Travel and Vaping TSA experience coming home from Vapercon.

[Jaguar G]

Just to beat on this dead horse a bit more...

Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer? | Culture | Vanity Fair

Jag

 

[plarkinjr]

Just to beat on this dead horse a bit more...

Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer? | Culture | Vanity Fair

Jag

Just HAD to stir the pot didncha?


I've been saying this for years:
"From an airplane-hijacking point of view, Schneier said, al-Qaeda had used up its luck. Passengers on the first three 9/11 flights didn’t resist their captors, because in the past the typical consequence of a plane seizure had been “a week in Havana.” When the people on the fourth hijacked plane learned by cell phone that the previous flights had been turned into airborne bombs, they attacked their attackers. The hijackers were forced to crash Flight 93 into a field. “No big plane will ever be taken that way again, because the passengers will fight back,” Schneier said. Events have borne him out. The instigators of the two most serious post-9/11 incidents involving airplanes— the “shoe bomber” in 2001 and the “underwear bomber” in 2009, both of whom managed to get onto an airplane with explosives—were subdued by angry passengers."...
“Focusing on specific threats like shoe bombs or snow-globe bombs simply induces the bad guys to do something else. You end up spending a lot on the screening and you haven’t reduced the total threat.”
...
"I asked Schneier if he thought terrorists would in fact try this approach. Not really, he said. Quite likely, they wouldn’t go through the checkpoint at all. The security bottlenecks are regularly bypassed by large numbers of people—airport workers, concession-stand employees, airline personnel, and T.S.A. agents themselves (though in 2008 the T.S.A. launched an employee-screening pilot study at seven airports). “Almost all of those jobs are crappy, low-paid jobs,” Schneier says. “They have high turnover. If you’re a serious plotter, don’t you think you could get one of those jobs?”"


The article doesnt even mention the "cost" I believe exists that much of the flying public avoids flying to avoid the security hassles. We know airlines are suffering lower profits. Some of that has to be attributable to folks like me who opt to fly less.