China News Agency, New York, September 7th (Reporter Wang Fan) US media reported on the 7th that as the 20th anniversary of the "September 11" terrorist attack approaches, air travel has once again become the focus of attention.
People generally believe that in the past two decades after the incident, there have been more and more security checks at US airports, and passenger privacy has become less and less.
On September 11, 2001, four American airliners were hijacked by terrorists. Two of them hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one hit the Pentagon, and the other crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the entire incident.
According to the "Wall Street Journal" report, the US aviation industry fell into a downturn after the "9.11" incident, and it took three years for civil aviation traffic to return to the level before the terrorist attacks.
The report said that the recovery of civil aviation traffic does not mean that the flight experience is as usual. What airport passengers feel is that the security check process has become strict and complicated.
Take off your shoes, take off your belt, take out your baggage for inspection, wait for scanning... People have to plan more queue time in advance and accept the work of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) established by the US government after the "9.11" incident Personnel inspection.
In order to save time in queuing, more and more Americans have joined a "Trusted Passenger Program" called "PreCheck" in recent years.
After passengers join this program, they can use the special fast-track security checkpoint at the airport, eliminating the need to take off their shoes, unbuckle their belts, and take out their laptops.
In this regard, the "Denver Post" quoted the Associated Press report on the 7th that travelers must provide personal information including fingerprints, work organization, and address when applying to join the "advance security check" program.
As the twentieth anniversary of the "9.11" incident approached, Congress approved TSA to use more private vendors to collect information from applicants.
This has aroused public concern about the risk of privacy leakage.
Jay Stanley, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union, a New York-based non-profit organization, said that there is currently no way to prove the relationship between TSA's collection of this information and ensuring aviation safety.
In the face of various doubts, TSA said that it is still optimistic about this plan, and said that it hopes to increase the number of people participating in the "advanced security check" program from about 10 million to 25 million.
Another official confirmed that TSA has begun testing kiosk equipment equipped with facial recognition technology at the airport, which means that photos taken by passengers when applying for "advance security screening" qualifications may be connected to the network in the future.
On the 7th, the "Washington Post" also discussed the issue of air travel safety.
The report cited the views of experts such as Nicholas Rasmussen, former director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, saying that stricter airport security checks do make air passengers safer, but with technological development, the current security check system cannot ensure There will be no terrorist attacks in the future. Therefore, relevant departments are faced with the challenge of constantly updating security inspection measures, and the future airport security inspection requirements will only become more.
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