Danny Westneat / Times staff columnist
Feeling of insecurity on ferries

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They say the security is not just for show. The FBI believes the state ferry system has been under terrorist surveillance.

Yet upstairs, walk-on passengers streamed unchecked onto the M/V Wenatchee. In five minutes, I saw six passengers carry on large suitcases or backpacks. A man wheeled on board a cart loaded with a duffel bag, two suitcases and a large cardboard box wrapped with duct tape.

Nothing was searched or sniffed. Nobody asked: "Hey, what's in the box?"

For all the hubbub, security on these ferries is a joke.

Last month I went to the Puyallup Fair. My backpack was searched, my baby stroller's storage compartment unloaded and checked.

So security is tighter at the fair than on the ferries — even though a terrorism suspect was casing the ferry system.

Shouldn't homeland security make more sense by now?

After 9/11, it was bound to take time to figure out how to make America safer without ruining life as we know it.

When they did pointless things such as temporarily ban curbside check-in, I excused it. I figured we'd eventually get it about right.

Three years on, these weak but pricey attempts at security are becoming indefensible.
 
The last ferry bombing — a blast in February that capsized a 1,747-passenger boat and killed 100 in the Philippines — was perpetrated by an al-Qaida member who walked on with 8 pounds of TNT in a box, as The Seattle Times' Mike Carter has reported.

This is an approach we are not even trying to stop. The ferries visually screen 5 percent of walk-ons — meaning there's sometimes a ferry worker there to size you up as you board.

They won't search you or your stuff. The very idea has many ferry-users and the American Civil Liberties Union in conniptions. They say it might be unconstitutional. Or worse, inconvenient.

U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island, says ferry commuters are in a hurry. They dash for the boats "while brushing their teeth and shaving. We can't have them stopping for random searches."

Yet we search people at airports and at the King County and federal courthouses.

In New York, where they know their terrorism, all cars have been banned from ferries. Here, we can't even look through our backpacks. Or find money for bomb dogs to sniff crates toted onto the boats.

Inslee said this week it costs $400,000 for more dogs. Coincidentally, that's the size of an anti-terrorism grant the feds inexplicably gave Bellevue for ... new traffic cameras.

It's easy to second-guess, I know. But the entire homeland-security enterprise is a guessing game. If the best guess is that ferries are juicy, vulnerable targets, let's protect them — using dogs and searches, if that's what it takes.

Or take an educated guess and protect something else.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday.

Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.