, the guard seemed uninterested in looking into the backpack that I started unzippering and took me at my word that I had no weapons.
I am always interested in any sort of security measures that organizations utilize. When I questioned the guard about whether anyone has actually revealed that they did have a weapon, he indicated people occasionally mention they have pocket knives, but that’s it; that he has to take them at their word and that’s all he can do. I’m certainly not up to speed on Texas’s 4th Amendment-related laws, but this sounds pretty much like your typical limits on private security force’s rights to search.
And I didn’t really expect any thing more. It was a lot like the searches I was exposed to in the past year or so entering Smithsonian museums in DC or the entrances in Disney World.
No Metal Allowed…On Your Person
My opinion radically changed when we decided to go on one of the tram tours. You get to ride a tram across the public road onto the Johnson Space Center property and see either the Mission Control Building or the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility. Since you’re going on to a secure facility, they subject you to greater screening than they do at the front entrance.
While waiting in the long line to board your tram, we all saw an armed guard wearing a NASA patch on his shoulders guiding individuals through a metal detector. I could see that people were removing belts, watches, wallets, and so forth in order to get through the detector without triggering it.
But WTF!? When I got closer to the head of the line, I could see that people were setting down more than their personal accessories. Purses, backpacks, camera bags, were allowed to be set down on a table next to the metal detector and after the individual walked through, the bags could be picked up without them being checked. Not scanned, not rifled through, nothing! Not even given a second thought!
This was such a blatant case of security theater that virtually every person in my vicinity who was the slightest chatty could be heard muttering about how stupid the whole thing was?
If I could draw, I’d make a cartoon of it:
a terrorist-looking guy standing in front of a metal detector at at a check point saying, ”just a moment sir…” to the screener while in a thought bubble it says “…while I put my bomb in my backpack which you aren’t going to check.”
Well it was Sunday on a holiday weekend. Perhaps they weren’t too concerned about security and decided to make it look like they were trying. They still failed at that.
Losing Count
As if this wasn’t enough entertainment, we were given “boarding passes” just after getting on the tram. Each on had a distinct number on it. The passes given out in each row were sequentially numbered. Presumably, there was a unique number for each passenger.
After disembarking at the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility and then reboarding the same row of the same car as we were instructed, the boarding passes were collected. Presumably, they were making sure that everyone had returned to the tram, that no one had decided to stay behind and cause trouble.
The problem was that as they collected the cards from each row, the youthful tour guides seemed entirely too engrossed in collecting the cards from the right-most person in each row and stacking them, paying no attention to whether the number of cards collected matched the number of people in each row. It’d be entirely simple, given the lack of attention the two guided were able to pay to some 100 tourists, for someone to hand over their buddies boarding pass while their buddy was hidding inside the tour building until the group left.
In all it was self evident that the engineers that do the nitty gritty work of our space program are not at all involved in reviewing the security procedures for tourists who visit their facility.
Now don’t start blasting me with giving away precious security secrets. I heard too many others around me griping about the idiocy of the supposed security we were being subjected to believe that this could be viewed is some sort of super secret golden security morsel.
Besides, as many cryptographic experts agree, the security of a cipher should not depend on the obscurity of the algorithm. Many great cryptographic functions have been created for which finding the keys or plaintext is extraordinarily difficult even when the algorithm is known. As such, if many of the security measures are really good, it wont matter if we can see what they are and how they work.
When the security measures (or “algorithm”) are so blatantly obvious, yet so blatantly subverted, a concerned citizen should not be criticized for so blatantly pointing it out.
Followups:
