Keep your shoes on

Boston Globe

20 hours ago

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Why the TSA waited five years after Reid's abortive shoe bombing to institute its shoes-off rule has never been clearly explained, but in all that time no one else has tried to take down a plane using explosive footwear. Nor have any passengers ever been caught with a shoe bomb in the nearly two decades after the rule went into effect.
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In other words, there has never been any evidence that making millions of travelers shed their shoes contributed to anyone's safety. It was all
things
rather than bad
people
— with screening for forbidden bottles of shampoo or corkscrews or lighters as if they posed deadly threats, instead of monitoring for behavior that represents a real threat to planes and their passengers.
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From the day it was created, the TSA has specialized in fighting the last war and in overreacting to one-time long shots. One Islamist radical tried to hide explosives in his shoes, so hundreds of millions of travelers had to start removing their shoes. Another would-be terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attempted to hide a bomb in his underwear, so we all had to submit to full-body scans or (for several years) pat-downs. British officials learned of a plot to
I often reflected in the years after 9/11 that if Osama bin Laden's terrorists had destroyed not four airliners on that terrible day but four crowded movie theaters, then Americans would have had to radically change the way they went to the movies — advance reservations would have become mandatory, audiences would have had to get to the cineplex (with photo ID) two hours early, and X-ray equipment operated by a vast new federal bureaucracy, the Theater Security Administration, would have scanned everyone entering and leaving. But at airports there would be no interminable security lines, a box cutter in your carry-on wouldn't raise any eyebrows, and you could arrive for your flight 20 minutes before departure. We would still be as vulnerable to a hijacking-massacre as we actually were on 9/11 — but almost no one would be thinking about that because the 'last war' would have taken a different form.
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Former TSA administrator
And even that they aren't very good at. The government's own 'red team' tests — in which undercover inspectors try to smuggle weapons or contraband through security — have
As Americans who travel abroad are aware, other countries never deemed it necessary to adopt the shoes-off rule. That includes countries in which the threat of terrorism is far more acute. In Israel, for example, security screening begins even before passengers enter the terminal, officials make a point of engaging in dialogue with almost everyone who's catching a plane, and travelers remain with their luggage until
after
the security check is completed. But nobody has to take their shoes off or remove their laptop from their bag to be scanned separately. Security agents there are watching for nervousness, inconsistencies, or suspicious behavior. They aren't preoccupied with confiscating bottled water or whether you're wearing a belt.
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The TSA's ritualized absurdities have come at a steep cost. They waste billions of dollars annually. They consume countless hours of passengers' time. They treat everyone like a potential terrorist. To prove that no one is exempt, they have gone to the extreme of patting down
Nearly a quarter-century after 9/11, there is no evidence that any of this has ever prevented a hijacking. 'TSA has played next to no role in the biggest counterterrorism stories of the past two decades,' journalist Darryl Campbell, who writes extensively about air travel and airline security, wrote in 2022.
It is widely agreed that the two most effective deterrents to another hijacking have nothing to do with airport checkpoints. One was a physical change: the locking and reinforcing of cockpit doors, so that no terrorist could ever again breach the cockpit during flight. The other was psychological. The passengers on 9/11's United Flight 93, by overpowering the terrorists and forcing them to crash the plane into a field, prevented a far greater catastrophe that day — and thereby taught future travelers of the importance of fighting back.
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The end of the shoes-off rule is long overdue. But it's just one small retreat in a long war of make-believe. The TSA remains fixated on creating the illusion of security rather than actually providing it. If the agency truly wants to protect travelers, it should abandon its theater of confiscated water bottles and trampled dignity and learn to focus instead on what truly keeps passengers safe.
But until that happens, we can at least keep our shoes on. It's a start.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at