Good morning.
I want to apologize. I have a little head cold, but I will try to stay online as much as I can.
First of all, it is an honour and a pleasure to be with you today. I welcome Professor Salter's viewpoint. I've seen it many times. We are definitely on two sides of the line here.
I'm not going to go through my presentation but rather give you some nine points of what I think is wrong and how to fix not aviation security--because I don't believe in it--but airport security. Aviation security alone will not secure Canadians. If I can blow up a terminal in any country, then the whole aviation concept is broken up. What I suggest is looking at airport security as part of a national transportation and border security system. It's not just the aviation security that needs to be looked at.
An independent agency by law, that is above the politics and the bureaucracies of the procedures of the government, should be entitled to do the job. In the Israeli system, the gold standard, this means that the Israeli Security Agency, which reports to the Israeli Prime Minister, is the only agency that can regulate and put together a system that should protect Israelis and everybody visiting the country from any—and I would say it again, any--terrorist crime imposed on the country.
There's one thing I want to stress very carefully: you cannot adopt part of the Israeli system, which a lot of nations are trying to do, wrongfully. The Israeli way of protecting the borders, the airports, seaports, and transportation is a complete system that cannot be broken up. If you break it up and take only one or two things that you like from that system, you might do more harm than good. The biggest issue with Israeli systems, and Professor Salter has done a very good job in fighting it, is what you call profiling. We do not do racial profiling or make any other comments about people's religion, but we do a lot of behaviour profiling. I will get back to that also with your questions.
The essence of the system basically lies in 90% sharing of real-time intelligence information. If you don't do that, you can put in the best systems in the world and you're doomed. If you don't know what's coming at you, how can you protect yourself?
Security and response—I say it again, security and response--together...[Inaudible—Editor]...the national resilience. I haven't seen any response plans equipped with CATSA's approval to do the so-called aviation security they have the mandate for.
Technology and humans are not interchangeable. You cannot bring automatic machines and sniffers, and I don't know what, instead of people, and vice versa. There is a very fine line of decisions to be made of whether you go the human way or the technology way.
We have a system in Israel called SAFE, which I outline in my papers, which stands for security, architecture, fore planning, and engineering. It basically protects the critical infrastructure, including airports, seaports, and border crossings.
Finally, airport security is not aviation security or vice versa. Airport security is an involved system. I have made my points many times before. The system that North America is using—and I tend to agree with Professor Salter, that the Americans are setting the security standards and not the Canadians—basically states that we have one point in the terminal where we check the passengers, and that's it. I don't care what kind of equipment you have there because that is the wrong approach to airport security, because if I can overcome this point, I am clear to do whatever I want at the airport, and that is very dangerous.
I'll say one last thing about the body scanners. I don't know why everybody is running to buy this expensive and really useless machine. The reason for that is...and I cannot, and I'm sorry I cannot; I can do it in person, for people who have security clearance.
At any rate, I can overcome the body scanners in two minutes with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747. You would never, ever see it in those scanners. The technology is wrong. It is right for what happened on Christmas Day, but it is wrong for aviation security. That's why we haven't put this in the Ben Gurion airport. We'd rather put in different systems that can sniff very carefully both luggage and people for explosives residues that are so small that even if you had walked by a bomb, it would sound an alarm.
I welcome your questions.