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Blog Ho! is back with a few notes in airline security |
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Tuesday, 13 January 2004 |
Blog Ho! is back after an extended holiday break. I had lots of good ideas to blog about over the break, but was away from a computer most of the time. Most of the topics are outdated now, but this one still sticks...
I spent the holidays in Germany and France and flew back from Paris right in the middle of the mess of stopping every other flight out of Paris to the US. The whole mess turned out to be based on intelligence that didn't unfold as expected, but the episode caused me to think about the efficacy of all the air travel related security measures taken after 9/11. Reading Bruce Schneier's new book, Beyond Fear, really put me in the mindset for this (an excellent book about making sensible security decisions).
Is stopping flights an effective countermeasure to terrorism? If the intelligence is correct and you can stop a plane with a terrorist(s) on board then it's one hell of a countermeasure. If you're wrong, there is still some benefit as a preventitive measure - it makes it harder for terrorists to plan effectively if flights are randomly cancelled. However, given the unpredictablility of air travel without canceling flights for security reasons the benefit is extremely slim. Terrorists already have to compensate for this uncertainty. That's partly why they hijacked four planes on 9/11, not one. The trade off is that it delays or cancels flights and contributes to the culture of fear.
The question of agendas seems to be playing a role here too. All of the cancelled flights have been on foreign carriers. This makes the decisions questionable. Could it be they are staying away from US carriers because they don't want to exacerbate the problems of already troubled US airlines? Most importantly, stopping flights gives the intelligence organizations and TSA something they can say they did. "See we made you safer by stopping this flight." When in fact we have no idea if this is true.
Overall, stopping or delaying these flights is what Schneier calls Security Theater, and this is a fine performance.
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