Why the obsession with blowing things up? If terrorists were in possession of radioactive material, (the so called 'dirty bomb') a light aircraft would provide an excellent means of spreading it over an extremely large area of a major city, and with a fair degree of freedom, barring the aircraft being shot down. It would be a far more effective way of contaminating a city than a bomb or bombs
Similarly, an aircraft would provide a very effective way of spreading a lethal agent such as Sarin (poison gas) or a biological agent like anthrax spores. Just imagine the effectiveness of a Pawnee or an Air Tractor in this role. Even Mike's fuel to noise converter would be suitable. Stemmes on the other hand would not be my first choice of delivery mechanism... -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Mark Newton Sent: Wednesday, 16 March 2005 12:42 PM To: Discussion of issues relating to Soaring in Australia. Subject: Re: [Aus-soaring] Securing Gliders - Was "The list is... alive!" 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 ----- Voice: +61-4-1620-2223 ------------- Fax: +61-8-82231777 ----- _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This communication, including any attachments, is confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, you should not read it - please contact me immediately, destroy it, and do not copy or use any part of this communication or disclose anything about it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
