Peter Stephenson wrote:
Well, Mark, if you were G. W.Bush, what would you do to allay the public's
fears and get back into office? If you were seen to be doing nothing, and
another terrorist attack occurred which could have been prevented by
searching baggage, you would be out on your ear.
He'll be out on his ear if another terrorist attack occurs after he's
spent the last five years telling everyone how safe they are with the
Government's new security procedures too :-)
OBL really missed his opportunity. If he'd really wanted to hurt the
American psyche, he'd have launched another identical attack about
3 months after the first one, thereby demonstrating that the strict
security measures implemented by the US Govt were powerless to stop him.
Perhaps he had trouble finding people who wanted to kill themselves
in airliners or something. :-)
In San Francisco last year, I lost a small swiss army knife to a preflight
search because I accidentally had it in my hand luggage (We had transferred
some gear from our cases to our hand luggage to reduce their weight) so
searching/Xraying does work.
It does? That's a false positive. You had no intention of doing anything
to the plane (correct me if I'm wrong), and yet you had personal property
confiscated anyway. Some Government agency had to spend millions on an
X-ray scanner, and you had to pay for a new knife, and the security of
the plane you were about to board was completely unaffected. Doesn't
sound like a very smart expenditure of finite security resources to me.
Six years ago you would have been able to carry that small swiss army
knife on the plane without any safety issues at all: The flight would
have been just as safe, and you would have been just as innocuous as
a threat.
Back in 2000 I used to travel with a Leatherman Supertool on my belt
all the time. Never caused any problems, I just chucked it on the
X-ray conveyor with my laptop and picked it up at the other end without
dramas, and nobody ever questioned whether it was something that
oughtn't be allowed on a plane. Now you can't even carry crochet hooks
on airlines. Does that mean security is better? No, it just means
more people who aren't attempting to attack aeroplanes are annoyed for
no good reason. Security isn't improved when your penknife gets
confiscated and I'm forced to take off my shoes on the way to the
departure gate; Security is improved when bad guys are actually
caught and/or prevented from doing what they want to do (a feat
which has never been attributed to any airline security screening
anywhere in the world despite the trillions of dollars that have been
spent on it during the last 30 years)
I'll dig up something I sent to a security mailing list last year
which might put a couple of other things about pre-departure screening
in Australia into perspective as well. It'll take about ten minutes
to read through, so get a coffee first :-)
The take-home message is that security isn't improved by preventing
a blacklist of implements from being carried in cabins. Security
is improved by preventing bad guys from entering the plane (or, even
better, the airport) in the first place. And absolutely *nothing*
that airline passengers are forced to go through prior to their
flight is geared towards achieving that aim. If security orgs really
want to do that they'll train and employ more investigative field
agents... But the US Government is actually *reducing* its CIA
headcount at the moment. How serious are they really?
- mark
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I tried an internal modem, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton
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