Transport Committee on April 22nd, 2010

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities for meeting 11. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are here for a study of aviation safety and security; security concerns.

Joining us today from the University of Ottawa is Mark Salter. He's an associate professor of the school of political studies.

Via video conference, Rafi Sela will give us a presentation.

The translation will be delayed.

[Roger Gaudet, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

The translation system is only working in English; it isn't working in French.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

On the format, first we will have opening remarks and presentations, and then we will follow with questions and answers.

I want to advise the committee that because of Mr. Sela's location, translation and response times will be delayed. So please allow for the translators to do the translation and for Mr. Sela to respond, as he will have to wait for the question to be heard.

We'll start with Mr. Salter, and then we'll go to Mr. Sela.

Please begin.

[Dr. Mark Salter, Associate Professor, School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa]

Thank you.

I'd like to thank the committee for the invitation to speak here today.

I'll be making my presentation in English only, but I will be able to answer questions in French.

I have two serious concerns about the Canadian aviation security system that have nothing to do with the good work done on the front lines.

I want to be as clear as possible on my four initial take-home points.

First, aviation security is a matter of public security. The public must be engaged in an honest, frank discussion of the risks, responsibilities, and uncertainties of aviation security. To my mind, it is simply unacceptable that we have a large sphere of public policy that we cannot discuss openly.

Second, I see no compelling evidence that risk management is the appropriate model for managing aviation security. I'll return to this, but it is crucial to say that aviation safety and aviation security are fundamentally different objects and they require different manners of management. Safety is an area in which one can accumulate knowledge and therefore make risk judgments. If a bolt fails 800 times, we may assume that it will fail the 801st. However, aviation security, because it is driven by individuals, is fundamentally different. Because 800 people have passed through a security checkpoint securely is absolutely no indication that the 801st person will be secure. Ironically, then, the more we know about aviation security, the more wrong we are.

Third, because of this underlying uncertainty, safety management systems and security management systems are fundamentally different. I want to highlight the managerial structure that places CATSA, in particular, in an impossible position. Transport Canada has defined a regulatory structure that is prescriptive, yet best practice and Treasury Board Secretariat rules about risk management require CATSA to be flexible. So CATSA is stuck in between the best international practices and the prescriptive regulations of Transport Canada. To me, this should be one of the key grounds of discussion.

Finally, I think profiling is a dangerous path to go down. Profiling by nationality, origin, race, ethnicity, and language are all incredibly misleading.

There are a number of questions, and I want to do my best to respond to them in a succinct way.

First of all, the threat is not simply to the Canadian aviation sector. Rather, it is to Canadian society. The way we protect the Canadian aviation sector must reflect the broader needs and requirements of Canadian society. It seems essential to me that the way we police aviation reflects the values that Canada represents. It seems to me that we need to be very careful about, for example, going down the profiling path.

Second, with all respect to my colleague, Mr. Sela, from Israel, I would argue that it is incredibly dangerous to follow the path of the Israeli security system as the gold model for international aviation security. I understand that this is the discourse within the majority of public discussions about aviation security. But I think the Israeli situation--geopolitically, legally, and strategically--in terms of risk and threat, is so fundamentally different from what it is in Canada that we really go a step too far if we adopt or even seek to adopt the Israeli model. I'm sure Mr. Sela and I can have a frank and robust conversation about that in the next two hours.

To give a clear example, we all know that we may be burglarized or assaulted in our homes, and yet we invest in police forces, and perhaps we invest in locks for our doors. We do not put down razor wire and land mines. That's because we have a different understanding of what the risk is to our homes and to us than what it is to the country or to the border between North Korea and South Korea. If we are to understand what measures to take, we have to understand what the risk is, in particular to Canada.

Third, I'm increasingly concerned about the American tail wagging the Canadian aviation security dog, if that isn't stretching the metaphor too far. At the moment it appears—and I say “it appears” because there is not transparent information about this available to the public—that American security requirements are changing what screening gets done at Canadian airports. This is not just in pre-clearance areas, but those are the spaces where it's most visible. The American government requires that extra screening be done on passengers to the United States.

