KEY POINTS:
US airport security. That's usually enough to send a shiver down the spine of any traveller. Since 9/11 travelling to, from and within US has been at times mildly annoying, other times, a downright nightmare, thanks to the security provisions rolled out following the terrorist attacks.
I decided long ago not to get annoyed at the security rigmarole, to go with the flow, take off my belt and shoes, remove my laptop, put all my toiletries in a clear, zip-lock plastic bag and do as little as possible to draw attention to myself.
I'd smile in anticipation for the web camera and offer my index fingers for the biometric scanning - I hear a lot of people complaining about the fact that they get photographed and scanned every time they enter the US. Well, that's the whole point - the photo and scanned fingerprints are compared to a set already sitting on a server in a building in Washington DC. If they don't match, you'll end up in a Spartan little room behind the immigration desks - but more about that later.
It was at Washington DC's Reagan National Airport, as I was passing through security to catch a flight to San Francisco that I was selected for "random screening".
"Sure," I said, like I had an option in the matter, my pulse quickening. The previous day I'd seen the not so secret service in Arlington Cemetery preparing the area for Dick Cheney's Veterans'Day speech. They drove black cars with tinted windows and looked like they meant business.
I stood in the little glass corridor for a few minutes while the security officers organised themselves. Then a young guy took my bag and started swabbing it with a plastic stick with a little material pad stuck to its end. He put the material pad in a little machine which presumably scanned it for traces of explosives.
Suddenly an alarm went off. The young guy gave me a curious look. "Are you carrying any medicines?"
"No,"I said.
He raised his eyebrows and looked at the screaming machine. Then an older woman turned up, looked at me, then the machine. There was a lot of fiddling around with the machine, then, finally, the woman ascertained that it had run out of printer paper. I breathed out.
"Haven't you been trained to change this?" she asked her younger colleague.
"No," he said. Just to make sure there was no confusion, he emptied my tangle of electronics, phones, Ethernet and USB cables from my bag and swabbed the lot - a five minute process, which I thankfully survived.
If you thought the heightened security level at US airports was starting to recede, think again. In fact, there are moves afoot to ratchet it up even further. A friend doing some work for the US Homeland Security Department told me about the plan the US Government has to digitally scan you when leave the country as well. By the end of next year, Homeland Security wants to have a system in place to track "foreign nationals" leaving their ports. The idea is that while its easy enough to monitor people entering the US at border crossings, its hard to tell for sure if the person leaving is the legitimate passport holder.
The US has been trialling RFID technologies to make biometric exit scanning easier, but the trials haven't been very successful. Instead it wants to put exit kiosks at exit points that people go to self-scan themselves at before they get on the plane, ship or cross the border. Here's where it gets messy. There's talk that the Government wants the airlines to take responsibility for it, scanning passengers at the gate, the last point before they get on the plane or ship. The specifications for the biometric exit scheme will be released next year.
It will cost a lot of money to implement and the airlines will no doubt fight tooth and nail to avoid the cost and hassle of making it work. Meanwhile the innocent traveller will have another trial to complete before being allowed to leave the US, which brings me back to that spartan immigration room. It's where I ended up at San Francisco airport recently when a friend I was travelling with entered the US on an expired Green Card. By the way, don't EVER do that.
Anyway, the room was full of people whose fingerprints or photos hadn't matched those on file. Some of them had to wait most of an hour for their case to be heard and their details to be authenticated. That's manageable on the way into the country. But what about on the way out, when you've a plane full of people waiting for you to have your credentials verified. That little scenario veers more towards the nightmare end of the US security experience scale.
