Well, be glad you're alive to complain. A few hundred people who walked down the jetway early on September 11, 2001 were martyred because airport screening was a too-leaky sieve.

It's still a sieve, and always will be. As a process, in the systems engineering sense, screening forms a mesh to try to catch evil-doers. Like every process with human and mechanical parts -- as any systems engineer will testify -- screening inevitably suffers occasional leaks and gaps and failures. The best we can do is make that mesh finer, and smarter. Screening people at airports, both at random and with focused profiles, isn't new. Remember that simpler era when the concern for most Americans was hijacking to Cuba?

Though airplane cockpit doors are being armored, and closed-circuit TV will give the flight crew important surveillance of the passenger compartment, that big but confining enclosure of an airliner's fuselage remains a tempting soft target. The innocent passengers on just one crowded jumbo jet outnumber the people burned beyond recognition in the recent Rhode Island nightclub disaster and the subway fire holocaust in South Korea, combined. And all the essential control wires and cables needed to keep an airplane flying run along the vulnerable sides of the passenger compartment, and cargo compartment below.

Profiling per se has important and wide applications. It's an essential tool of peacetime law enforcement, though it started to get a bad name when "ethnic" was put before "profiling" and some abusive cops went too far. It seems that thanks to lawsuits and lots of media attention, that particular problem was largely cleaned up. Profiling takes many forms, from judging someone's appearance, to assessing their behavior and responses to key loaded questions, to patterning a serial killer's modus operandi. Profiling also works as textual analysis of letters or broadcasts -- for perps running the gamut from the Unibomber to UBL. Profiling is entertainment too. Look how many TV series and movies involve a police "profiler" or forensic psychologist in the cast of characters.

And that leads to my crucial point here. Homeland security profiling and Hollywood-as-industrial-technique intersect. At the moment, that intersection could be one of our major blind spots. That blind spot might not be big enough anymore to drive a truck through (read truck bomb), but it might be leaky enough for another Al Qaeda attack team to walk through with their heads held high -- or held low to simulate osteoporosis.

I was at a Current Strategy Forum last summer (June, 2002), at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Inevitably, airport security came up. Complaints about delays, about senseless detaining of little old ladies and even "strip searches" of infants in diapers, were voiced by the panelists and audience alike. Among the diverse and distinguished speakers, one stated that security checks ought to concentrate solely on the obvious danger, described as "angry young Arab males."

You can see what the speaker was getting at. There are just four things dangerously wrong with what he said. Each of these words, "angry," "young," "Arab," and "male" are all based on hidden assumptions, and the composite profile resulting might be overly constrained. We've seen young female suicide bombers in the Israel/Palestinian conflict. We've seen non-Arabs convert to Islam and then become extremely violent Islamists. What does "anger" look like if you've taken a load of Valium or drank half a pint of vodka? And who says the attacker has to be young? An older person, suffering from some terminal disease like inoperable cancer, could make the perfect homicide bomber. In the toolkit of Hollywood storytelling, the "I'm dead in six months anyway" device is almost a cliché.

But it gets worse. Every one of the traits involved in "angry young Arab male" -- even if said traits do apply precisely to the attack team in Al Qaeda's next lethal strike -- can be concealed through clever deceptions and diversions. Such tactics are as old as war itself. The weapons in a well planned anti-profiling campaign would be a "Bodyguard of Lies." That phrase belongs, I think, to Winston Churchill, from a different good war. The tools, this time, would have more in common with Steven Spielberg.

In case that sounded cryptic, let me be clear: If a group of terrorists can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars learning to fly large commercial aircraft, they can spend money to master acting and makeup skills. The "angry young Arab male" could, with professional coaching and training, and hard-nosed rehearsals before a ruthless "director," learn to pass himself off as a little old non-Arab lady. When is a man not a man? Think Tootsie or Mrs. Doubtfire. When is an oldster not an oldster? Remember how the villain in The Day of the Jackal aged his appearance by thirty years, supposedly by ingesting bullet propellant? Remember Marlon Brando with cotton stuffed in his cheeks, to look jowly on that classic of classics, The Godfather?

Acting workshops can be as much a threat to our national security as flight school! Maybe more so in 2003 and 2004, since 9/11/01 made flying lessons a high-profile marker (pardon the pun) of potential hostile intent. Acting school, presumably, is still wide open ... and class is in session right now.

Hollywood can play an important role in homeland defense. The movie industry did it for our country in World War Two, and did it well, with infotainment to maintain home-front morale, celebrities to help on war bond drives, and artists creating proud unit insignia for combat formations fighting overseas. This time, the role (oops, another pun) could be different. To a professional acting teacher or cosmetician or wardrobe-costume specialist, the fake "nice little old lady" would give off subtle indicators of falsehood -- in appearance, in behavior -- that should be itemized through painstaking consultation with federal authorities. Those indicators could be things the typical airport screener might not otherwise ever know or think to look for. The list of telltale tags of fakery needs a seasoned team of insider experts to draw it up effectively -- trustworthy folks who've worked with every trick of the trade on stage and screen.

This resulting profile, of Hollywood-like make believe turned bad, deserves a high priority. The tag list ought to be kept very classified, too. There's no sense in giving the enemy helpful hints to improve their act.

JoeBuff.Com / Joe Buff Inc. Joe Buff, President Dutchess County, New York E-Mail readermail@JoeBuff.Com