My question is how is that being done? I simply don't know. I'm a serious person. It's not because I'm lazy. It's not because I haven't been asking questions. We simply don't know what the rules are. We don't know what the rules are about the degree to which American regulations are pushing Canadian security.

Finally, one of the key questions, to me, is how secure is our aviation security system?

I want to make two points. The first is that, in one sense, it's unknowable. It's unknowable because we don't know what the next threat is. Again, this is not because of anything in the process or in our intelligence agencies; it's simply that the aviation security system is a deeply uncertain one.

We can make broad generalities about highway traffic safety and say there will be 3,000 people killed on Canadian roads over the next year, but we can't say which accident will happen or which accident will be fatal. We can only draw large rules to say that this is the speed limit, or this is what we do with traffic lights.

In the same way, we do not know--and I would say in some way we can't know--how secure our aviation security system is because there's no way of putting those high-impact, low-frequency events into any kind of model. There's just not enough data that lets us say Canada has a 90% security rate, whereas Israel has 99%, whereas Burkina Faso has 95%. So we have to operate within this atmosphere of uncertainty, which means looking for incremental improvement rather than some kind of metric or number.

In particular, the millimetre wave scanners represent a genuine leap forward in aviation security screening technology. There is no question that they detect not only the current threats that we face better in terms of liquid explosives and in terms of prohibited items, but they go after the next generation of threats much better also—that is, for example, ceramic knives or other kinds of devices that are not seen by the current metal detector archway. The millimetre wave scanning is, without a doubt, not magic, but a much better mousetrap. So I think they should be rolled out across the country.

One of the reasons I think these are better is that despite the public hesitation about being naked--or being seen to be naked, although the images themselves are never identified with an actual person—it is much less intrusive than the physical pat-down by an officer.

Let me make my recommendations to this committee. I'll be as clear as possible.

First, I think we need to speak plainly and truthfully to the Canadian public about the risk and the uncertainty within the aviation security system. That includes telling both the negative story about uncertainty and the positive story about success. We cannot minimize the degree to which Canadian aviation security has turned on a dime over the past 10 years to provide a much-enhanced level of security, with new waves of technology being rolled out every three or four years.

Secondly, I think we need to say clearly to our international partners that we are going to treat passengers in Canada to the same standard that we do Canadian citizens. I think there's a very good example of how this has worked to Canada's advantage with the EU-Canada passenger name record, or PNR, agreement—not the advanced passenger information, which is your nationality, but all that other stuff that goes on the reservation form. That agreement, unlike the one between the EU and America, has been given a lot of approval and approbation by privacy officials. So there's a real example where Canada has led the world in doing aviation security better.

Third, I would say that the millimetre wave scanner is a better mousetrap and should be rolled out across the country. Even if there is a cost involved and a public diplomacy campaign needs to be carried out to demonstrate its utility, I think it's a better mousetrap that is less invasive and will allow us to do security screening better and, frankly, with less profiling.

I really look forward to your questions. I appreciate the opportunity to be here today.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Sela, welcome to our committee. I'll ask you to make your presentation, and then we'll move to questions and answers.

[Rafi Sela, President, A.R. Challenges]

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.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you, Mr. Sela.

Again, I will just remind the committee that there is a time delay, so ask your question, and I'll be generous with the time.

Mr. Volpe.

[Joe Volpe, Liberal, Eglinton—Lawrence, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Welcome, Mr. Sela and Professor Salter.

This, of course, is not the first time we've had a conversation together, although this is the first time we can actually see Mr. Sela, even if it's via the technology of the day.

I welcome your ideas. I don't think you were debating last time, but you were making your presentations at different times. At least one other colleague around this table had the benefit of some of your perceptions.

You may be aware that just the other day we had people from CATSA and from Transport Canada discussing this very issue, or at least part of it. That discussion had to do with the technology that Professor Salter says is great and is the best available. He says we're making progress by leaps and bounds by investing in it—I hope I'm not misinterpreting what he said—while, Mr. Sela, you say we shouldn't waste our money.

