Six years after 9-11, have we learned how to prevent terrorism? Perhaps, as there has not been a successful attack in the U.S. since then. On the other hand, it is hard to defend our current approach to airport security. After watching the TSA subject a three-year-old to the explosives-sniffing "blower" at an airport, my friend Amos Guiora, formerly a counter-terrorism specialist with the Israeli Defense Forces, wonders "where are we?"
What does subjecting a 3-year-old to the blower unattended by a parent (his mother went through the blower previously) tell me?
It tells me that we have yet to begin risk assessment and analysis, identifying legitimate threats has not been begun and sophisticated cost-benefit analysis of counter-terrorism is apparently in its infancy. How dangerous is this? Very.
As long as 3-year-old boys are made to go through blowers at airport security lines, we clearly are not focusing our limited resources on genuine threats. Rather than develop sophisticated prototyping models, we only hear "you have been selected for a random search."
Of course, this assumes that airport security is really about preventing terrorist attacks, as opposed to sufficiently inconveniencing air travelers so they feel a bit more secure.
UPDATE: In a related vein, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton ask "Are We Safer?"
Related Posts (on one page):
- Three-Year-Olds and Airport Security:
- Have We Learned to Fight Terrorism?
Or is the blower test only designed to test whether or not someone has been assembling explosives, and not actually carrying explosives?
Even assuming that there is no reason to test a 3 year old, that doesn't seem to be about just making people feel secure. It seems to be about preventing the government from being accused of racial profiling. And of course many of the groups who complain loudest about useless security measures are also the ones who'd complain loudest about any hint of racial profiling.
The blower is intended to detect trace amounts of materials required for the manufacture of explosives, not necessarily the explosives themselves. Thus, if the 3-year-old's parent was put through the blower, there does not seem to be much reason to put the child through as well. From having discussed this issue with Amos, I know he also objects both to rote, randomized use of such technologies as well as to ethnic profiling. He believes there are alternatives, such as the various screening methods used by El Al. Whether such techniques could be implemented in the USA is another matter.
JHA
For instance, how many people have been caught with something in their shoes? Yet we're still taking off our shoes everytime we go to the airport. This is absurd.
Actually there does seem to be a reason -- the basic theory of trace evidence transfer. If mom makes the bomb, handles the kid, then changes clothes, the evidence will be on the kid. Further, of course, the idea that a 3yo will be carrying a bomb is silly only to us, not to fanatics; children have been used for this in the past and will be used for it in the future. Remember that it does not take a large bomb to breach a fuselage.
billo
Not this guy. If a bunch of brown-haired, hazel-eyed, light-skinned Jews flew a few planes into some buildings in this country, I'd expect to receive a little extra attention in the airports.
The security measures are not about making a safer environment for passengers, but about making the appearance of a safer environment for passengers.
Airport security in this country is a joke.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Colvin_Reid
Good thing the government is in charge of security rather than private enterprise. That way we don't end up with completely useless and time consuming requirements.
What a bizarre argument. The aim of searches includes deterring attempts. That no one has been caught can argue for complete success rather than failure.
Was that a reference to the "Simpsons" bit, "this bra bomb of yours better work, Nerdlinger"? If so, well done.
Maybe Dad made the bomb on the kid, then Mom took him along to blow up the plane?
There's a lot of silliness about airport security I won't defend, but this is a pretty straightforward thing to do. And really not that invasive. Hell, when my kids are/were 3, they will/would've loved going through the blower.
Again, lots of airport security is just theatre, but that doesn't mean all airport security is theatre.
As for the TSA, you have to realize that its employees generally can't find jobs elsewhere, as with many, many government employees. Unlike, say, the Israelis, who hire pretty sharp people for such jobs, our government is content with the dregs.
Or maybe Mom is running away from militant Isalmist boyfriend who secretly used boy to plant explosives in the parking garage, football stadium, or at the state capitol.
There's simply nothing wrong with the test at issue, which is unfortunate, because the problem of mock security is real and the worry about discrimination claims is real.
In any event, no more dollars should go to airport passenger security until the ports and borders are in MUCH better shape. Do we really think terrorists suffer from such an extreme lack of imagination?
Do you have any evidence other than the word of Rush Limbaugh to back this outrageous statement up?
As for the TSA, you have to realize that its employees generally can't find jobs elsewhere, as with many, many government employees. Unlike, say, the Israelis, who hire pretty sharp people for such jobs, our government is content with the dregs.
