(Preface: Being an Arizona Cardinals fan has ups and downs, to say the least, and one of the primary drawbacks is that their games often leave one emotionally and physically drained. Just watching these guys is exhausting. 31-10 is a safe lead for 99.9% of the football teams in the world, but not us. The Cardinals relish in finding ways to make everything far more gut-wrenching than necessary, and Sunday's 51-45 gunfight with Green Bay was as ridiculous and improbable as they come. I had to struggle to achieve any kind of coherence with this short piece. My brain is not working. If you like to gamble on sports – I do not, but to each his own – I have free advice for the Arizona-New Orleans game: take the "over.")
Two weeks ago in the wake of the failed Underpants Bomber I noted that with even the most strident efforts to secure commercial air travel the bomber will always get through. Matthew L. forwarded me a recent Wall Street Journal piece suggesting that calculated fatalism about terrorism in the air isn't so outlandish an idea. The author makes a number of obvious but often overlooked points about the diminutive risk posed by terrorist attacks (compared, for example, to dying in an auto accident or being murdered in the U.S.). I'm most intrigued, however, by his use of the apt phrase "security theater." The pointless efforts to reassure panicky idiots that "increased security measures are being implemented" is dishonest at best and achieves nothing except making everyone more miserable and whittling away at what little remains of our privacy in a modern airport.
It would have been silly to expect any kind of calm, level-headed response to the Underpants Bomber. We got the predictable foaming-at-mouth "Liberals put America in danger!" reaction from the Teabagging crowd followed by the inevitable "We have to look like we're tough!
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Do something!" response from the White House and Congress. Even if we recognize the fact that most anti-terrorism measures in airports are strictly for show, the reaction to this latest incident still stands out as mind-bogglingly stupid. Two examples illustrate the point.
First, on inbound international flights passengers are now required to spend the last hour before landing in their seats and without any "personal items" in their laps. Think about that for a second. We all have to spend the last hour of a 9 or 12 (or 18 or 20) hour flight sitting bolt-upright in an uncomfortable coach seat staring straight ahead and doing nothing. No reading, no iPod, nothing. In what possible hypothetical situation could this add any security whatsoever to international flights? I guess future Underpants Bombers will have a mere 9 hours to execute their plan on that Amsterdam-Detroit flight instead of 10. The cost in misery is substantial. The benefits aren't even plausible let alone realistic.
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Second, two flights in the past week have received F-16 fighter jet escorts because of "unruly" passengers who were probably trying to, you know, read a magazine during the last hour of the flight. Most recently, an AirTran flight to San Francisco was escorted by two armed F-16s because…a drunk locked himself in the bathroom. OK, let's give The System the benefit of the doubt and assume they did not know he was just a harmless drunk.
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Implausible, but let's go ahead and accept that premise. What in the hell are two F-16s supposed to contribute to this situation? If the guy is in the bathroom mixing an Underpants Bomb is the F-16 supposed to fire a missile into the plane and blow it to bits before the terrorist can…ignite a bomb and blow the plane to bits? That'll learn 'em.
An F-16 burns 150 gallons of fuel to take off and ten gallons per minute thereafter. Combined with the other (astronomical) parts and labor costs involved in operating that kind of aircraft we might question the benefit of this policy. Either the Unruly Passenger is a harmless false alarm or it is a real terrorist who will or will not succeed in his plot irrespective of the presence of armed fighter escorts. Armed escorts could have been relevant on 9/11, but what are the odds of a cockpit incursion happening again? Since those events I think a pilot would fly the plane into the ground before allowing a hijacker to commandeer the aircraft and use it as a missile. So, like armies prepare themselves to fight the previous war, our Security Theater seems to be responding to the threat of terrorists from 2001.
We stopped improving airport security sometime in mid-2002. Everything since then has served only to waste money, waste time, and make everyone more miserable. It is a race we can't win, as security measures inevitably focus on past, not future, attacks. Soon we'll be subject to "Total Body Imaging" scanners to catch underpants bombers…and how long do you think it will take would-be bombers to figure out how to beat that? All it will do is make airport lines longer, make people feel more like cattle, and make the next would-be bomber swallow or "keester" a tube of explosives rather than sewing it into his underwear.
I feel safer already.
Danny says:
i'm getting to where I'd just rather drive unless I'm going to Europe of Hawaii
Chris says:
I've always wondered why we didn't place soldiers or security personnel on airplanes instead of starting 2 Vietnams, implementing security theater (good term), etc.. If terrorists are using airplanes as weapons, we need to start treating them as possible weapons. Perhaps we should barricade the pilots in the cockpit behind bulletproof glass and have a soldier escort them if they need to leave the cockpit. Airplanes are a temporary period without laws: we need to get more people on planes to enforce the law. Too bad if it costs money to implement these measures: the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan show money isn't an issue in fighting terrorism.
Matthew says:
Wooo! I knew you'd dig the article. And I'm glad you managed to comment on it, even given your state of mind at the moment. Go Cards!
waldo says:
September 7, 2007 ~ The much-vaunted ($170,000,000) protection for the APEC summit was peeled away with embarrassing ease yesterday by satirists armed with hire cars flying Canadian flags. Two police security checkpoints into the sniper-ridden "ring of steel" later, and it took a comedian in an Osama bin Laden outfit to rouse Sydney's $150 million APEC security monster into action……..the fake motorcade sailed past police checkpoints to drive within metres of President George Bush's hotel, the InterContinental.
