Abstract
This paper will review critical Infrastructure and airport security before and after 9/11, and the improvements made to fix it. The approach to airport security and critical infrastructure should be a global effort that exists in when finding ways to protect all key assets. September 11, 2001, opened they eyes of many around the world which made other think about the vulnerabilities that exist in airport security and all critical infrastructures Some of the vulnerabilities were inadequate security screening, failing to identify weapons and poorly trained TSA workers. Airport Security is an essential part of everyday society. It is a valuable asset to the government and the economy. For these reasons, it makes airports easy targets for attacks.
Critical Infrastructure and Airport Security
Critical Infrastructure for years has been the aim for a wide range of adversaries globally; It is a movement that appears to have no end point.
” According to the U.S. Patriot Act, Critical Infrastructure as “systems and assets whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety or any combination of those matters” (School, 2017). The troubling events on September 11, 2001, exposed various weak points in Americas’ transportation infrastructure (Wortzel, 2003).
The question now is what steps are being taken to protect and secure airports and what are the current airport security measures. What was airport security like before 9/11 and the progress since 9/11?
For most, there is an understanding that protecting America’s Critical Infrastructure requires cohesion from more than one level of the government. Protecting our Infrastructure like airports can be a daunting and tedious task to handle. Providing adequate airport security is something that will need to be propagated. This is a task that is too complex to be isolated with no partnership. Since the private sector runs and owns about 85 percent of America’s critical Infrastructures and valuable assets. For this reason, a majority of the knowledge, expertise, and resource needed to plan and take better protective precautions will come from outside of the government (Wortzel, 2003). Our government is ultimately responsible for setting standards to implement a coordinated approach to all aspects of critical infrastructure protection. Over time, the threat to airport security has increased; and will continue to change as the threat changes. Since 2001, the proliferation of suicide bombings has matured into a real danger to airport security (Franziska Hofer, 2012).
“According to Hofer (2012), “in the last decade, these changes in threat profiles, in combination with efforts to facilitate transportation by air for passengers, led to massive investments into development of new security technology” (p. 278).
Airports...