Way to go, turn the reason for the creation of the TSA and the government takeover of airport security into the bizarro world version of history. It was exactly for the reasons you state that private airport security was found to be inadequate after 9/11.
Well I did, and apparently, very rarely teenagers have been suicide bombers. So to say it is "common" or to imply that very young children are involved is outrageous.
You can make the same argument for Unicorn repellent. I haven't seen any Unicorns around here ever since I started using the Unicorn repellent. No siree!
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
[Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock!
The presumption was that this was a sort of recon. A probe. If this worked, fine. If not, something else.
The fact is, if there's a hole, somebody will attempt to use it. Terror does not require blowing a jumbo jet out of the sky. A small explosion which kills or seriously wounds two or three people in the seats nearby would do just fine, even if the plane landed safely. Because a plane which blows up all over the sky is one thing. It's beyond comprehension. Contemplating the thoughts of passengers covered with blood and body parts of their fellow passengers, listening to the shrieking of the injured, for however long it takes to get on the ground, is more terrifying. In the first case, everybody is just...gone. In the latter case...well, think about it.
IMO, the idea of random "spot checking" various possibilities is a good idea. The problem for the terrorist is not in failing. It's what happens in getting caught, and all the tracking back that would involve. It would be a good decision for the terrs to go to small stuff if it was the price of reducing the probability of failure and the associated intel gift to the US.
So, while I am not particularly impressed by the TSA, the doctrine of checking things which might be considered silly is defensible. Considering something too "silly" to consider is a good way to get somebody thinking about using it for cover. They might think of something.
This was hugely wasteful and inconvenient. She was carrying multiple pieces of luggage, with the baby tied to her physically with a wrap, which had to be painstakingly undone and redone.
She nearly missed her flights.
These searches didn't happen to her that often before our daughter was born.
Is my daughter on some don't-fly list? Does a 3-month old baby belong on such a list?
(Both my wife and I have worked for government agencies. I'm sure I've passed a background check. Why would my daughter be suspicious?)
Could even the TSA be that incompetent?
The TSA, in tests, lets suspicious items through airport security 2.5 times as often as the private security companies it replaced.
It makes another 9-11 even more likely.
And I will remain forever grateful for the TSA officer who was willing to sit on my luggage (after he realized he wouldn't be able to use my vacuum-required compression bags, which he had opened even though he could see through them) in order to get it closed again.
link please
You should provide a link for the gun in the teddy bear story, as it sounds very much like a post 9/11 urban legend. A quick Google search reveals that it actually did happen, albeit in 2003 and therefore not exactly "shortly after 9/11." http://www.cnn.com/2003/TRAVEL/07/17/gun.teddy.bear/
Some audits are utterly at random. A few are in great depth, designed to figure out just how people are fudging, and thus devise a better profile.
Then the profiles come in. Fit one (more than X dollars in in-kind charitable contributions, more than X% of income to deductions in general, things that are out of line with others in your income class, etc.), and odds of being audited shoot up.
Sure, but my guess that the frequency with which the TSA searches 3-year-old kids and 80-year-old women is not optimal in the game-theoretic sense.
A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.
You need to focus on big problems, not little ones.
Wow, I guess I imagined all of the folks who were terrorized by the anthrax attacks and the DC sniper. Because everyone keeps saying that there hasn't been any terrorism in the US since 9/11.
This needs to be repeated--again.
Wow, I guess I imagined all of the folks who were terrorized by the anthrax attacks and the DC sniper. Because everyone keeps saying that there hasn't been any terrorism in the US since 9/11.
First it was:
There has not been an attack in the U.S. since 9/11.
Now we have:
There has not been a successful attack in the U.S. since 9/11.
Is it really that hard to get right? Let's just appoint a Ministry of Reality and get this over with.
A quick Wikipedia entry, for what it is worth, on recruiting children to attack Israelis, is here.
I got it by Googling "suicide bomb child," and much more appears there.
One commenter (wm13) asks if El Al's screening techniques pass muster under American antidiscrimination law, such as disparate-impact discrimination claims, under which sensible rules must be thrust aside when they disproportionately affect some racial group, unless they are absolutely necessary to safety or the operation of a business.
I don't think federal law applies the disparate-impact burden to passengers; it's limited largely to the employment and housing context, and the federal race-discrimination law that applies to customers (42 USC 1981) doesn't have a disparate impact component.
