It seems that an undercover expose has been carried out by the ITV "Tonight with Trevor Macdonald" programme on the very poor security at Birmingham, with a US congressman already calling for all flights to the USA from BHX to be temporarily suspended until security is beefed up.
Will be interesting to see this as I use BHX quite a bit. Personally I never felt that there were any lapses - in fact they were one of the airports using the security gate/boarding gate photo ID process which people complained about.
With the local ethnic population in the area there are a number of flights to/from Pakistan, India etc and I would have thought that they would be more careful?