Doppy

No, I don't think that banning scissors is saving us from terrorism. Instead, I think we should be concentrating our resources on major threats, such as guns and bombs.

On the other hand, I don't think it's practical to have government agents interviewing every passenger to determine if they're allowed to bring scissors onboard. First, we don't have the resources and the cost of such a program would be enormous.

And second, I don't see the benefits of allowing some people to carry "dangerous" items on the plane, but not others. If the item really is dangerous, the bad guy will get his hands on it if he needs to. This solution simply doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe you could explain why you think it's a good idea, because I can't figure it out.


The government didn't need to detect and prevent (by itself) the attacks to stop them. What it did need to do was put together the pieces of information and get that info out to the right people (in some cases the airlines and public) so that appropriate actions could have been taken. Private industry and the public can play an important role against terrorism, but only if they're given good information to work with.

The disagreement regarding the PATRIOT Act is not regarding the parts of it that aim to (but don't actually seem to) allow for better cooperation between law enforcement and intelligence services to stop terrorism.

The disagreement is whether the public needs to give up freedom, liberty and privacy to "make us safe." That's what the disagreement is about, and the evidence seems to indicate that we don't need to give these things up to be safe. Even without the PATRIOT Act the government was able to collect enough information to determine that terrorists were planning to crash planes into buildings, and there were some indications of when something (we didn't know what) might happen.

The problem was that (1) this information didn't get passed to the right people / aggregated and (2) the information was buried under tons of other junk information.

#2 above is made worse by the PATRIOT Act and programs like "SecureFlight" which seek to collect an outrageous amount of information about every person in the country. When you're looking for a needle in a haystack, increasing the amount of hay by 10000 times doesn't help your cause.

PatrickHenry1775

There is a simple way to reduce the haystack that must be looked at. Concentrate most of your resources on the likeliest threat. This approach would exempt Norwegian grandmothers and seven year old American children from the more intense scrutiny so that more resources would be allocated to the more probable threats. This is what the FAA failed to do in 2000-2001, and what TSA is failing to do even to this day.

amarain

And look what happens when they do...

SirFlysALot

Looking at which library books I checked out or the books I bought from Amazon.com will not make us safer. Looking at my financial records will not make us safer. If there is an issue this information can always be gotten by court order. But until now there has to be a crime first!

A few items in the Patriot act needed updating such as wiretaps. If we never made any adjustments for technology we would only be able to tap Western Union telegraph messages.

I DO object to the searches of our homes without a warrant. Even tho most times judges rubber stamp what ever law enforcement wants I would prefer to have some official oversight of these guys.

I agree with Doppy. The information was there to be had before the Patriot act. Something went wrong.

Bart

Here's the flaw in your statement: Norwegian grandmothers are not being given more intense scrutiny if they are in a wheelchair or are pacemaker patients. Everyone who boards an airplane must be screened at the checkpoint. For those unable to pass through a walk through metal detector, an alternative screening method is used: usually a full body pat-down. There appears to be a perception that just because an elderly person is being patted down that they are being given more intense scrutiny. This is not the case. They are being an alternative form of screening as a substitute due to some physical or medical limitation that prevents them from undergoing the primary method.

Where I agree with you is if an elderly person or young child is pre-selected for secondary screening by the SSSS on their boarding passes. This is bureaucracy at its stupidest. Then again, I think the whole pre-selectee process is stupid.

Bart

Believe it or not, your post supports exactly the point I am trying to make. In the wake of 9/11, we have government efforts attempting to improve the ability to detect, deter, neutralize and intercept the next terror attack and you strongly criticize those efforts. I'm not saying I disagree with the context of your argument; in fact, I think you'd be surprised at how much we have in common. The point is that you are not about to sit idly by and condone whatever actions the government takes in the name of fighting terrorism. It is along those lines that I argue nobody would have sat idly by to allow the government to take actions to neutralize or intercept the 9/11 terrorists EVEN IF the government was able to successfully detect and deduce that 4 airplanes were going to be hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center. It is our nature to question, challenge and debate government intrusion of any sort, and the sort of actions that would have been required to intercept those terrorists would have required intrusions beyond those considered reasonable.

What's the solution? I don't know. I certainly don't want to see the United States turned into a police state. I certainly don't want to see the Constitution suspended, even temporarily, in the name of our own protection. All I'm saying is that all of this speculation of how the FBI failed to respond to reports about Middle Eastern men taking flying lessons, or that the Department of Defense had a super-secret intelligence program that identified Mohammad Atta as a terrorist residing in the United States, or that the FAA had several intelligence reports indicating that an attempt to hijack airplanes and fly them into US landmarks all don't amount to squat because the government would have still remained paralyzed to take any significant action. If anything, we probably would have learned that four or five FBI agents also perished among the Flight 11 victims because they had Mohammad Atta under surveillance. Speculation on my part, but I think you understand my point.

Doppy

Nobody really has a problem with the government acting on specific information about a specific threat with regards to specific people.

The problem is when the government tells us that we ALL have to give up freedom/privacy/liberty for security theater.

The government did a great job of figuring out who the terrorists were after 9/11 and tracing their footsteps. They didn't need a database of what books every American reads to pull that off.

One of the easiest and most effective things the government could have done was made us better aware of the threat.

It wasn't "unimaginable" that a terrorist would think crash a plane into a building as we have always been told -- the FBI arrested someone in 1995 who had planned to do that, and investigated at flight schools in the follow-up because it recognized the threat as real. Simply passing that information on to the airlines and public would have improved security (take a look at UA 93). It might have even deterred the hijackers from their plan if they knew we were on the lookout for something like that. (Note that I'm talking about telling people about a specific threat, not the generalized "be terrified of everything" stuff DHS usually says.)

Of course, this is speculation, as well. My point is that your "the government would have remained paralyzed" remark seems to suggest that the only way to gain security is through invasive measures like curtailing our rights and privacy. This position is certainly in vogue these days, but I don't happen to agree with it.

Bart

Not once, in any of my 1500+ posts have I ever advocated curtailing anyone's rights or privacy as a way of gaining security. Disappointed in your comment; this ends the discussion; it is going nowhere.

Doppy

I didn't say you did.

You said the government would have been paralyzed from taking any "significant actions." What I said was that the only "significant action" that I could imagine the public being up in arms about was massive curtailments of privacy or freedom.

Even pre-9/11 I don't think the public would have been up in arms about the government taking significant actions such as arresting terrorists or telling the airlines about the specific planes-as-missiles threat.