I guess we're trying to find a different way. I suppose many of us believe that if we're going to have security in the aviation sector in Canada, we'll have to use a multi-dimensional approach.

I hope you'll forgive me, Mr. Sela, if I say that the gold standard in Israel works great in Israel--I'm not going to question your perception--but also ask Professor Salter whether he agrees that the very unique situation in Israel, no matter how well it works, may not necessarily be a gold standard for Canada.

If that's his impression, perhaps he'd share with us the reason for that.

[Dr. Mark Salter]

Thank you very much for the question.

Mr. Sela can correct me if I misunderstand his point of view. He makes the argument—and I think it is one entirely appropriate for a country as small and, frankly, as vulnerable as Israel—that airport security needs to be integrated into the entire national security architecture. Given that it takes only 25 minutes to get from the West Bank or Gaza to Ben Gurion airport, there is a much different level of security that is required. For example, the checkpoints that exist in east Jerusalem or along the security wall provide information that can then be used to, if not “profile”, then at least “identify” who should be subject to more screening.

In Canada, we have a fundamentally different legal and political culture that says that airports and mobility are part of our right to move and are part of our right to freedom. We say that surveillance does not extend beyond, for example, the airport or the airport checkpoints to general public places or to other areas of concern.

So I think the threat that Canada faces is radically different from the one Israel faces. Canada has not experienced the same threats or attacks to airports that Israel has. We are not in the same geopolitical neighbourhood that Israel is in. I think it is only natural that they be far more sensitive to security in that way than we are.

[Joe Volpe, Liberal, Eglinton—Lawrence, ON]

I wonder then if I could maybe turn the question over to Mr. Sela.

If Professor Salter is right and we're looking at an entirely different system because of the conditions, in a country like ours, where we have in excess of 60 million passenger movements per annum, I'm wondering whether the advanced check--which I guess Professor Salter refers to as “profiling”—of potential or frequent passengers is, first, feasible in Canada, and two, desirable to look at 60 million-plus passengers and try to build a profile of the security risk for each one of them?

[Rafi Sela]

I don't think that's the question. The question is do you have a system, not the level of security. You are confusing two different issues--the system and the level.

I agree that Israel has a very, very high level of security, which it needs, but the system fundamentally should be the same. I can describe it to you as the volume on your radio. You have a system that works, and if your threats go up, you just turn up the volume button. You don't change the way you do your screening. You don't add equipment. You don't retrain your people. You don't invest in your airport security every year because other incidents have happened. You are running after the incidents instead of being in front of them.

Israel has never banned liquids. Israel has never looked at what people carry onto the airplane other than what the ICAO has banned. And we have never had any problem in the last 25 years...although I can tell you that we have 70 threats, real-time threats, which means that within two hours, somebody will blow something up near the airport or in the airport. And we never had an incident like that.

I agree that the level is very high. The system should be the same. Now, we're not profiling. I don't even suggest to you profiling. I don't even suggest you go to the system that we have in Israel of interviewing passengers. I suggest that instead of looking at everybody, create a trusted traveller and trusted worker identification process, in which travellers who would like to walk through security very fast would actually surrender some of their information to the authorities and be--as you wish--pre-screened as trusted travellers.

Once you have done this, you will tremendously reduce the number of people you have to check. Your checkpoints then become a very fast walk-through.

You do need cameras to watch who is coming into your airport, what kinds of cars, who is doing what, who is coming into your terminals, what's going on in the terminals, and then, of course, what's going on at the sleeves to the airlines.

We can argue until tomorrow whose system is better, but I think we have the proof that it works.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Monsieur Laframboise.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for being here, Mr. Salter and Mr. Sela. I think we're hitting a sensitive nerve. My question is for both of you. Mr. Salter can answer first, then Mr. Sela.

I'm concerned about what is going on in Canada, and I'll explain to you why. On December 25, we witnessed this change in American standards, and we realized that our Air Transport Security Authority, which hires private contractors for security services, did not have the required staff and had to call on all available police departments to assist it.

