In today’s San Francisco Chronicle I read an article about a woman who ran through an unmanned security checkpoint at SFO and was able to get on a plane and get to Baltimore before she was apprehended. 2 hours after she left on her flight, the entire terminal was evacuated while airport security conducted a “time-consuming physical search” for her.
Point 1: She obviously had to go through the check-in at the gate before she got on the plane, so it’s not like she could ‘get away.’ This is a little Taiwanese woman sprinting madly through airport security checkpoints and they couldn’t stop her before she got to her gate?!
Point 2 (and this is what made me post this): Get a load of this quote from the article.
Can he be serious? ‘The system is not flawless’ and ‘if someone really wants to there are ways they might be able to get through’??? ‘Ways’ like moving aside a folding table? It’s not like she was crawling through air ducts, here; she ran through an unmanned checkpoint!
I’ve been to SFO since 9/11. I’ve seen those scary dudes in camo with gigantic guns. What in the world are they for, if not to stop people from traipsing through checkpoints without getting checked (I am not, by the way, implying that this woman should have been shot. It’s unfortunate that she was evidently too stupid to know that she was going to get in big trouble for what she did, and she’s definitely going to have to suffer some consequences somewhere down the line that will probably seem unfair to some people, but she’s a total idiot in my book)?
I really have no attachment to the issue here. Airport security is pretty much fully a political football in my uninformed opinion, and I don’t care much how it’s handled. But the idiocy of pretty much everyone involved in this event is monumental.