But intentional racial discrimination is forbidden, even if race is just used as one of many factors, unless that is necessary to promote a compelling state interest and is narrowly-tailored to doing so.
But that involves race, not other characteristics like age.
I see no reason why the TSA cannot take age into account, to stop elderly women from being searched as often as males from Middle Eastern countries. (Considering foreign citizenship and country of origin is not the same thing as discriminating based on race for purposes of the Constitution).
The Supreme Court made clear in its Kimel and Garrett decisions that the government can legitimately discriminate based on age whenever it has a minimally rational reason for doing so.
Overblown statements like this destroy credibility. So if we put Guiora in charge and did everything he said other than cease subjecting three-year-olds to puff blowers, we still would not be correctly focusing our resources. I don't need to click through because whoever this guy is, he's not thinking clearly.
But isn't "[c]onsidering foreign citizenship and country of origin" an alienage classification? If so, it too is subject to strict scrutiny and thus essentially "the same thing as discriminating based on race for purposes of the Constitution." See Bernal v. Fainter, 467 U.S. 216 (1984)
My point is - the fear of an attack is worse than the attack itself. We have spent billions trying to control every little thing. At the same time, if we had six of us sit around in a circle, we could brainstorm 100 ways to get around security by mid-afternoon. Don't let you carry water bottles? Bring multiple small ones. If they guard planes, attack trains. If they guard trains, attack busses. So on and so forth.
All the while we wring our hands more and more and spend another billion here and another billion there (not to mention the inconvenience factor).
We have torn ourselves up over 1 attack 6 years ago involving less than 4,000 people.
Since that time, roughly 2.4 million have died of heart disease, 240,000 of influenza, and 68,000 by homicide, so it's not life.
We've spent billions giving ourselves a false sense of security. That means patting everyone down as they entered the college football game this past weekend. At such a wasted cost, it's not money.
So what is it?
2.) The fact that a terrorism risk exists on *domestic* flights is proof that the government is doing an abysmally poor job of keeping potentially dangerous aliens out of the country in the first place. If a majority (or evan a sizeable minority) of the people in country "X" hate our guts and want to kill us, then why in God's name do we continue to indiscriminately grant tourist visas and student visas to people from country "X" ??
TSA workers aren't mass spec experts and should not be making subjective decisions about something like that, even if you're technically correct.
So, while I am not particularly impressed by the TSA, the doctrine of checking things which might be considered silly is defensible. Considering something too "silly" to consider is a good way to get somebody thinking about using it for cover.
The problem is that they don't check at random. They have a list (shoes, contact lens solution) of things that have been tried once in the past. As long as you avoid that very short list of vehicles, you're clear.
Would either a game-theoretic optimized search routine or the methods used by El Al (assuming those aren't the same thing) pass muster under U.S. anti-discrimination law?
Israeli questioning (which is layered on top of other measures, not in place of them) involves asking questions about who you are, what you were doing, where you were. For example, if you're claiming to be an apolitical Christian Swedish tourist college student and all your souvenirs and photos are from Ramallah or Nablus, that's a red flag.
Could that be done in a way that's compliant with US law? Perhaps, but it would inevitably attract criticism anyway. And it doesn't scale to TSA-size.
It's the first thing you mentioned: fear.
Human beings are not rational decision makers, whatever the economists may tell you. Rather, out brains overvalue anticipated loss by about a 2 to 1 margin over anticipated gain. Putting it another way, we grossly overvalue fear.
War is the health of the State, whether it's a War on Terror [sic] or a War on Drugs or a War on Deadbeat Dads, or whatever. 9/11 was a godsend opportunity to a government that was already hell-bent on expanding its power in every direction possible.
And so what if your chances of being killed by a terrorist are about a hundred times smaller than your chances of being killed by a drunk driver; imaginary hobgoblins are the best kind.
And the fact that the American people allow themselves to be stampeded by such a trivial (statistically speaking) death toll shows what a nation of cowards we have become. Good grief! London, during the WW-2 Blitz suffered about 5000 civilian deaths EVERY MONTH!
Averaged over the past ten years, there have been about 4000 people (round numbers) killed by terrorists on American soil. That comes out to 400 per year, compared to 4000 per year killed by drowning (for example) and 40,000 per year killed by automobiles.
