I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks. — Bruce Schneier
That would certainly beat the various draconian and invasive measures I’ve been reading about. And it’s not as though any of them would even work. Most of them wouldn’t even have prevented the latest attack that got prevented just fine without any of the new proposals.
Security is hard. In this case, you’ve got quite a lot of airport security people who aren’t getting paid exceptionally well trying to catch one person out of every billion or so travelers who’s willing and at least mostly able to blow himself up. And you need to do that on tight schedules with no false positives.
To make things just that much harder, everyone else in line is already annoyed with you because of the existing inconveniences of travel and airport security, often combined with long lines, making it exceptionally easy to get a false positive based on behavior (if anything, you probably need to be most concerned about anyone who looks serene through the whole process). And that’s just a couple of the issues involved.
Sigh. I’m going to be flying in less than a week, going to a mostly undisclosed location for a business-planning retreat. Hopefully some of the hysteria will have died down by then and I’ll be able to legally at least read a book during the flight. If I hadn’t already prepaid the entire trip, I’d cancel it and go find a cottage in Maine instead.