You're talking about systems. The security system we have established, which is to contract security out to private subcontractors, raises a lot of problems in my mind, particularly with what we are learning today. We want the employees to be reliable. There have been tenders and subcontractors have been changed. As you know, uniforms have disappeared. Journalists got their hands on uniforms and were able to penetrate certain airport areas. So that's frightening. We want security, but we don't want to pay the price for it.

I'd like to hear what you have to say about the fact that the Canadian Air Transport Security Administration uses a private subcontractor business and about our ability to retain appropriate staff in order to guarantee that the work gets done when there are alerts.

[Mark Salter]

I'm going to answer in French, even though I don't know certain technical terms in that language. I'm sorry about that.

First, there is an airport security system in Canada. It is a highly complex system because, at an airport, there are local police officers, border officers, investigators and auditors from Transport Canada, who audit CATSA's systems and procedures. There are also people for CATSA and perhaps other federal agencies, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It's a complex system. In my view, the line structure isn't clear.

If I understand correctly, CATSA is solely responsible for screening. The only things that employees try to detect are prohibited items. If they find some banned item, they can tell passengers that they may not be in possession of that item or hit the red button and call someone who can conduct an investigation. Under the current system, CATSA has very limited responsibilities.

In response to your question and to what Mr. Sela said, I would say that we in Canada have the technology to monitor the identity of airport workers and to ensure security. It's called the restricted area identity card. This card has won awards in the field of innovative technology in Canada. It is also a model for other air authorities in the world. Uniforms are part of the system and are not a threat to air security because the biometric card is very reliable.

Under the current system, the sole task of CATSA workers is screening. They must detect prohibited items. This is not a security function, but rather an observation function. If CATSA calls on subcontractors, I don't think that's a problem because their task is not really a security one. I'm aware of your security concern, but I think that, if this function remains an observation function, hiring subcontractors will not pose a real problem.

I'll now let Mr. Sela answer.

[Mario Laframboise, Bloc, Argenteuil—Papineau—Mirabel, QC]

Mr. Sela, go ahead please.

[Rafi Sela]

You know, now we're going into a system that I certainly don't approve of and you want me to explain why it doesn't work. That's very difficult for me.

I can tell you that the threat levels in Israel are going up and down a thousand times more than they go up and down in North America, and we never, ever have to hire outside people or reinforce the people who are working at the airport or the border crossing. The reason for that, again, is the system. You can turn it up, you can turn it down, but you never change the system. That's why I'm so adamant: get the system going. You have one place at the airport where you want to check everybody.

The card that Professor Salter has so well described is a nice technology, but it works in Canada. [Inaudible--Editor]...in Hong Kong or in Singapore. More importantly, does it replace the TWIC card in the United States? No.

So you're going about doing technology in your own little backyard hoping the rest of the world will go with you. This, in my opinion, is not the way to do it. My opinion is that in the case of aviation security, ICAO needs to play a much higher role in enforcing standards for security, like they do in safety. I've been in front of ICAO twice. I haven't been very successful with it.

I think if Canada wants to play a role in this, Canada, the United States, England, Germany, Russia should come in front of ICAO and say, “Listen guys, enough play, it's time to do. Come up with some regulations that all the airports will follow and we will enforce them.” This is the only way you can come up with a system that works.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Merci, Monsieur Laframboise.

Mr. Bevington.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the two witnesses. I've had the pleasure of hearing their opinions in the past. I appreciate their scholarly nature and their practical nature as well.

You know, I view this system at the airports we have as like the Maginot line in France. It looks pretty impressive in the front, but all you have to do is go around and all the security is gone. I also look at what's happened in North America, the three major incidents of terrorism whether Air India, 9/11, this latest incident, and they seem to be failures of security information, not of airport systems per se but the failure to communicate information. That gets to a couple of things.

One of them, Mr. Salter, is what you're talking about, the complexity of the jurisdictions that service the airport security. We have that even in Parliament where we have Transport Canada responsible for physical security at airports and we have Public Safety responsible for things like secure flight designations. We have no coordination.