I'm not saying we should totally ignore the risk; I'm just saying that the risk is *WAY* too low to justify giving up any freedom.
... the risk is *WAY* too low to justify giving up any freedom, especially when there are lots of measures that could be taken to reduce the risk, *without* impacting the freedom of American citizens -- such as not making enemies in the first place, and then not inviting them to come live/visit here, and of course: bombing the ones that DO attack us back into the Stone Age instead of wasting military resources on regimes that were no threat in the first place, such as Iraq.
What you're overlooking is that the risk also includes potential terrorist attacks of far greater lethality, e.g., suitcase nukes. That said, I agree that it has become politically incorrect to suggest that these terror-associated risks be part of a broader cost-benefit analysis which includes the things you mentioned, as well as any number of other potentially lethal social scourges, e.g., crime, inadequate health care and nutrition, crumbling bridges, levies and other infrastructure, etc.
But if a terrorist were to plant a bomb with a newborn daughter, the world would be screaming about why TSA didn't screen the baby.
the problem is that we all want to go through airports without any inconveniences. Then we want to security to catch only the criminals, not the law abiding citizens. When they make a mistake, either by inconveniencing the good, or letting go the bad, we blame them for incompetence.
That pretty much summarizes many of the posting here. In a perfect world, we could do all that, but we don't live in a perfect world, and we should accept the fact that even if you have highly paid, rigourously trained TSA people, they will make mistakes. The point is to target the low hanging fruit (not all terrorists are brilliant, afterall) and go after the easy stuff.
Personally, I like how they handle security in Europe and Israel much better, as the people are trained to ask questions and find inconsistencies, and observe stressful behavior and so on. Here in the US, we have a faith that technology will solve all our problems, which of course it doens't.
BUT... If I'm flying a small commuter plane going nowhere, do I really need to be checked as if I'm boarding a 747? Do I need to be patted down before I go into a second-rate college football game? Do I need to stip down before every flight and have some random person who happened to be hired for the TSA rummage through my bag?
It reminds me of a set of stats I saw in a law &econ class. It talked about the cost per life saved for various regulations. If we did that for terrorism, we'd be talking millions - if not billions - per life in raw cost. That doesn't account for hassle factors, longer wait times, etc.
So again - we're not buying lives (or at least not efficiently). We're just buying false sense of security.
The US has 12,000 kilometers of land borders and 20,000 kilometers of coastline. Reliably keeping out someone who wants in is simply not an option.
But DC Jag Guy said in response, "isn't '[c]onsidering foreign citizenship and country of origin' an alienage classification? If so, it too is subject to strict scrutiny and thus essentially 'the same thing as discriminating based on race for purposes of the Constitution.' See Bernal v. Fainter, 467 U.S. 216 (1984)"
Maybe so as to local governments, some of whose alienage classifications are subject to strict scrutiny.
But not as to Congress. The Supreme Court has said that Congressional alienage classifications are subject to mere rational basis review, and that Congress has plenary power to make such classifications.
Whether you agree with this local vs. federal distinction or not, the Supreme Court has made it law.
And the TSA, a federal agency, can thus use alienage classifications without hindrance in screening for terrorists.
Good question. Do I really need to go through a metal detector before I go into the Government Printing Office bookstore on North Capitol Street. I know it's a government facility and all, but there must be a total of, what, two people in there at any time? I guess if I were a terrorist who was stymied by that search, I'd just have to console myself by going and blowing up Borders (which also has a metal detector of sorts, but it's to catch people shoplifting books *out*, not terrorists bringing bombs *in*).
And why am I forbidden to bring my Leatherman into the Old Post Office, anyway. I know it has what they laughingly call "a knife" on it, but are people really afraid that I'm going to use it to hijack the building and crash it into the White House?
Given that, all security screening for any weapon at all is completely useless.
When you're deciding on precautions to deal with bad weather, you don't have to worry that your failure to take precautions will cause bad weather. But when you face an opponent seeking to harm you, the probability of an attempted strike is not independent of your precautions. The behavioral response from the enemy is likely to be very large--they will ramp up their efforts to exploit the weakness. For example, if we hadn't secured the cockpit doors after 9/11, I'd believe that we would have seen many further attempts to get in there, if only to disable the pilots and crash the plane (since trained suicide pilots are a scarce commodity)
So comparisons of terrorism risks with exogenous risks like hurricanes and heat waves and bridge collapses is inappropriate.