Ten years ago, British prosecutors finally nailed the terrorists who changed the face of international air travel. Making life smoother for passengers has taken longer.
Three ringleaders in September 2009 were finally convicted of plotting to bomb transatlantic aeroplanes using liquid bombs disguised as harmless drinks.
They intended to kill even more people than in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, according to security officials, before the plot was broken up in its early stages.
Even though their plans were foiled in 2006, the plotters had a major impact. The plot led to a global ban on carrying liquids aboard aircraft – including, in the early days, ink-filled pens – causing chaos at departure gates, delays and the cancellations of hundreds of flights.
A decade later, security officials still grapple with the fallout from the plot as some restrictions remain on carrying fluids aboard aircraft, with knock-on effects of delays and queues at security.
The National witnessed technology under development in a crowded laboratory in the Welsh capital of Cardiff that only now has the potential to bring back the travel experience of the pre-plot days.
But the techniques to screen people and their belongings – incorporating artificial intelligence, machine learning and scanning techniques used by astronomers – highlight the increased sophistication of technology needed to tackle modern terrorism.
From smart cameras on streets to facial recognition software, the march of science in confronting terrorism has been accompanied by public disquiet about what it means to live in a society subject to often unseen scrutiny.
In the past decade, concerns have grown over the nature of "mass surveillance" of populations, as revealed in leaks by US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, challenging politicians to consider what people are prepared to accept to stay safe.
Western governments have been accused of sweeping up huge amounts of information with little evidence that this has improved security. Police in the UK have suggested they foiled at least 22 attacks since March 2017, but the benefits of surveillance technology are not always clear to the public because of the secrecy of the work.
“It is extremely difficult, if not impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of surveillance programmes,” said Dutch academics Michelle Cayford and Wolter Pieters, of the Delft University of Technology, in a 2018 paper that looked at what intelligence officials thought about how well surveillance technology worked.
“Intelligence work is like putting together pieces of a puzzle … it becomes difficult to evaluate one small piece of the puzzle that by itself seems insignificant but is necessary for the completion of the picture.”
Britain has been cited by campaigners as one of the most-surveilled societies in the western world. A study by the BBC in 2009 suggested one south London borough had more security cameras than in the cities of Boston, Johannesburg and Dublin combined.
The decade started with police in Britain’s second city of Birmingham apologising for putting 200 security cameras in two largely Muslim areas. Most of the cameras were designed to identify car number plates moving in and out of the areas, a technique first developed in the 1970s in the UK.
Community leaders were led to believe that the cameras were supposed to stop crime and anti-social behaviour. But police were forced to remove them when it emerged they were funded in part from a counter-terrorism budget, sparking anger that innocent Muslims were being unfairly targeted.
Similar complaints – with more advanced technology – continue, with police in London forced to apologise at the end of this decade after sharing images of crime suspects with private land owners operating cameras using facial-recognition software.
The technology scans faces in a crowd and checks them against a watch list of suspects but the London scheme was operating across a newly-developed site without oversight from any public body.
And the police in South Wales – which is leading the development of the technology – was taken to court in a separate case over the mass scanning of crowds. Police won the case but face further scrutiny from regulators over the technique.
“Facial recognition cameras have crept onto our streets, making border style security and frequent identity checks a norm,” said privacy group Big Brother Watch, which has campaigned against the technology.
But a rash of terrorist attacks in the UK since 2017 – including by a suicide bomber at a pop concert in Manchester that killed 22 and three attacks at landmark bridges in the capital – have increased concerns about terrorism in the public mind and persuaded government to act.
Alongside low-tech solutions such as car-stopping bollards in public places, the private sector has invested in increasingly smart ways to protect the public.
Technology developed to study deep-space objects has been adapted by a British company to create the airport scanner intended to end the long queues at security checkpoints.
The scanner picks up heat signatures to map a subject and then uses artificial intelligence to identify potentially dangerous items hidden under clothing. The system is so sensitive that it can identify a 100-watt lightbulb from 800,000 kilometres away.
The system has the potential to speed up the security process by five times as the passengers do not need to take off their outer clothing or stand still while they are scanned, according to the developers based at Cardiff University.
The developers have already received significant interest in the system from the Middle East, according to Sequestim, the commercial venture based at the Welsh university.
They say those being scanned would not necessarily notice they were being scanned. Any warning of a potentially dangerous object hidden beneath clothing would be transmitted to a member of security via an earpiece.
The National saw a prototype of the scanner in action at Cardiff with researchers tucking a gun, bullets and other objects inside their clothing. The fake firearm showed up as a dark gun-shaped patch against a body shape. The system is set to be tested at a UK airport in 2020.
Ken Wood, of Sequestim, said the company had received inquiries from national border security units. They said it would be ideal to protect royal palaces, places where VIPs gathered, sports stadiums, prisons and for use in airports, where the company hopes to place its cameras from 2021.
“We can screen people walking down the street or entering public buildings so there’s an enormous application for public safety in any areas where people gather in large numbers,” he said.
“In the aviation world, there’s a huge problem. The number of people flying is set to double in 10 to 15 years. The strain on security infrastructure at airports is enormous – and it will continue to grow.”
