Just more security theatre and corrupt politicians (guess who runs the companies the scanners are bought from).
The reality is that they can't keep weapons and drugs out of prisons where there are no freedoms, and there is plenty of time to be as invasive as you want to visitors and residents.
Additionally the security system has failed if the point you pick up the bad guys is by some low paid grunt at the airport staring at a screen. The point of airport security should be to catch occasional idiots and that is about it - something any metal detector can do.
The reality is that anyone determined can get through any security system and wreak terror. The response is to not be terrorised. It is to live well and not in fear. It is to have made their actions completely pointless.
Airport security is a stupid idea, it's a waste of money, and it's there for only one reason: to make white people feel safe! That's all it's for. To provide a feeling, an illusion, of safety in order to placate the middle class. Because the authorities know they can't make airplanes safe; too many people have access. You'll notice the drug smugglers don't seem to have a lot of trouble getting their little packages on board, do they?......
I remember this stand up, which was actually before 9/11. He goes on in that standup to say here are lethal items you can take on board: "a knife, an icepick, a chainsaw... and the only thing they'll tell you is that you have to fit it under the chair in front of you". Things have changed in that respect, I guess.
George Carlin was the embodiment of NSFW, he was the one who went to the Supreme Court for the right to swear on the airwaves... And lost. The “Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV” was one of his legendary routines.
Huh, I didn't know he went all the way to the Supreme Court.
I figured everyone should know George Carlin, but I added the NSFW, just in case people had their speakers up in the office (like I almost did - even though I'm a huge fan, it just slipped my mind). The "obviously" was a reference to him being the epitome of NSFW.
Isn't the psychology half the battle?
You need to convince people there exists a reasonable effort to provide some sort of security --even if it's more psychological security than not. In addition, as others have pointed out it's also to filter against known (easily replicated) attacks.
"The term Security Theater sounds dismissive and implies there is no actual benefit. It seems in the least debatable to me."
it, in fact, does not provide any benefit. Making people "feel" safer, will only worsen the problem when they finally find out that they aren't actually safe (due to an attack happening).
Bruce Schneier who coined the term in the first place did give one example where he was okay with it. It should be noted that the costs are extremely low for this example and doesn't delay anything:
I would argue making people feel safer (or comfortable) to fly is a benefit they are willing to trade in for whatever might happen. They have nothing to lose. If they don't do the "theatrics" people might choose to fly less due to a perceived lack of security effort. So, in the meantime, while the theatrics maintain a semblance of security, the airline industry gets the benefit of doubt.
Once the bubble is burst, that'd be another issue. Still, I think people will rationalize it as "well, we got X years use out of the system."
Out of curiosity, what _do_ you think has accounted for the safety record? Obviously you don't believe the theater has helped. At the same time I don't believe that people (AQ) have not been plotting against transportation assets. I would ask, why would they abandon that path, if they thought the theater was just theater? Are there other mechanisms keeping them at bay?
Additionally, even if the theater contributed nothing to security and all the heavy lifting was accomplished by other means -intel, profiling, whathaveyou, the theater would act as a signal to travelers that something was being done. It would be the customer-facing expression of the work being done behind the scenes --a kind of proxy so that what's actually being done --methods and so forth could remain opaque.
I think the main reason for the safety record is that there just aren't that many terrorists out there. Of course, increased security raises the bar, so it would be more appropriate to say that there aren't that many terrorists out there with the resources and skills to pull off an attack.
But if airport security actually hindered many real attempts, why don't we hear about them?
Right up until 9/11 you could ask the same question, what accounts for the safety record? After all, many years had passed without any hijackings or bombings.
Then the bubble burst, and the only possible response was to increase security measures. Any politician not supporting such measures would have been torn apart by the media if a new attack had occured.
I think that airport security _does_ provide a deterrence to unskilled terrorists, and it provides real security against some random mentally unstable guy trying to wreak havoc.
I think everyone agrees that security theatre helps people feeling safe. It's the amount of money being spent on it that is at issue. We'd all be safer if the money spent on ineffective body scanners were being spent on making roads safer, or perhaps by building more schools and hospitals in areas of political conflict.
That may be so. Where I live, in SF, they make no difference (there are seconds indicators on the crosswalks --they do not change at the pressing of the button). Nor does pressing them at a crosswalk in the stop phase change normal traffic light phase change.
I've never seen a button increase the crossing time, either. What I have seen, however, is that on a light that normally has, say, a 10s green with no crossing indicator, pressing the crossing button will extend the next green to something like 30s and display a crossing indicator.
