Ringing in the new year with bad decisions
Okay so it is a New Year and to ring it in we found out that our government is still not as good as most poker players at decision making. I am talking about the TSA’s response to the Nigerian guy who tried to blow up a plane headed for Detroit. If you wanted to give a text book example of resulting you would use the TSA’s response to this to demonstrate why resulting is so bad. So, this guy decides he is going to light his underpants on fire to blow up an international flight headed for Detroit in the last 20 minutes (during its descent). I just love saying the guy tried to light his underpants on fire. That is fun. I mean you can’t make that stuff up. Luckily, the underpants bomb malfunctioned and some astute passengers managed to wrestle the guy to the ground before any real damage could be done.
So, what was the TSA’s response to this? Well they decided they would stop people from being able to do ANYTHING during the last hour of a flight. And by anything I mean using laptops or playing games on your phone or getting up to go pee (yes, no peeing no matter how urgent during the last hour of the flight). Why is this so stupid? Because it is classic resulting. You can’t fight terrorism by putting policies in place that only prevent attacks or attempted attacks that have already happened. Trying to protect against specific scenarios doesn’t work. First, someone can certainly blow up a plane in the first hour of a flight too (and still be near dense population). They could also blow the plane up in the middle of the flight or 61 minutes before the flight ends. Second, if you protect against very specific attacks you are being ineffective because terrorists will just work around whatever security you have in place because there are too many ways for terrorists to attack. Third, and probably most importantly, the threat of terrorism is actually quite small. The chances that you will die by terrorist attack are minuscule. So to inconvenience so many to protect against some specific scenario makes no sense and is, in fact, just fear mongering. Because aside from making us all afraid the protections don’t really do anything.
Take the example of the prohibitions on liquids put in place as a reaction to an attempted attack on a plane with a liquid explosive (resulting again). The prohibition against bringing liquid in a container more than 3 oz doesn’t do anything. Someone could bring many 3 oz containers of liquid and mix them up into enough explosive to bring the plane down. We all know that. If it takes 12 oz of liquid to create an explosive, the rules don’t prohibit 12 oz of liquid from coming on board. They just prevent it from all being in the same container. So the rule it silly and just an inconvenience to all the people not trying to blow up planes because it doesn’t do anything to stop the people that are. On a more important note, just because one person tried to blow a plane up using a liquid doesn’t mean that someone won’t try to blow a plane up using a solid (see underpants guys for details). So the prohibition on liquids doesn’t really keep us any safer, just more inconvenienced.
The fact is that there are too many specific targets and specific plans to protect against. The only way to really keep us safe is to use all the money wasted on these silly procedures borne of resulting and put that money into intelligence and surveillance. That is how you actually prevent attacks because if you have good intelligence and surveillance you can catch the bad guys no matter what they are targeting who how, even if it is a target you never thought of or a completely new method of attack. Good intelligence is blind to method. And that is why it actually works where resulting does not.
Part of the reason that resulting is so bad is that terrorists don’t care if they get caught. That is because there are only two results to attempting an attack: 1) it works which is a win for the terrorists. 2) The terrorist gets caught which that becomes a huge news story which then freaks out the public and makes the target country or population terrified and scared. That is also a win for the terrorists. Security measures only really work if the perpetrator does not want to ever get caught.
Anyway, there is a fantastic article on this here
It is really a good read.
Oh…and Happy New year!
I agree with you, Annie. On your point about not doing anything before landing… I don’t think this yo-yo got up and walked around. I believe he tried to light up his Fruit of the Looms while seating down. So even the measure seems useless.
I agree about having stronger intelligence. But it now seems that everything our intelligence community does is illegal. We obtained lots of information from detainees in Guantanamo, but now people are crying foul because we “tortured” them.
There seems to be no deterrent to these acts. Like you said, if they succeed they go to heaven and are greeted by I-don’t-know how many virgins – except this guy. If he would have succeeded in lighting up his briefs, I don’t think he would have been too effective with “the ladies” – and if they get caught, they now know they’ll be read their rights and tried in civilian courts. Probably they’ll be declared incompetent and spend a lot of our money going from court to court.
They know their hand and ours. How would you like to be in a tournament where everyone can see your cards, but you can’t see anyone’s?
Amen. Great article- Should be read by everyone who is concerned- which is EVERYBODY!
[...] while ago I wrote a post on TSA procedures where I argued that the procedures don’t really protect us from terrorists [...]
Thank you for writing this. I’ve been having a similar conversation and positing many of the same ideas to friends for years now. So many of the TSA regulations are just ridiculous and inconvenient.
To make matters worse, Americans specifically are often subjected to additional rounds of screening abroad, particularly in Europe.