Airlines don't want air cargo scanned

So, I'm supposed to give up personal information and allow criminal background checks on me before I board a plane, but any shipper can put whatever he wants to onboard, and no one at the airline wants to make sure its not a bomb? Why am I being held to such a high standard, when a shipping company isn't? If I'm on the plane, doesn't it stand to reason that I'm less likely to want to see the thing blow up than some shipping company? I guess it means we can inconvenience people, just don't bother businesses. Shit, I may just start shipping myself in containers.

Report Faults Air Cargo Security (washingtonpost.com)

The government is undertaking inadequate measures to prevent terrorists from planting a bomb in the cargo holds of passenger aircraft, according to many pilots, flight attendants, families of victims of terrorist attacks, and one major European airline.

The warning was raised by dissenters in a report issued yesterday by the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, a coalition of aviation groups dominated by the airline and air cargo industries.

The study's key recommendation urged the government to develop ways to better verify the identities of shippers and ensure that they are not on watch lists of known terrorists. The report also proposed that the government allow cargo from unknown recipients to fly on passenger planes if it is screened.

But those proposals weren't enough for many groups, which urged the government to physically inspect all air cargo before it reaches the belly of aircraft, perhaps by deploying screening technology similar to what is used for checked luggage.

The report's recommendations 'will not offer substantial improved security on passenger planes' because they fall 'short of 100 percent actual inspection,' Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 wrote in the study. The report was not made public, but a copy was obtained by The Washington Post.

Cargo security has reentered the spotlight after a man shipped himself from New York to Texas in the belly of an aircraft last month. The incident underscored what government investigators have long known: Despite billions of dollars spent to screen checked luggage aboard an aircraft, air cargo on the same plane is often never inspected.

The airlines, still financially strapped, have lobbied hard against using machines to screen cargo, fearing that a slowdown in processing packages could push customers to cargo-only carriers such as FedEx and United Parcel Service. Cargo accounts for only about 5 percent of airlines' annual revenue, but any drop-off could push a small profit to a loss, according to the Air Transport Association, the U.S. airlines' largest lobbying group.

No recent incident involving a terrorist explosive in a cargo hold has been confirmed. But the Transportation Security Administration has estimated it is 35 to 65 percent likely that terrorists are planning to put a bomb in cargo on a passenger plane, according to an internal government report citing intelligence from 2001.