Is this something that both of you can agree is a problem at our airports?

[Dr. Mark Salter]

Without question, there is a real dynamic at Canadian airports. Transport Canada describes the passenger protect list, which is immediate threats to aviation, and it is the airline agents who inform the passenger of their ability to board or not board the flight. They then phone a 1-800 number that connects them with the TC folks. The local police are responsible for interdiction, particularly of CATSA, but CATSA has no role in either intelligence gathering or intelligence utilization. Their only job is to look for objects. That's it. It's only objects. So Transport Canada and maybe the police have ideas about who the individuals are, but CATSA just looks for objects.

Were it possible to create reliable intelligence about aviation security, then I would be very excited to see that used. I'm personally not convinced that we have either a global system or even a national system that allows us to identify those threats with enough certainty or with enough timeliness to actually manage it.

So intelligence sharing is certainly useful, and it's certainly helpful, but remember that we would need an equivalent surveillance system to make sure that we understood when those people were entering and leaving the airports.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Sela.

[Rafi Sela]

Well, there is a system. I hate to say it again and again, but there is a system. We have a platform by which we can alert the cellphone of a CATSA employee when somebody is a suspect. We have a system that automatically--I say it again, automatically--detects threats. We have a system that makes intelligence agencies share their information without their giving away the store, which we were trying to convince the Americans to look at.

There are systems available. The problem is that the American TSA is entrenched in their security standard of doing it the way they do it: like an elephant in a china store, coming into a terminal, turning the terminal upside down, taking the aviation business almost out of business, and not doing security.

And nobody does anything about it. You can debate it to death. The essence is that you need to have your security agency, which is one of the best in the world, share information in real time with those people who encounter the danger. It is available. You can use it.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Another topic is the full-body scanner.

Mr. Salter, you talked about the ability of these scanners to see ceramic objects. We had evidence in the last meeting that CATSA felt that the body pat was equivalent to the full-body scan.

If you have trained personnel who are looking for identification of psychological elements or people under stress, would not the pat-down be a more effective device in determining from individuals their relative state of mind when going through a scanning system? In other words, can't human beings judge other human beings better than a machine judges human beings?

When we have two systems that we've put in place...and one may detect ceramic devices, but we heard evidence last time that the idea of knives and guns being the biggest threat anymore is gone because of the hardened cockpit doors. We're really looking for explosives now; that's really the biggest threat we have for aircraft.

What system do you think would be more effective in actually determining that?

[Dr. Mark Salter]

I think this gets to the meat of my disagreement with Mr. Sela, and that's about behavioural profiling.

I'm going to be as provocative as possible to make the distinction between the two arguments extremely clear.

I do not believe one has behavioural profiling that is independent of culture. I think we need to be wary of engaging a system of behavioural profiling that makes the same assumptions about how we react to stress and authority. An obvious example is eye contact with individuals who are in a higher position of authority. In western culture, we take that as a sign of respect and a sign of confidence, whereas in other cultures it's read in an entirely different way.

I know that Mr. Sela will be able to speak to this in a different way, but I'm concerned that the behavioural profiling brings with it certain racial, ethnic, and linguistic stereotypes that we would not wish to follow.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Mr. Sela.

[Rafi Sela]

I fail to understand how we're now comparing profiling with body scanners. They're not the same equipment to do the same thing. Body scanners are just an extension of the regular X-ray machines. And they do nothing.

Let me tell you something. X-ray machines and body scanners are all operated by people. If the people are not well trained, or they're tired, or they don't have time to look at the screen because they are engaged in talking to other people, what good does it do? It's not 100% effective anyway.

I am under strict constraints of security, but I'm telling you again, we have compromised the body scanners too many times with explosives that could bring down a 747--I know how to do it, and I could explain it to people with security clearance--but you will never, ever see it in the scanner like that.

My idea, again, is use the current equipment--the manned portals with the metal detectors, the X-ray machines--and put on some new devices that have been developed, that sniff explosives, drugs, and biohazards. Go with that instead of looking at the naked-person image that people won't look at after awhile and anything can be smuggled through.