Many aviation experts continue to complain that security controls at airports are inefficient and ineffective. Their arguments are only strengthened by the fact that testing the system usually reveals breathtaking gaps. Nevertheless, terrorists are known to be adaptive by nature and have responded to increased vigilance and technological improvements at airports by switching their ’loci operandi’ to trains, as the attacks in Madrid ('04) and London ('05) and the averted plots in Germany ('06) painfully illustrated.
The need to beef up train security is apparent and two interesting examples below show different approaches and success rates:
German police authorities (BKA) put facial recognition to a test at the central train-station in Mainz in 2007 – with mixed results at its best. They tried to recognize 200 registered commuters (so people purposefully took a designated picture at the beginning of the test). However even in these artificial conditions they reached a recognition success rate of only about 60% during the day and less than 20% at night. These results were so disappointing that the BKA chief said he could not recommend facial recognition, at least at its current level of maturity, for wider use by the federal authorities.
Last week Amtrak – the US train behemoth – announced the implementation of airport-like security checks. Now some travelers will be exposed to checks before they board trains by technologies like Smiths Detection’s portable explosive detection devices. Amtrak did however, stop short of installing fixed metal-detectors, which would trigger lengthy cues and erase the last benefit that trains have over airlines – that of convenience. This columnist believes though that as long as rail security remains significantly lower than airlines, it will remain a target of convenience for terrorists.
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