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“You do not have to take off your jacket, just your heavy coat,” insisted the security agent at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, when I passed through there last week. “You do not have to take anything out of your bag. Leave your laptops where they are.”

For a second, I wondered if the metal detector doorway at the top of our line was the mirror in Through the Looking Glass. This nice sincere gentleman in uniform seemed to be saying precisely the opposite of familiar phrases I’d heard scores of times at airport security gates, in more than a decade since 9/11, especially quarterly trips across the border to Chicago.

Usually, Chicago friends said to allow one hour travel time just for clearing O’Hare security, with its lengthy lines that slowly snaked through multiple passport ID checks, then bogged down as people stripped off shoes and layers of clothing in order to shuffle along a counter pushing personal possessions on plastic trays with other anonymous humans lurching towards the metal scanners or the Revolving Ionizing Tower — er, the body scanners, equipped with AIT (Advanced Image Technology, whatever that is).

On March 13, however, the security lines at O’Hare — the second-busiest airport in the U.S.  and the fifth busiest in the world — were re-configured. This time, the Transport Safety Agency’s (TSA, a branch of Homeland Security) pre-screener looked at my security ticket and waved me into an “Expedited” line — and I felt like I’d fallen through the looking glass, to a time before 9/11, before security lines squandered our time stressfully in corridors ringing with “Orange Alert” alarms.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, I’d become of 25 million people who have benefited so far from the Pre-Check program that the U.S. Transport Safety Agency [TSA] quietly implemented in 2011. I learned later that a code on my airline ticket identified me as someone known to be a low-risk individual, and expedited my clearance accordingly. Last December 16, 2013, the TSA announced it will expand the successful pilot program.

As Ashley Haley reported in the Washington Post,  “Travellers who use the TSA’s Pre-Check program get to keep their shoes, belts and sweaters on and do not have to pull their laptops from cases or display their plastic bags of liquids as they hustle through special airport checkpoints. Their carry-on luggage still passes through X-ray machines, and they still must step through metal detectors.”

Of course, as a politically aware person, I immediately wondered if I’d been selected on the basis of all the wrong reasons, such as age, gender, class, clothes and so forth.  Like Groucho Marx, I questioned the ramifications of any club that would have me as a member.  Who else qualifies for expedited clearance? More importantly, who doesn’t qualify?

Current airport security programs treat all passengers as suspects, at least partly in an attempt to look fair. Efforts to identify potential terrorists at the airport, for example through their behaviour, have led to complaints that investigators tended to identify people of colour 80 per cent of the time.

Ethnic groups have charged that “no-fly” lists and “random” security line patdowns amount to no more than racial profiling. More, they charge, such programs are rife with errors in peoples’ names, such as misspelling and misattributions, compounding misunderstandings.

Zahra Billoo,  Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said, “Each year our offices hear from hundreds of individuals who are visited by the FBI and face related travel issues.”

OnIslam.net cited some examples of officials harassing Muslims, including:

“Earlier in February, a US Muslim Air Force veteran had complained of being barred from leaving the country after being allowed to care for his terminally-ill mother.

“In May 2012, fifteen American Muslims, including four military veterans, sued the federal government over being placed on a “no-fly” list for no apparent reason.

“Earlier in 2011, an American Muslim family was kicked off a JetBlue flight because their 18-month child was flagged as no-fly.

“In 2009, nine members of a Muslim family were removed from a domestic AirTran Airways flight to Orlando, Florida, after they chatted about their seats in the plane.”

Some of the Muslims affected have reacted the way any good American would: they’ve sued the government. In January, Rahinal Ibrahim, a Stanford doctoral student, made substantial progress in her legal challenge to being placed on the TSA’s “no-fly” list.

OnIslam reports, “U.S. District Court Judge Alsup ruled that Dr. Ibrahim had standing to challenge the government’s actions, ordered the government to correct Ibrahim’s position on the ‘no-fly’ list and to disclose to her what said position was.”

The good news is that the new TSA Pre-check seems to sweep a wide swath, automatically clearing everyone enrolled in any of nine major frequent flyer programs, for example, or anyone who has a redress number. The better news is that, where previous airport security programs treated every traveller as suspect, the Pre-check begins with the premise that most travellers are innocent.

The TSA news release clearly states this approach. “TSA Pre Check helps strengthen security by identifying low-risk individuals through pre-screening. This allows TSA to focus resources on travellers about whom we know less, while providing the most effective security in the most efficient way.”

TSA’s Risk Assessment program screens most passengers as they book tickets or check in, says the TSA. “Secure Flight is a behind-the-scenes program that enhances the security of domestic and international commercial air travel through the use of improved watch list matching.” Co-ordinating intelligence really fits with the Obama administration’s general emphasis on intelligence as a primary defence strategy.

The TSA continues: “Collecting additional passenger data improves the travel experience for all airline passengers, including those who have been misidentified in the past.” This sounds like a strong hint that people who may have the same very common names or very ethnic names as alleged international terrorists no longer need to produce a demeaning “redress number” to be treated as regular passengers. Secure Flight will track their number automatically.

Secure Flight centralizes and standardizes screening that airlines used to carry out according to their own systems. TSA says Secure Flight’s advantages include:  “Provides a fair, equitable, and consistent matching process across all airlines.”

And Secure Flight’s mandate includes, perhaps surprisingly, “Protect passengers’ personal information from unauthorized use and disclosure.”

This seems to me to be a dramatically different approach to security — one that makes me feel the like the White Queen, who urges Alice to practice believing in impossible things. “Why, sometimes I have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” she exclaims.

As my husband as I sat at a nice boulevard-style café inside the new O’Hare Terminal K —  grateful to have unexpected time for veggie omelettes before our early morning flight — I searched online for “expedited” air travel, and mulled over what seems impossible in the world we have inhabited since 9/11.

– Other passengers were as shocked and disbelieving as I to hear the nice gentleman in uniform countermanding all the petty indignities heaped on air travellers in the last decade. Most travellers listened to him but kept on with their regular disrobing routines. Some shook their heads. It was almost as if he had said we could smoke cigarettes on the plane.

– Furthermore, Secure Flight subsumes the niche industry of cross-border pre-clearance, such as Nexus and Global Express services. Originally pitched to customers who wanted to streamline customs and immigration procedures, Nexus cards now provide access to special security lines, which may or may not be faster than regular lines. That’s another industry I’d expect to fight back.

I was just starting to choke on the idea that passenger registration never gets cross-referenced with other information as a name passes through the great air passenger registry in the cloud — when our omelettes arrived. Digging in, I realized that even when the metal detector turns into a looking glass, and I walk through, I’m not as adept as the White Queen yet. I can barely believe three impossible things before breakfast.

Penney Kome

Penney Kome

Award-winning journalist and author Penney Kome has published six non-fiction books and hundreds of periodical articles, as well as writing a national column for 12 years and a local (Calgary) column...