Originally Posted by
TSORon
What should we do, based upon your conclusion? Stop attempting to interdict those who would do those things the like of which happened on 9/11? Trust to luck, god, or a roll of the dice?
First of all, stop rewarding terrorists by harassing millions of passengers after every terrorism attempt.
The 9/11 will never happen again because of the changed passenger reactions to hijacking. And as the shoe bomb and this new incident show, the passengers are quite efficient at that. How many bombs has the TSA caught at the checkpoint over these years?
Let's assume every passenger will have to arrive at the airport one hour earlier because of the new "security" measures. If we assume a life expectancy of 80 years, it will be 701280 hours. So one million passengers delayed by one hour is equivalent to at least one passenger being killed. You have to balance the lives saved by security measures against lives wasted in the airport queues.
Also focus on people, not objects. Saudi Arabia sponsors lots of Muslim schools all over the world which are rumored to produce terrorists. Why isn't the US sponsoring a network of similar schools promoting more peaceful versions of Islam? This would cost a lot less than the stupid war in Iraq cost. Fight the enemy with its own means.
It is sick that after every act of terrorism, I am scared not of terrorists killing me, but of the government making my life miserable with unnecessary security precautions.
Basically do the same thing the London Underground
did after bombings:
We were very conscious of the fact that getting the system running was the thing that would make the system safest in that, if we didn't reward people with chaos, they would likely leave us alone