Heathrow Airport is a horrible place: overcrowded, dirty and unable to cope with the volume of traffic. A few days ago, Terminal 5 was opened. As a result of the demented decision by the British Airports Authority, the Spanish-owned company which has a monopoly franchise on UK airports, to blend international and domestic passengers going through the terminal, BAA has decided to fingerprint everyone who goes through terminal five. Soon all passengers going out of Heathrow, and other BAA airports, such as Gatwick, will be affected. The queues will get worse, and ironically, so will the vulnerability of passengers to terrorist attack during peak times. One hates to think what it will be like during the summer holidays and over the Christmas break.
Richard Morrison has a good old rant in the Times of London today about this issue. He points out that BAA has introduced the system at its own behest, not because of the government. For once, a libertarian cannot just bash the state for this, at least not as the direct culprit. I have no problem per se in a private airport operator setting certain rules which customers are free to ignore by going elsewhere, but as BAA has a monopoly, it hardly is a model of free market capitalism. BAA was privatised initially with its monopoly largely intact, which was a mistake. Of course, if passengers feel safer going to airports which demand iris scans, fingerprints, ID cards, body searches, intense questioning, and all other manner of intrusions into privacy, by all means go to these places. For the rest of us, even those who fear terrorism, we might prefer to take our chances and travel like free law-abiding adults, rather than convicted criminals.
For a good, sober look at the trade-offs with security measures and the unintended bad effects of things like this, this book is a good place to start. The author is not some hard-line civil libertarian and quite friendly to a lot of security ideas, but he understands that there is no security system in the world that is fail-safe and argues that it is about time people were allowed to weigh the risks more intelligently.
The system is being applied in a nested monopoloy of two close-to-government organisations. The relevant BAA terminal is exclusively for BA use.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using biometrics to authenticate boarding passes. Trouble is, it is really difficult for the punter to distinguish this from an all singing all dancing surveillance system.
If only journalists would get as excited about the horrific fate of PNR data from all flights as they do about the relatively unimportant matter of fingerprints.
I don’t give a toss about checking my fingerprint is the same in two places. I am extremely unhappy about details of my home, my itineraries, and my credit cards being passed to any government agency, home or away, that wants them.
BAA makes its money from its shopping malls, doesn’t it? The longer people must wait the better for BAA’s bottom line. Security is just an excuse.
London’s only major airport that is not owned by BAA (Luton) is a much more pleasant experience to go through than any of the three (Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted) that are. I go through all four airports frequently, so I do certainty know this from hard experience. Whether this is because it is smaller (although by most standards it is still a reasonably large airport) or whether it is because it is managed by a different company, I do not know. However, the way things are, we have no opportunity to find out. Privatising the three airports as one company was a terrible decision. The politicians and bureaucrats who were responsible for doing so deserve eternal contempt for having done so.
I’ve maneuvered through Heathrow airport many times and it is getting increasingly more difficult. The security precautions are ridiculous as compared to other major airports (JFK). I can only hope they will come to their senses. Get a Cheap Ticket To London