I was happy to hear Obama say "I fully understand that even when every person charged with ensuring our security does what they are trained to do, even when every system works exactly as intended there is still no one hundred percent guarantee of success.", because it's a kernel of truth in amongst the bushells of lies that have been propagated by politicians, the 'intelligence' communities and 'security' forces of the US for decades.
No security system is foolproof indefinitely and militarising every aspect of daily life is not the answer to anything. Whether the US will ever be capable of acting sensibly on this fact is the defining conundrum of our time. 'Cause we do have a few other little problems….
jon says:
How about from now on all the airline personnel on board have to be former college athletes? Not just linebackers who didn't get an NFL stint, but softball players, divers, wrestlers, and so forth. And they get a key to the toilet, so you best get on with your business and move on.
That, combined with passenger jumpsuits (though you get to keep those as a souvenir, since the airlines will remove the "Department of Corrections" labels and install their own,) the reinforced cockpit doors, the shoe removal, and the mildly-invasive strip search should make everyone comfortable and relaxed.
johnnyboy says:
After watching last night's 60 Minutes piece about our über-fucked, hi-tech border security system to the south, seeing your blog entry this morning helps convince me that we aren't really any more secure now than we were 9 years ago.
Charles Kiblinger says:
Bruce Schneier coined the phrase "Security Theater." His writing on security of all sorts is the most sensible and rational work available.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/cybersecurity_t.html
As he has said, "Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers."
dbsmall says:
I didn't see any attribution, when I scanned the WSJ article…"security theater" was coined by computer security expert, Bruce Schneier, when we first imposed ridiculous measures after 9/11:
– now we have the rainbow-sprite color-coded system that never changes tone that tells us we need to always be vigilant—THANK GOD FOR ORANGE!
– Talk to a chemical engineer…not just any one, but an engineer (or even chemist) who specializes in high-output reactions and explosions. Find out whether an electrolyte sports-drink could be converted to an explosive in an airplane lav…They'll, of course, hedge by saying "I can't figure a way to do it, but if the following conditions could be mitigated…" So, fools in the UK may or may not have been planning to do something they'd have failed with. And our solution is to inconvenience everyone who travels? (And really, if we were going to be inconvenienced, a more effective rule would be: no glass or metal containers… FREEBIRD!)
– I want to be clear…Richard Reid *failed* to ignite his all-stars, right?
– I carried a box of pens on the last plane ride I had (a sealed box).
So, there are two main problems, as I see it, with this security theater:
1) It is ineffective at preventing security problems
2) It is effective at inconveniencing travelers
In other words, terrorism is achieving its purpose. The purpose isn't just to kill…it is to control…and look at how effectively they're doing that!
Kulkuri says:
"As he has said, "Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.""
Have all the cockpit doors been reinforced, I doubt it. I agree with the fact that passengers are no longer going to sit by when a plane is hijacked. They now know it isn't just a free ride to Havana.
Pan Sapiens says:
Not to sound smug, but I've been a big fan of Schneier almost from day one of his appearance on the internet. Nice to see others hear have heard of him and are handing out the correct attribution. He is a must read.
Also, did anyone read the WSJ comments? Fuck! I imagine evolution has shaped these conservative WSJ types with streamlined bullet shaped heads, for ease of insertion into each other's buttholes.
Pan Sapiens says:
D'oh! "here"
Aslan Maskhadov says:
"In other words, terrorism is achieving its purpose. The purpose isn't just to kill…it is to control…and look at how effectively they're doing that!"
Actually their purpose is to change government policies, namely foreign policies which disturb them and really aren't doing Americans a lot of good either. Perhaps instead of sending more troops into Afghanistan and possibly some to Yemen, it might be a good time to reevaluate many of those policies, as CIA analyst Michael Scheuer suggested in Imperial Hubris.
As a side note, he coined what is probably the best term for the threat-level meter- The Traffic Light of Death.
Sasha says:
I think the point of the F-16s is that they could pretty nearly obliterate the plane. An explosion, big enough to bring the plane down, but too small to break it into pieces means a plane size object, with a significant amount of jet fuel, hits the ground. You're still going to have pieces hitting the ground with a missile hit, I think, but they will be much smaller and the remaining fuel will either ignite in the air or fall on the ground. Plus with the F-16 you get some choice as to location; e.g. the more sparsely populated area surrounding the city instead of the city itself.
I was on a plane that had to make an emergency landing shortly after taking off from San Francisco. After dropping the landing gear in an attempt to burn off the fuel, they decided to dump the fuel over a fuel dumping zone. I had never heard of this before but if there is that much clear space around an airport, maybe the debris from a missile shot could clear the more occupied parts around the airport.
None of this is to suggest all of this isn't insane overkill, just that there is a purpose to the fighter planes.
Danny says:
We're at war with terrists, or is it terriors?
Please don't go nuculer on me.
hillwomp says:
if your goal is to make this my favorite blog you're gettin' there
Parrotlover77 says:
I'm pretty sure the FAA requires this for commercial airliners. A quick gazoogle tells me: http://www.allbusiness.com/transportation-communications/transportation-services/4133778-1.html
As for the F-16s for the drunk dude. Isn't it possible this might refute your thesis that nothing is being done for future unknown style attacks? What if being drunk and beligerant was a proposed tactic? That's a big distraction. While the attendants are dealing with Drug Dude, then Terrorist dude sneaks off and does some bad terrorist thing?
Now, don't get me wrong, I agree with 99% of what you say about security theater, but I'm not entirely sure we should waive off suspicious activity just because it seems improbable.
Full body scanners? Bad. No laptops or ipods on the last hour of the flight? Bad. Taking proactive measures when a passenger starts going crazy? Maybe good…