America is finally moving past its post-9/11 security theater

Vox

2 days ago

is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk.
On Tuesday, the TSA — a federal agency not known for its generosity — gave American travelers a gift: They will no longer have to take off their shoes when going through airport security. 'I think most Americans will be very excited to see they will be able to keep their shoes on,' said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The statement was, somewhat unusually for Noem, absolutely true.
The shoe removal ritual has been standard practice for so long that it's easy to forget why it started. The British al-Qaeda recruit Richard Reid's nearly successful effort to bring down an American Airlines flight mid-air in 2001 with explosives hidden inside his sneakers exposed an apparent hole in airport security. Within a few years, almost all but the youngest and oldest US air passengers had to get used to the awkward habit of holding their shoes as they shuffled through the screening line. (Unless, of course, they shelled out for TSA's PreCheck system.)
The policy change is an implicit marker of underappreciated progress. The threat of devastating terror attacks in the US, so long an obsession among both officials and the public, has greatly receded. According to the Global Terrorism Index, the US suffered only three terror attacks in 2024, resulting in just one death — the lowest number since 2010 — while the European Union only experienced 34 attacks, leading to just five deaths. Few would have predicted that decline in the dark days of late 2001 or even 2005, when 20 years ago this month, 52 people were killed in a devastating attack on London's transport system.
What drove the decline
It might be hard to believe as you're herded bleary-eyed through a Newark airport security line at 6 am, but the TSA has actually gotten better at screening for threats.
Beginning in the late 2010s, the TSA began rolling out automated screening lines (ASLs) that were equipped with multi-view computed topography (CT) scanners. These machines generate 3D images of carry-on bags, enabling reliable detection of the same kind of explosives Reid tried to use in 2001. Studies have shown that the CT scanners, which are being rolled out in all major US air hubs, match the old system of X-ray but also offer physical inspection for threat detection, which helped pave the way for the TSA to retire the 'shoes-off' rule.
Beyond airport screening, the massive holes in US security that existed before 9/11 have largely been closed. Every traveler who crosses US land and air borders undergoes biographic vetting against the Terrorist Screening Database. Compare that to the pre-9/11 period, when passenger identities were only spot-checked against watchlists if they were specifically flagged pre-boarding, meaning there was no real systematic advance collection of traveler data. The US has worked with other countries to maintain and share data on potential threats; better cross-border policing has helped disrupt multiple terror plots before they could be completed.
Perhaps most of all, the nature of the terror threat has changed significantly. In the post-9/11 era, the US faced highly organized international terror cells that were set on attacking the West. Today, after more than two decades of counterterrorism operations, those cells have largely been destroyed. Al-Qaeda's core has been splintered, while ISIS lost its last territorial hold in 2019. Though lone-wolf attacks can still occur, what's left are largely disorganized fighters who struggle to put together an organized plot.
We're not in the clear yet
More than most of the subjects I write about for Good News, the decline of terrorism requires a whole mess of caveats.
First of all — because even at their peak, terror attacks in the West were rare — it's more difficult to be confident that we're truly seeing a long-term, meaningful decline. It's entirely possible that the day after this is published, an attack could take place somewhere in the US.
That's exactly what happened on January 1 this year, when Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an American-born Houston resident who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, killed 14 people in a lone-wolf attack in New Orleans. And there are increased threats from right-wing extremists — as seen in the horrifying assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband — and far too little evidence that the government is taking those threats seriously.
The same tools that helped close security gaps at airport and border crossings bring real civil liberties concerns — concerns that will only intensify as the Trump administration takes to exploiting screening measures for naked political reasons. Even as the toll of terrorism has lessened in the US, it has intensified in much of Africa, where a powerful al-Qaeda affiliate killed thousands of civilians. And here at home, there's plenty of reason to fear that sharp budget cuts by the Trump administration — including holding up billions in anti-terrorism grants to states, according to the New York Times — could waste all the progress that has been made.
What we're experiencing is, at best, a partial victory, one that has come with costs and that could be reversed at any time. But anyone who remembers the sheer fear that permeated the US in the months and years after 9/11 — the 'orange terror alerts' and the anxiety that accompanied something as simple as boarding a subway car — knows that even a partial victory is more than many of us would have expected.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!