New York — Did you pack your bags yourself? Have they been out of your possession? The questions asked of airline passengers aren't designed to trip up a terrorist, and that raises another question: Should passenger questioning be tougher?
Israel's airline, El Al, routinely interrogates passengers boarding its flights, often probing their background and travel plans. But its operation is a tiny fraction of the U.S. aviation system, and El Al's painstaking security methods would not transfer easily to U.S. airlines.
Some aviation security experts say tougher questioning could be a valuable tool in the United States, at least in theory. In practice, they admit, it would be unfeasible to subject all U.S. passengers to such interrogation and difficult to find an acceptable method of selecting a subset of travelers to be grilled.
Mary Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general and now a lawyer for victims of airline accidents, said intensified questioning would be worth trying but only after expert profilers developed an effective set of questions.
"We'd like to see a more scientific basis," she said. "Just delaying people while we ask more inane questions won't get us anywhere."
She stressed that authorities would have to develop sound criteria for selecting some passengers for thorough questioning.
"There's no way in the United States that you can ever do it on the basis of national origin or race," she said. "We're a melting pot."
El Al has no compunctions about profiling Arabs, even if Israeli citizens, and some foreigners routinely come under closer scrutiny than most Israeli Jews. While many passengers are asked only about their luggage, others might be asked to explain their itinerary or past travels recorded in their passports.
In the United States, Arab-Americans and civil liberties groups see pitfalls in emulating El Al.
"I don't know if that's a road we want to go down Israelizing our air transportation system," said Ibrahim Hooper of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations. "We've always been in favor of heightened security for everyone not offering an illusion of security by singling out people on the basis of ethnicity."
Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said any intensive questioning ought to be based on well-founded concerns about a specific individual.
"What we fear is that airline security is going to become a proxy for racial profiling," he said.
The federal government, with help from U.S. airlines, implemented a program in 1997 called the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System to root out potential terror suspects. CAPPS' defenders say it avoids racial or ethnic profiling, though some Arab-Americans have complained.
CAPPS collects information from airline reservation systems on passengers' travel history and, based on secret criteria, flags those who might pose a security risk. Those travelers' bags may undergo extra screening.
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