5 Investigates: Looking into soft targets from Brussel’s attacks.
Congressman says security focuses too narrowly on airport gate area
The attacks in Brussels reveal common vulnerabilities in the U.S.: the national rail system and the area outside airport security.
"Our security focuses... too narrowly on the gate and other areas, and not enough on the whole footprint of the airport,” said Congressman Bill Keating.
He requested a federal accounting study on the topic and said the conclusions are just in. "We have to do a broader risk assessment of the whole footprint of an airport, and indeed today's strike in Brussels is a lesson learned that we can take home to the United States as a result of it,” Keatng explained.
Trains are a different challenge.
5 Investigates has put a spotlight on rail security over the past several months. We have shown you armed Homeland Security police officers on patrol at South Station and Amtrak Police with their bomb-sniffing dogs. But we also revealed the difficulty of securing train stations, intentionally wide open, no checkpoints, no security lines.
Congressman Stephen Lynch hosted a closed-door summit on rail security last month in Boston which drew elected officials and representatives from the FBI, Homeland Security and the NSA. The topic was how to make rail travel in this country more secure.
"There are so many portals to that rail connection. That's something we have to look very closely at in the United States,” Congressman Lynch said today. "Right now we spend 98 percetn of our security money on aviation security. We spend 2 percent on rail and port and we have to reconcile that difference because of the number of people we have traveling by rail every single day."
With rail attacks in Madrid, London, Russia and now Brussels, experts said an attack on trains is quite likely to happen here in the United States as well.
“I think our public officials, our elected officials, are aware of that possibility,” said Northeastern University security expert Sean Burke.
Burke said we need to reassess the resources that we are putting towards security and investigate whether there are improvements we can make. He said regular travelers will most likely be the first to recognize if something appears wrong, and must be vigilant.