January 20, 2002	Sunday	Ziqa’ad 5, 1422

WASHINGTON: For now, forget an expensive, flashy, James-Bond approach to protecting the US against terrorists.

Four months after Sept. 11, America is focusing on homeland-security systems and gadgets that meet these criteria: They’re as cheap, fast, and unobtrusive as possible.

Indeed, Americans clearly yearn to boost security. Yet some of the more high-tech security solutions may be years away. And in the interim, Americans don’t want to be cowed by terrorism — or lose too much of the ease and convenience of life before Sept. 11. This approach, however, has some experts worrying that new safety measures won’t be sufficient.

Witness the airlines’ strategy for meeting today’s federal baggage-search deadline. They’re mostly using a bag-matching system, which ensures that every bag in a plane’s belly has an owner in a seat above. The other options — bomb-sniffing machines or dogs — are slower, more expensive, and more effective.

And rather than killing potential anthrax contamination by irradiating mail — which is slow and damaging — one high-profile new safety device ‘sniffs’ for contaminants, making it cheaper and faster than many of its competitors.

“People are pretty impatient,” says Philip Anderson, a homeland-security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here. The concern is that if airports are clogged up by many new security measures, “you’re going to slow the process to the point where it’s going to be very difficult to use commercial aviation as a means of travel,” he says. The same goes for ports, borders, and other security bottlenecks. Clearly, the national need for speed is sparking development of exotic devices that would impress even James Bond’s gadget guy, ”Q”.—Dawn/The Christian Science Monitor