Security Theater

One Man Failed to Light His Shoe on Fire in 2001. Americans Removed Their Shoes at Airport Security for the Next Nineteen Years, While Undercover Investigators Carried Weapons Past Screeners in 67 of 70 Attempts.

On 22 December 2001, Richard Reid boarded American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami with explosives built into his shoes. He then failed to detonate them. He could not get the fuse to light, passengers and crew noticed a man attempting to set fire to his own footwear, and he was restrained for the remainder of a flight that diverted to Boston. Nobody was killed. The device never functioned.

The Transportation Security Administration made shoe removal mandatory for all passengers in 2006. The requirement was lifted on 8 July 2025, after nineteen years, on the grounds that improvements in screening technology and a layered security system had made it unnecessary.

The Intervening Period

In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general sent covert teams through airport checkpoints carrying mock explosives and prohibited weapons. The teams got them through in 67 of 70 attempts, a failure rate of 95 percent. Follow-up testing reported in 2017 found the agency still failing a majority of trials.

These results were obtained at checkpoints where every passenger was in stockinged feet. The shoes were being screened. It was the rest of the process that was not stopping anything.

What the Rule Was Measuring

The shoe requirement had one clear property, which is that it was visible. Several hundred million people a year performed it, in public, in a queue, and the performance was the only part of the system most travellers ever observed. The red team results were not visible. They were classified until they leaked, and they described the part of the checkpoint the passenger cannot see.

This is the durable asymmetry in security policy. A measure that is conspicuous and useless is politically stable, because everyone can see it working, in the sense of see it happening. A measure that is invisible and ineffective attracts no attention at all until an inspector general writes it down.

The Reason It Ended

The rule was not repealed because the evidence turned against it. The evidence had been against it, publicly, for a decade. It was repealed because the scanners improved to the point where the agency could say the shoes were being adequately screened without being removed, which allowed the requirement to be dropped as a technical upgrade rather than as a correction.

This distinction matters more than it appears. Nothing in the 2025 announcement conceded that the preceding nineteen years had been unnecessary. The policy simply became obsolete, which is the least costly way for a rule to end, and the reason so many rules end that way.

The Arithmetic

One man, on one flight, failed to ignite a device in his shoe. In response, roughly two million passengers a day removed their footwear on a concrete floor for the better part of two decades, while the agency conducting the screening was demonstrably unable to detect weapons carried past it by its own investigators.

The liquid restrictions, introduced in 2006 after a plot that was also disrupted before anyone boarded, remain largely in place. They are subject to the same logic and await the same eventual scanner upgrade, at which point they too will end quietly, as an improvement.

Filed from public reporting:

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