In the Interests of Safety

As is poitnted out in the Guardian, on my way to Poland for a book festival the other week, the book reviewer I was going through security at Heathrow behind a man of advanced years who walked with a crutch. He went through the metal detector leaning on his wife, having left the crutch next to the conveyor belt. The detector beeped, so the man was given his crutch and forced to go back through to remove his shoes, a procedure that obviously caused him some annoyance and discomfort. Now in socks, he was ordered to pass through the metal detector again.

But he wasn't allowed to take his crutch with him, and his wife wasn't allowed to go back through the detector. Eventually, the security guard himself reached a hand through the detector to help him and the man, grimacing, limped through, while his crutch passed through the baggage scanner. My fellow travellers and I were all mightily relieved when the implement came out the other end, indicating, reassuringly, that the man was not a maniacal terrorist with a cunning crutch-bomb.

In the Interests of Safety: The absurd rules that blight our lives and how we can change them
by Tracey Brown, Michael Hanlon

We've all seen such examples of what the writer Bruce Schneier calls the meaningless "security theatre" at airports. One pilot had his butter knife confiscated, just before taking the controls of an enormous metal machine packed with flammable fuel. Liquids were banned in carry-on baggage even though the inciting incident – a "plot" to mix innocuous chemicals in the plane's toilet and thereby produce explosives – almost certainly wouldn't have worked. And yet, as Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon point out in this book, passengers are not only allowed but encouraged to buy and take on board large duty-free bottles of alcoholic spirits, which could easily be turned into Molotov cocktails.