I guess that's true in (some?) cities, but most places aren't cities. In most places, the crossing signal probably won't turn at all unless you press the button.
> it's also to filter against known (easily replicated) attacks.
By kludging in a filter for every known attack that's been tried you force the people doing the screening to concentrate on improbable situations. How many people have tried to use exploding shoes?
Better would be to give screeners a lot of training (and pay them appropriately) to look for "other stuff", other signs that a person might be a terrorist. Preferably that other stuff would have good research to support it.
...and instead, we freak out as a nation, flush our civil liberties down the toilet to feel "safe", and let our country fall apart in the wake of our fears.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Bravo, USA, bravo. Osama is still #winning because we're still dealing with his terror of >10 years ago. Let that sink in for a bit....this is exactly what he wanted.
For the sake of honest debate... how do you know what exactly it is Osama wanted? Maybe all he wanted was to kill people and didn't care about liberty because he does not know what it is! or he wanted to send some kind of a message to westerners or something else... we will not know.
Sure, liberty seems to be lesser in airports...but connecting that to what Osama wanted is a big stretch!
I think it's pretty clear that Osama wanted the destruction of the US. There's an old adage from the cold war that "You cannot show weakness to the enemy." Study how the Cuban Missile Crisis was eventually resolved, and you'll see this doctrine at work.
The funny thing is, liberty shows strength. Take one country that makes a law against criticizing the government, compared to one that professes free speech on all topics. The country with free speech is saying, in effect, "Say what you want! We're stronger than your words."
So, as the US continues to give up its liberties, the rest of the world is watching, and they see this for what it is: the US is showing its weakness.
> There's an old adage from the cold war that "You cannot show weakness to the enemy." Study how the Cuban Missile Crisis was eventually resolved, and you'll see this doctrine at work.
Not really. The "not showing weakness to the enemy" stuff was what nearly destroyed the world in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It wasn't until the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, sent a long and emotional telegram directly to President Kennedy imploring the President to join with him in taking a step back (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Secret_neg...) that a way out of the crisis began to present itself.
Armaments bring only disasters. When one accumulates them, this damages the economy, and if one puts them to use, then they destroy people on both sides. Consequently, only a madman can believe that armaments are the principal means in the life of society. No, they are an enforced loss of human energy, and what is more are for the destruction of man himself. If people do not show wisdom, then in the final analysis they will come to a clash, like blind moles, and then reciprocal extermination will begin...
Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you...
Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.
Kennedy took Khrushchev up on this initiative; what defused the crisis was a secret agreement where the US agreed to remove all its nuclear missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets pulling theirs out of Cuba.
Right. What I meant was that all of the actual negotiations happened in secret. They had to, because of the doctrine. There's no shame in showing humility and even offering a friendly hand, but when the offer is made to your adversary, it is almost always done in secret.
But it's not secret from your adversary ("the enemy" that you're not supposed to show weakness to), since you're making the secret offer to him.
If anything, the lesson of the crisis is how important it can be to keep from looking weak in front of your friends. Kennedy kept the missile deal secret from the American people for a good reason: he may very well have been impeached had he made it public, and it would have shaken the confidence of our other NATO allies in our overseas commitments if they learned that Kennedy had removed the protection of (obsolete, but still) nuclear weapons from NATO-member Turkey in response to Soviet pressure. And winning even a small concession from Kennedy is probably the only thing that saved Khrushchev from being toppled in a coup by Soviet hard-liners after the Cuba debacle.
Sometimes your friends can be the worst enemies of all!
Very well put! (I was going to mention that, in reality, it's all about everyone else who's watching, but I think you did a better job explaining it.)
What's most interesting is that (based on anecdotal evidence), lost liberty and ridiculous security theater has done much more to harm America's image among it's "friends" than among it's enemies. I doubt Afghanistan or Pakistan care much about American airport security, but when I'm at Istanbul International, and the flight to JFK is the only one in the entire airport that requires extra screening, I see what that must look like to every European there (hint: they aren't thinking about what a great place this U S of A must be...).
In his public statements, Osama said he wanted the US to remove its military bases from Saudi Arabia. So the US moved the bases to neighboring Iraq. Osama won.
Worse. We put the bases in Iraq specifically to get them out of Saudi Arabia. I.e. we explicitly gave Osama what he said he wanted.
The troops were in Saudi Arabia to contain Iraq. The way to get them out was to overthrow Saddam. Invading Iraq was therefore a sort of appeasement campaign.
