Mike Borgelt wrote:
They may be evil but it is a mistake to think some of them at least aren't
stupid.
If you have no intention of blowing something up, every time you get
singled out for extra scrutiny is a security failure. Security
*successes* would involve singling out people who *did* want to blow
things up, and actually catching them. Yet aviation security has
never once managed to chalk-up a success like that anywhere in the
world. And they have hundreds of thousands of *failures* all over
the world every day.
(you can bet that they'd be trumpeting it from the heavens if they
ever -did- manage to catch a real terrorist. but they haven't, so
we're forced to wonder what's actually being achieved each time we
need to take off our shoes to walk through a metal detector)
Despite a track record of 100% sustained miserable failure for over
30 years, we keep giving them money and political capital to do more of
it. Insane, isn't it? Think of all the *real* security we'd have if
the world hadn't spent the time since the '70s sqandering trillions of
dollars on metal detectors and X-ray machines with a demonstrated
track-record of failing to prevent aircraft from blowing up, and had
instead spent those trillions of dollars on in-the-field agents
infiltrating actual terrorist groups and preventing them from getting
near the airport in the first place...!
(of course, that might be difficult: when one considers how
laughably ineffective the world's security measures actually are,
the only rational conclusion to draw is that that reason more critical
infrastructure doesn't get destroyed is that nobody wants to
destroy it. It's probably hard to infiltrate terrorist groups
when there aren't any. The world has a population of 6 billion people,
and the last ones who tried to commit an international terrorist
incident in the US killed themselves on Sep 11 2001. Who's out there
to infiltrate? *Anyone*? And given that our security spend is less
concerned with infiltration than it is with laminated passes for GA
pilots, how will we ever know?)
The world's aviation security apparatus is so clueless that it took
them nearly ten years to work out whether or not TWA flight 800 had
been blown up by a terrorist (it wasn't -- but we've got the extra
baggage screening and hand-luggage restrictions it inspired anyway).
Now they've banned us from walking onto the apron at piss-ant little
airfields out in the middle of nowhere that most people have never
heard of before. Does anyone feel safer? And, more importantly, is
anyone *actually* safer?
- mark
[ still laughing at how the X-ray screening staff at San Jose
airport completely failed to find the toolkit I forgot I had
in my laptop bag when I flew back to LA 3 weeks ago... ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
I tried an internal modem, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton
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