When we were flying from SFO last year, we spotted an unattended suitcase in the check-in desk queue. Naturally, we told the nearest TSA agent. Imagine how shocked we were when he seemed totally disinterested. He told us someone had probably left it for a minute, and had we asked the people around? After some encouragement, he asked the people around and after finding no owner, picked it up and moved it out of the queue to the side, still in the main terminal.

I have dual Israeli citizenship and have flown to and from Tel Aviv quite a few times.

* The line interviewers are smart people, and it's seen as a good first job after military service. In other places this might be seen as a dead-end or undesirable job.

* The atmosphere in Ben Gurion is very calm because everyone feels safe (or at least I do).

* The only time I've seen any mild panic was due to my (late) great-aunt. She was a neurosurgeon, but could be alarmingly absent-minded in daily life. She'd taken my sister and I to the airport for our flight back to London, back when we were both in our teens. For some reason, my great aunt had a kind of small suitcase on wheels with her that day, and when my sister and I stood in the queue, she left it next to us and went off to find the bathroom. The line moved forwards and the suitcase didn't. The security guards spotted this fact within about 30 seconds, and started asking whose the bag was. We didn't realise it was my aunt's, and after nobody claimed it they started ushering us all back and making radio calls. When my aunt came back we all got an earful from the security staff.

Article leaves out the very real and very big catch:

"Israel values its security, and pays for it. According to an analysis by Bloomberg News, Israel spends around 10 times more per passenger than the United States does."

A little more on that:

"[An analyst] estimated El Al's security bill at $100 million a year, which amounts to $76.92 per trip by its 1.3 million passengers. Half is paid by the Israeli government," Peter Robison wrote. The United States, in comparison, spent in 2008 $5.74 billion to monitor and protect 735,297,000 enplanements, or around $7.80 a passenger."

The TSA system is a production line - hire cheap unskilled labor, and train around a process and manuals.

In the USA the Israeli version would be very difficult in addition to very costly.

That doesn't even take into account the question of the uproar the system would cause with the suggestion of racial profiling.

References via:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...

and

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/01/07/would_you_pay...