Last week, I wrote about several underappreciated tradeoffs in airport security policy. Here’s another one: TSA screeners, like the rest of us, have only limited time and attention span. The more these finite resources are devoted to “security theater” procedures that have little or no value, the less of it there is available to focus […]
Tag Archives | Airport Security
Do Politicians Have Good Incentives to Promote Airport Security?
In a response to my post arguing that politicians have strong incentives to not enact good security measures before terrorist attacks and engage in “security theater” afterwards, Orin argues that politicians actually do have good incentives: In my experience, politicians have the right incentives in this area. The American public consistently cares very passionately about […]
Public Ignorance and the Political Economy of Airport Security: Why Governments Don’t Take Enough Precautions Before Attacks and Engage in “Security Theater” Afterwards
Co-blogger Orin Kerr points out that some people claim that governments fail to take proper airport security precautions before an attack happens, while others worry that they will overreact once an attack does occur. Unfortunately, these two problems are not mutually exclusive. It could well be that governments both fail to take proper precautions before […]
Bruce Schneier on Airport Security
I’m no security expert. But Bruce Schneier is a leading scholar in the field, and in this interview he makes some of the same points as I did here and here: Air travel survived decades of terrorism, including attacks which resulted in the deaths of everyone on the plane. It survived 9/11. It’ll survive the […]
Tradeoffs in Airport Security
In the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack on an airplane, there are always calls for increased airport security measures. Some of the proposed new measures may be justified, though others are likely to be “security theater.” But even security measures that do increase safety create difficult tradeoffs that we don’t think enough about. Law […]
More on Israeli Airport Security Measures
Orin responds to my post on airport security by claiming that the Israeli system is, overall, more time-consuming and intrusive than the TSA. I think he misses my point. I was not arguing that we should adopt the Israeli system in toto. I was merely saying that the fact that the Israelis find it unnecessary […]
Assessing Airport Security Measures
Nonexperts should be very cautious in offering assessments of airport security measures, or any complex policy issue. There is too much that we don’t understand. Thus, the following is at best a tentative analysis. That said, I suspect that many of the measures the TSA plans to take in reaction to the latest foiled terrorist […]