Are Florida airport perimeters a security risk?

Source: flatoday

Lurking for an hour on the perimeters of the state's busiest airports, including Orlando and Tampa, generally produced the same results. Police were rarely seen and, with the exception of Miami, never confronted the journalists from FLORIDA TODAY news partner The News-Press of Fort Myers.

Of five airport perimeters investigated by The News-Press, only at Miami International did authorities respond.

Eleven minutes after a reporter and photographer began walking along an 8-foot fence on the airport's west side, Miami-Dade police arrived in three cruisers. Officers demanded identification, ran background checks, then ordered the journalists off the property.

Holes large enough for a person to squeeze through were found in several perimeter fences. At Orlando, such a gap was found within 20 feet of a heavily used taxiway.

"Perimeter security? What perimeter security?" said Steve Elson, a retired Navy SEAL who in the 1990s headed a crack team of agents charged with testing airport security for the Federal Aviation Administration.

"Perimeter security is a joke. No one's paying any attention to it," he said. "And no one's going to until there's another 9-11 and a lot of people are killed."

Yep, what he said. In our alleged "War On Terrror," it might be a little easier to believe such a thing exists if we didn't see stories like this one on a weekly basis.

H/T Michelle Malkin

Technorati Tags: security, war on terror, airport security