Effect of the post-9/11 security includes loss of privacy — and sovereignty

FRANCOIS SHALOM
Postmedis News

Aviation changed the world 10 years ago, which in turn changed aviation forever. The instant those hijacked planes slammed into their targets, airline security became synonymous with national security.

“It was the first time airliners were used as a weapon of armed destruction,” said Raymond Benjamin, secretary-general of Montreal’s International Civil Aviation Organization.

The fallout is a security regime that features bans on gels and liquids in the cabins, more and longer lineups as screening of passengers and their baggage intensified — including frisking or interrogations of the most unlikely subjects, and, in the U.S., full-body scans.

Last year spending on airport security worldwide rose to $7.5 billion US, said Pierre Jeanniot, former president of Air Canada and of Montreal’s International Air Transport Association — an added cost to your airline ticket.

George Petsikas, an executive at Montreal’s Transat A.T., and president of the National Airlines Council of Canada, said 600,000 jobs in travel and tourism in Canada depend heavily on air travel.

“The danger is that people say ‘to heck with it, I can’t do this [airport hassle] thing any more, I’m gonna rebuild the porch instead.'” Hamilton points out that increased airline hassles can make other modes of transport more attractive.

One silver lining in the post-9/11 cloud has been a greater demand for more economical airplanes, said Hamilton. The result? Boeing Co.’s 787 Dreamliner, Airbus SA’s future A350 and Bombardier’s $3-billion CSeries program, a shot in the arm to Quebec’s economy.

Freeman, IATA and a host of other aviation players have said for years that it’s time to move past the 9-11 everyone-is-a-suspect mindset and adopt an assessment system at airports that gauges a flyer’s risk based on background checks.

But Mathieu Laroque, spokesman for the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, which manages Canada’s airport security, said the impetus will have to come from government regulators, and governments will not move until international standards are adopted.

Another, less tangible, lasting effect of the post 9/11 security-is-everything mentality is the resulting loss of privacy — and sovereignty.

Canadians now flying over U.S. territory, however briefly, must submit to the Secure Flight program. This program requires Canadian airlines to submit their passenger lists to U.S. authorities, even though no Canadian law required such a thing. In fact, the Aeronautics Act that prohibited Canadian carriers from sharing information about their passengers was amended on March 23 to “permit air carriers to share information with the United States for flights that overfly the continental U.S.,” said Lisa Filipps, spokeswoman for Public Safety Canada.

“This approach continues to balance the privacy rights of travellers with the need for a safe and secure air transportation system.”

Doug Reid could not disagree more. The professor of strategy at Kingston’s Queen’s University’s School of Business said that in addition to the “horrid” experience, flyers, “sadly, are guilty until proven innocent.”

“The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is essentially null and void the instant you get to an airport,” Reid said. “For all intents and purposes, CATSA conduct illegal searches and they know it. CATSA people use contrivances to work around that. When they ask permission to look into your bag, they’re not being nice, they have to legally. If you object, they don’t let you get on the airplane, which is very insulting and quite ridiculous. Last time I looked, we still had the right to disagree.”

The question of whether the terrorists won is “stupid,” Reid said, “because what is ‘win’?” “But did they change the way we live? Absolutely,” including the diversion of many billions of dollars, “maybe trillions” into security and wars instead of health care, education or infrastructure.

“We aren’t enslaved as the terrorists would want — but there’s no question we are less free now than we were 10 years ago.”