The dry ice bombs that exploded last Sunday and Monday at Los Angeles International Airport exposed something airport security experts don’t talk much about: At its core, airfield security is built on trust.
Ramp workers like 28-year-old Dicarlo Bennett, who was charged Thursday with two counts of possessing a destructive device in a public place, have access to just about anywhere in the airport. And though they must pass a 10-year background check before they’re hired, airport workers generally do not need to clear security when they arrive for their shifts.
“The way it works pretty much everywhere in the world is that trusted people are required to do things,” said Bruce Schneier, a security expert and a regular critic of TSA policies. “Insiders can do all sorts of things. But, by and large, insiders are not who you worry about. And they are really hard to secure against. There have to be thousands of people who have access to the insides of airports.”
Airfields are difficult to protect, but experts say that doesn’t necessarily make them dangerous. About 45,000 people have badges at LAX, airport officials say, and many of them work in areas of the airport not accessible to passengers. An airport is a busy place, and many employees use things like dry ice, knives and other tools, all of which would be dangerous in the wrong hands. Some also handle highly flammable jet fuel.
So much of airport security, then, depends on trust. The workers hired by airlines and contractors must be credible. They must take their jobs seriously, and they must take security seriously. They’re supposed to challenge others if they see something that doesn’t look right.
“There is an element of trust put in for the people who work at the airport, be they TSA employees, other federal employees or airline employees,” said Nico Melendez, a spokesman for the TSA. “We perform background checks. But background checks tell you what happened in the past. They don’t tell you what can happen in the future.”
Melendez said it’s not possible to check every employee when they arrive each day, especially when many of those workers have access to potentially dangerous or disruptive items once they’re on the job. (Dry ice is regularly used by caterers to keep food cold.)
“We don’t have a mandate to screen every employee when they come to work,” Melendez said. “It’s not feasible at this point. We have instituted the tools that we believe are necessary and effective for when they report to work.”
Arif Alikhan, deputy executive director for homeland security at LAX, said the key is to have many layers of security. He said unannounced security checks are common, and inspectors might take a look at an employee’s lunch box or bags. Employees are asked to question who enters secure areas of the airport, and told to never hold doors open for each other.
“All employees are required by our own rules to always challenge anyone who doesn’t have appropriate identification on them,” Alikhan said.
Jeff Price, a professor at the Metropolitan State University of Denver and former assistant security director for Denver International Airport, said in an email that layered security makes airports safer than they were before 2001. And he said the dry ice incidents do not mean there is a security gap at LAX.
“The dry ice bombs are creative, but I don’t believe represent a real threat,” Price said in an email. “There is a long way to go from making a MacGyver-type device out of dry ice to plotting and planning a terrorist plot to blow up a plane, both from a psychological standpoint and a logistical standpoint.”
Schneier, too, said he is not worried about the LAX events. Theoretically, he acknowledged, the dry ice bombs show what an airport employee could accomplish on the ramp. But just because someone was able to fill some soda bottles with dry ice and make them explode does not mean someone else is likely to do the same with a real bomb.
“You can do those things,” Schneier said. “I can do those things. ‘Can’ is one of those words that makes you crazy. Yes, he can do that. He could have done that last year, and he could do that this year. He can do a lot of things. Luckily, we don’t base policy on imagination.”
The dry-ice bomb incidents led to another arrest Friday when Bennett’s boss at LAX, ground services supervisor Miguel Angel Iniguez, 41, of Inglewood, also was booked on suspicion of possession of a destructive device.
Authorities insist, however, that the incidents were pranks, not terrorist threats.
Various people, including former Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, have called LAX the No. 1 terrorist target on the West Coast. But while an Algerian man discovered with a bomb at the Canadian border in 1999 was sentenced to 37 years in prison in connection with a plot to cause damage at LAX, Schneier said that assessment by Bratton is probably not true.
“Where can you possibly get that data?” he said. “I don’t think terrorists respond to opinion polls about how juicy targets are.”
