DHS: Looking for love in all the wrong places?

[Stinky The Clown]

This Christmas Scrotum Bomber thing has unleashed a wave of actual suggestions for some really bizarre new "security" measures. Cooler heads prevailed and the No Pee Zones were never implemented, but babies and wheelchair bound elderly are being patted down. The use of inflight blankies and pillows is now at the discretion of the pilot. The airport peep shows are getting wider uses and scanners are running cross eyed looking for dangerous substances like an over abundance of Scope mouthwash in Mindy's Gucci.

Meanwhile, out in flyover country, the malls lie unprotected. No, there's not one bit of snark intended in that statement. If one were wishing to scare the living fuck out of the entire 300 million of us, get two or five or sixteen suicide bombers and send them into two or five or sixteen suburban malls and blow themselves up.

Or send half into malls and half into supermarkets to do it.

We talked about this back in 2001 and 2002.

Such attacks happen with frightening regularity in various middle east garden spots.

One day of a coordinated series of such attacks, even if the casualties are low, will shut our country right down tight.

But we got the Airport Lavoris Patrol down pat, by gawd.

[CJCRANE]

1. My suggestion is

get rid of the neocon moles who keep letting these guys through.

[HereSince1628]

2. Fear has been known forever to be the killer of Liberty

What is often missed is that freedomicide is self-inflicted.

A free nation is by definition going to provide soft targets for attention seeking murderers. What is often overlooked is that despite the sacrifice of liberty to achieve a police state, the police state is always going to have a weak spot that can be identified and exploited by a determined attention seeker.
The hard prognosis is that at some point the cost of trying to have 100% protection always becomes too much and even the police state must learn to accept situational risk.

Different States will have different levels of risk and tolerance; the liberty experienced in different States will ultimately defined by these aspects of their national character. If we _really_ are the home of the braver and thereby the land of the freer, as a nation we must be defined by higher than average acceptance of risks.

That does not imply leaving potential targets in a soft condition, but rather on implementing situationally reasonable protections that are accepted to be unable to protect everything and everyone all the time.

Walking past a bomb sniffing dog to get into a store or mall wouldn't bother me very much, but maintaining bomb sniffing dogs (which are cheaper than bomb sniffing machines) at a randomly chosen 5%, 2% or even 1% of stores, malls, restaurants and places of social gathering in every community in a country of 350 million seems very costly to me, and it couldn't protect all the customers in all the stores from other concievable terror risks all the time.

[Stinky The Clown]

3. I agree with you completey

I think our airport weapons checks are a HUGE waste of money and I think the scans are a waste of time and effort.

If they worked, this guy would have been caught. It is all a show designed to make us feel better.

[HereSince1628]

5. The NW event demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining vigilance

It seems to me that at the operational level in Nigeria and Amsterdam, it wasn't necessarily that a program was incapable of providing detection, but rather that the implementation of that program was defeated by a loss of vigilance. "Sleeping," bought off, or decieved watchmen have been a security vulnerability since humans began guarding things.

The failure of US Intelligence agencies to heighten vigilance in those places with a warning based on available, but unnoticed patterns in intelligence, certainly is a contributing factor. But, it's not an excuse for the concommitant lack of vigilance that occurred.

Imperfect implementation of a security measures is built into security planning and it is why there are multiple layers to air transportation security (visa control, watchlists, no-fly lists, profiling/behavioral screening at transportation hubs, physical inspections, chemical screening, directives to not accept items for transport from strangers, on-board vigilance of flight crews/air marshalls/passengers). The effect of multiple layers of security is that the joint probabilities of the combined security measures generate very low probabilities of successful attacks.

That said, no system is ever going to be able to protect against all attacks all the time.

To me, less than 100% protection doesn't seem like a necessarily valid reason to abandon a reasonable protective system. Any adopted system must be expected to provide an acceptable level of protection relative to all costs (including impositions on liberty). What constitutes an acceptable cost/effectiveness ratio will vary among individuals depending upon how each person percieves different types of threat. I'll expect and pay for bomb/chemical sniffing dogs at transportation hubs, but I don't want to pay for that protection at the small town hardware store I shop, and where some of residents of the county apparently buy chemicals for their meth labs.

[RC]

4. Meh. Can anyone imagen the loss of revenue at the Malls

if they tried to implement the same "Security" searches for prospective customers they use at airports to enter a mall?
That would shut down this country better than any terrorist blowing himself up in one.

That should tell you something about airport security also.