"I tell you, freedom and human rights
in America are doomed. The U.S. government
will lead the American people in — and the
West in general — into an unbearable hell
and a choking life." [1]
We know what Osama wanted, he's made many public statements. He wanted the western world to stop interacting with the Muslim/arab world because he thought the west was a corrupting influence on traditional Islamic and arab values.
I get your meaning but it doesn't have much weight without any evidence. Certainly Osama has lied, and is capable of lying. But we do not automatically question the stated motives of murderers and bombers without additional evidence. We do not second guess whether abortion clinic bombers are actually anti-abortion. We do not hypothesize what the real motives of the unabomber were, we take it on face value that he opposed the advance of industry and technology etc.
Similarly, we have no good cause to question Osama's stated motives. When an organization repeatedly makes clear their motives through public statements; when that organization undertakes combat operations at such great risk and cost that they employ suicide squads to carry them out and when those operations comport with their stated motives; and when their other activities also closely align with those statements why question those motives? The only reason is because someone has a political cause they wish to shore up by portraying a major political force like Al Qaeda as something it's not.
For what it's worth, Osama was right. The west has been a corrupting influence on the Arab and Muslim world, eroding traditional values such as misogyny, oppressive political and social institutions, stultifying economic systems, etc. For the most part I think this has been a good development, as I value individual liberty, education based on rationality and science, the spread of industrialization and broadbased wealth, etc. But such things are roadblocks to the creation of a new caliphate, or something much like it, in the Islamic world, which is the ultimate secondary goal of groups like Al Qaeda after they have managed to isolate the Islamic world from external influences.
we have no good cause to question Osama's stated motives. When an organization repeatedly makes clear their motives through public statements; when that organization undertakes combat operations at such great risk and cost...
Let me ask everyone who believes OBL's stated motives: when GWB tells us repeatedly in public that we must invade Iraq because of the threat of WMD, and that the objectives have nothing to do with protecting oil supplies, should we take that statement at face value? I mean, the US through GWB has invested tons of resources, including the lives of its troops, into fighting that war, so surely the President's statements regarding the motivations can be accepted without question, right?
I'm not taking sides here. I'm trying to say that nobody ever truly knows the motivations of another person; in fact, frequently we don't truly understand the roots of our own motivations. See, for example, discussion in Mises' Human Action.
But Bush did tell us why we invaded Iraq: "He tried to kill my dad." Before he was even elected he indicated a desire to invade Iraq because he saw it as the hight of his father's presidency left unfinished. "If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it," he said on the campaign trail. He never once stuck to the WMD story; it was just what they made Powell say in public as a cover for all the other reasons he gave (see the Downing Street Memo for more details.)
If Osama had came out with a multitude of mutually-contradictory statements we'd have reason to doubt him, but he was amazingly consistent from when the CIA started funding him until the US military gunned him down.
Are you really suggesting murdering hundreds of innocent people is more honorable than lying for the sake of easing people's fears? I don't respect lying either, but let's not get crazy here.
I'm not defending the war crimes of the US either. All I'm saying is do not conflate lying with the obviously more extreme act of actually killing people.
Fear is not always irrational. If we encountered a large tiger while out on a walk, it would be a very beneficial response. To discuss the pragmatics, the problem appears to be the near deterministic impossibility of shutting off the defense contracting money spigot once it has been opened. It's not a business one has the power to boycott.
We know. Well, a lot of us do at least. I can only choose to live my life without fear and do my best to influence others to recognize real freedom is more important than a false sense of safety.
The response is to not be terrorised. It is to live well and not in fear.
An interesting comparison is a popular Israeli song from a few years back: Yalla Ya Nasrallah (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8pVvJIzllA). They respond to (not merely a single act, but frequent!) terrorism with taunts, humor, and an attitude of defiance.
I can imagine what a parallel song would sound like (Bring it on Osama / Blow up all the buildings you want . . . ). It would never have been written here. It would never have become popular. I see in that an indictment of the culture.
I completely agree. Any society that is not inextricably, geographically entwined with a mortal enemy is corrupt, degenerate, and bankrupt. Essentially, a society worse than the enemy society, and it deserves to be purged from within to regain the primal purity it once possessed.
The reality is that they can't keep weapons and drugs out of prisons where there are no freedoms, and there is plenty of time to be as invasive as you want to visitors and residents.
Additionally the security system has failed if the point you pick up the bad guys is by some low paid grunt at the airport staring at a screen. The point of airport security should be to catch occasional idiots and that is about it - something any metal detector can do.
The reality is that anyone determined can get through any security system and wreak terror. The response is to not be terrorised. It is to live well and not in fear. It is to have made their actions completely pointless.