Keep your shoes on

Our long national nightmare is over.

The requirement was instituted by the TSA in August 2006, nearly five years after an Al Qaeda-trained radical, Richard Reid, tried to detonate explosives concealed in his shoe during an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. Reid's plot was unsuccessful. A flight attendant found him acting suspiciously, and several passengers quickly moved to restrain him. The flight was diverted to Boston, where Reid was arrested and charged with numerous criminal counts related to terrorism. He eventually pleaded guilty to most of them and was sentenced to three consecutive life terms. He has been locked up ever since in the federal supermax prison in Colorado.

Why the TSA waited five years after Reid's abortive shoe bombing to institute its shoes-off rule has never been clearly explained, but in all that time no one else has tried to take down a plane using explosive footwear. Nor have any passengers ever been caught with a shoe bomb in the nearly two decades after the rule went into effect.

In other words, there has never been any evidence that making millions of travelers shed their shoes contributed to anyone's safety. It was all security theater — a ritual that looked tough and felt serious but did nothing to actually make air travel more secure. And it perfectly epitomized the TSA's obsession with stopping bad things rather than bad people — with screening for forbidden bottles of shampoo or corkscrews or lighters as if they posed deadly threats, instead of monitoring for behavior that represents a real threat to planes and their passengers.

From the day it was created, the TSA has specialized in fighting the last war and in overreacting to one-time long shots. One Islamist radical tried to hide explosives in his shoes, so hundreds of millions of travelers had to start removing their shoes. Another would-be terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attempted to hide a bomb in his underwear, so we all had to submit to full-body scans or (for several years) pat-downs. British officials learned of a plot to mix explosives in soft-drink bottles, so passengers were ordered to limit their liquids and gels to containers no bigger than 3.4 ounces. Terrorists based in Yemen hid two bombs inside printer cartridges and shipped them to addresses in Chicago — whereupon TSA announced that "toner and ink cartridges over 16 ounces will be prohibited on passenger aircraft in both carry-on bags and checked bags."

I often reflected in the years after 9/11 that if Osama bin Laden's terrorists had destroyed not four airliners on that terrible day but four crowded movie theaters, then Americans would have had to radically change the way they went to the movies — advance reservations would have become mandatory, audiences would have had to get to the cineplex (with photo ID) two hours early, and X-ray equipment operated by a vast new federal bureaucracy, the Theater Security Administration, would have scanned everyone entering and leaving. But at airports there would be no interminable security lines, a box cutter in your carry-on wouldn't raise any eyebrows, and you could arrive for your flight 20 minutes before departure. We would still be as vulnerable to a hijacking-massacre as we actually were on 9/11 — but almost no one would be thinking about that because the "last war" would have taken a different form.

Former TSA administrator Kip Hawley conceded in 2012 that the agency remained obstinately reactive. An agent's job should be "to manage risk, not to enforce regulations," he wrote. But by and large agents "focused almost entirely on finding prohibited items."

And even that they aren't very good at. The government's own "red team" tests — in which undercover inspectors try to smuggle weapons or contraband through security — have repeatedly shown that the TSA is easy to fool. In one 2015 investigation, for instance, agents got knives, guns, and mock explosives through checkpoints 67 out of 70 times — a 95 percent failure rate.

As Americans who travel abroad are aware, other countries never deemed it necessary to adopt the shoes-off rule. That includes countries in which the threat of terrorism is far more acute. In Israel, for example, security screening begins even before passengers enter the terminal, officials make a point of engaging in dialogue with almost everyone who's catching a plane, and travelers remain with their luggage until after the security check is completed. But nobody has to take their shoes off or remove their laptop from their bag to be scanned separately. Security agents there are watching for nervousness, inconsistencies, or suspicious behavior. They aren't preoccupied with confiscating bottled water or whether you're wearing a belt.

The TSA's ritualized absurdities have come at a steep cost. They waste billions of dollars annually. They consume countless hours of passengers' time. They treat everyone like a potential terrorist. To prove that no one is exempt, they have gone to the extreme of patting down grandmothers in wheelchairs, babies wearing diapers, and former US vice presidents.

Nearly a quarter-century after 9/11, there is no evidence that any of this has ever prevented a hijacking. "TSA has played next to no role in the biggest counterterrorism stories of the past two decades," journalist Darryl Campbell, who writes extensively about air travel and airline security, wrote in 2022. According to the think tank RAND, the overwhelming majority of terrorist plots — including schemes to attack US airports or planes — have been foiled by intelligence and security services. There hasn't been another 9/11, but not because blue-shirted agents made you take off your shoes and empty your pockets.

It is widely agreed that the two most effective deterrents to another hijacking have nothing to do with airport checkpoints. One was a physical change: the locking and reinforcing of cockpit doors, so that no terrorist could ever again breach the cockpit during flight. The other was psychological. The passengers on 9/11's United Flight 93, by overpowering the terrorists and forcing them to crash the plane into a field, prevented a far greater catastrophe that day — and thereby taught future travelers of the importance of fighting back.

The end of the shoes-off rule is long overdue. But it's just one small retreat in a long war of make-believe. The TSA remains fixated on creating the illusion of security rather than actually providing it. If the agency truly wants to protect travelers, it should abandon its theater of confiscated water bottles and trampled dignity and learn to focus instead on what truly keeps passengers safe.

But until that happens, we can at least keep our shoes on. It's a start.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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