Originally Posted by lavalyn

We don't have a good profile of what terrorists do or do not, other than do terrorist-y things like hijacks, car-bombings, plane collisions, etc. That's the thing about terrorist profiling. The sheer amount of information on FT is a treasure trove for airplane-attacking terrorists, as well as for the non-terrorists (that vastly outnumber the former) that just want a reasonable trip from A to B. And for a terrorist (or non-terrorist) that wants more information, joining the forum is a pre-requisite to actually asking the questions they need answered.

Edit and aside: I'm reminded of the Sony Rootkit makers, that joined public developer mailing lists to ask questions about writing CD-ROM drivers, without disclosing their final intent. They got helpful advice from other mailing list members on how to do some of the things they needed their software to do. Do you really think people with malicious intent won't join relevant fora to gather necessary information? It's just that people with malicious intent are (hopefully) badly outnumbered by good people, that a priori helping a random stranger is helping the public at large.

Yes, I agree that it's security theatre. Yes, I agree that things that go squish are not real threats compared to the annoyances they cause in getting banned. No, I'm not willing to say whether terrorists are "more likely" or "less likely" to join FlyerTalk.