By SUSAN HELEN MORAN, for United Press International

WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 (UPI) –Privatization, a centralized command, and stricter federal regulations are the keys to improving airport security in the light of the events of Sept. 11, according to a new proposal from scholars at a California think tank.

The proposal, “Fixing Airport Security,” by Robert W. Poole Jr., and Viggo Butler, opposes the bill to create a new federal workforce in charge of passenger screening, which was passed unanimously by the Senate earlier this month.

“Before we rush into creating a new 28,000-person federal passenger-screening bureaucracy, it might make sense to start with a clean sheet of paper and ask what kind of system would best do the job of keeping airports safe,” says Poole, who is director of transportation studies at the libertarian Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles. “The overwhelming evidence from other countries, especially Israel, shows federalization does not work.”

Poole calls for a centralized authority at each airport, which would be under the command of the airport’s owners, not the federal government or the airlines, which are now responsible for passenger screening. Both the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, have published articles by Poole promoting these policies.

The proposal also states that the Federal Aviation Administration should impose strict new performance standards and serious fines for lapses in security measures, making airports legally liable for passenger security. Airports in London, Brussels, Belfast, Frankfurt, and Rome hire private security firms, Poole points out, and have found this model to work after 20 years’ of experience fighting terrorism.

Five years ago, Israel also privatized airport security. Now, the Ben Gurion Airport Authority in Tel Aviv hires a private firm, Amishav, to do passenger screening and other security functions.

An effective system must safeguard the entire airport, not just passenger screening, Poole says. The Senate’s proposed legislation, he says, contains “nothing about controlling access to the rest of the airport for the thousands of caterers, cleaners, refuelers and others who lack mandatory background checks or secure ID cards.”

Airports must be willing to pay more for better security personnel, as well, he says. The highly competitive airlines presently save on overhead by hiring screeners at little more than minimum wage, who are often poorly trained and unmotivated.

“You get what you pay for,” says Poole: turnover of passenger screeners is between 100 percent and 400 percent in this country compared with between 10 percent and 50 percent in Europe, where airports are in charge and pay higher wages for security personnel.

To pay for better private security, Pole suggests that airports could charge up to $4.50 as a “passenger facility fee,” which would go directly to the airport. In contrast, advocates of federalization propose a nationwide tax of several dollars on all airline tickets to pay for a federal workforce to conduct screening.

“The…problem with federalizing airport security…[is that] the system for hiring federal employees is so notoriously bad and inefficient that we could be hiring for two years before we actually get the federal work force up,” says Paul Light, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, told a think tank panel this month. “That’s why the Senate said we’re going to exempt this new work force from the civil service system. Well, that’s a heck of a note, isn’t it?”

Yet, analysts at other tanks believe that federalization of airport security is a necessary first step to secure the homeland.

“Eventually we can come to the European model, but right now, the federal government’s got to take over and run things,” says Larry Korb, director of studies at the influential New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. Korb favors the Senate bill and believes that the federal work force will function much like the police, as a government-sponsored security force to protect U.S. citizens against unlawful acts.

Still other policy analysts have abandoned the debate over who should be in charge of airport security and are focusing on specific technical proposals to bolster airline security.

Improved technology screening procedures and equipment could be the key, regardless of whether it’s privately or federally overseen, says Jim Lewis, director of technology and public policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Developing visas and passports with biometric fingerprints, for example, would stop impostors from using stolen or borrowed visas or passports, says Lewis. Facial screening machines at check-in would be quick and could look for a match between the passenger’s image and an image in a State Department or Immigration and Naturalization Services database of known terrorists, he says.

“Unlike most aspects of the challenge before us, which require complex political and military responses, there may be a technical fix that can prevent the diversion of commercial aircraft to deadly purpose,” wrote Alton Frye, director of the Congress and foreign policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, in a “Los Angeles Times” op- ed piece on October 19.

“Hijack alarms could be installed in cockpits and linked to automatic interlocks that prevent a hijacker from controlling the plane’s course … Planes should have multiple devices to signal that hijackers are taking over the cockpit, [including] messages sent automatically on the basis of any forced entry into the cockpit,” Frye wrote. “Once a coded signal was transmitted from a plane being hijacked, an onboard computer could freeze the plane on autopilot, pending release by the insertion of a prescribed code.”

Frye admits that implementing this and similar technological fixes would need close study and evaluation, but are worth pursuing.

“Added airport security might be needed but the measures chosen should not be applied in a broad and draconian way,” says Ivan Eland, director of defense policy at the Cato Institute.

Eland, a vehement opponent of federalization, recommends that new airport security measures address specific threats. “The ban against sharp metal objects aboard aircraft is a good one,” he says, but the bans on electronic ticketing and curbside check-in, however, seem to be an example of government measures that have only a tangential relationship to the problem of hijacking.

“We can only institute so many security measures to prevent terrorism before the burden to an open society is too great,” says Eland.

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Experts Differ on Fix for Airport Security