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But another government had identified him as a person of some concern. British officials barred Abdulmutallab from entering last May after he submitted the name of a questionable school in an application to extend his student visa. That fib bounced him to a U.K. suspicious-persons list. "If you are on our watch list," British Home Secretary Alan Johnson told BBC Radio on Monday, "then you do not come into this country." But under British policy, this information was not shared with U.S. officials because Abdulmutallab had not been linked to terrorism.
Will any of this change now? Some lawmakers are pushing for less restrictive rules about who may and may not be put on the no-fly list. And Obama seemed to call for more-aggressive investigation of people when they are first named to the TIDE list. But that will take time and manpower and political will.
2 | The search-and-scan system at airports can be beat
Security teams have beefed up airport body-scanning and searching protocols continually since 9/11, but terrorists have been far more aggressive about exploiting their weaknesses. Part of the problem is our chronically reactive approach to airline security: in military terms, the authorities are always fighting the last war. Ever since Richard Reid tried to ignite his shoes, loaded with the explosive pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), on a flight from Paris to Miami in 2001, U.S. travelers have had to remove their footwear for scanning before boarding. After a plot to blow up several airliners over the Atlantic with small amounts of liquid explosives was uncovered in London in 2006, travelers were barred from carrying containers with more than 3.4 oz. (100 ml) of fluid each through security checkpoints.
Around the world, security measures remain inconsistent--and inconsistently applied. Abdulmutallab tried to get around the barriers by sewing an 80-g packet of PETN into the crotch of his underpants, betting that if he boarded in Lagos and transferred in Amsterdam, he would make his way undetected onto the Detroit-bound flight. That worked: during his layover, Abdulmutallab most likely encountered nothing more than ID checks and a metal detector at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. He was betting that any pat-down--unlikely as that was--would not come close to the tiny bomb in the crotch of his trousers. Fellow passenger Ghonda, who transferred to Flight 253 after a flight from Ghana, reported that although he passed through a metal detector, neither his bags nor his body were hand-searched.