There is a crisis in airport security on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security argued with the airline industry over whose fees were more responsible for the insanely long lines at TSA checkpoints. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson called on the airlines to drop their fees for checked baggage this summer so flyers would bring fewer carry-on bags. The airlines said the TSA should drop its $85 fee to sign up for the speedier TSA PreCheck program.
In Europe, terrorism appears to have claimed an EgyptAir A320 that took off from Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris and vanished from radar over the Mediterranean Sea.
It’s likely that both the unreasonable delays at U.S. airports and the loss of the EgyptAir plane were caused by the same thing: the politically correct insistence that every passenger is equally likely to be a terrorist.
Since the 9/11 attacks, airport security has focused on two things: knowing who’s on the plane, and knowing what’s in the luggage.
The problem in the U.S. is caused by too much of the second, and the EgyptAir incident may have been caused by not enough of the first.
This spring, as thousands of Americans missed their flights due to TSA backups, the European parliament was still debating whether to allow the collection and sharing of airline reservation data by adopting a Passenger Name Record directive.
The Council of the European Union finally adopted the PNR in April. But the 28 member nations of the EU have two years to implement it. France had been planning to begin testing of the system this summer.
Why did Europe wait so long to start a PNR system? French Prime Minister Manuel Valls pressed hard for …