6 ms·

Matt Blaze: How unpredictable screening helps terrorists

56 points by alterego 17y ago

wendroid 17y ago
4 in 5 people scanned, send 5 people
- chaosmachine 17y ago
  Those still aren't very good odds.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    You can't talk about odds without talking about returns. 1-in-5 is f'ing fantastic if a $1 bet pays $1000.
    - chaosmachine 17y ago
      True, but if someone is going to go to the trouble of planning and financing an attack, I imagine they'd want a better than 20% chance of success. Especially since one attacker being caught could ruin the chances of all the others.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        WHY? Really, how much do you think a PETN bomb costs? Re-read the article: nothing that happens in response to these attacks fails to help the terrorists. They send 5 people and one blows up a plane: huge positive ROI. They send 5 people and nobody blows up a plane, but commercial air travel is disrupted to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars: huge positive ROI.
        chaosmachine 17y ago
        You have a good point, if you measure it in terms of financial damage, the terrorists win either way. A side point: I suspect bombs are at bottom of the price chart in terms of financing an attack. More likely, the most expensive part is finding someone stupid enough to blow themselves up, and getting them to the right place at the right time. The cost of doing this undetected would probably increase non-linearly with the number of people involved in your attack.
        tptacek 17y ago
        Which is why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed never gets on the suicide flights. Terrorist management is expensive. Terrorist suckers are cheap, and if the history of the Iraq and Palestinian experience is an indicator, will get cheaper as AQ gets more operational experience.
        ghshephard 17y ago
        The good news for our side, is that these people have to be simultaneously stupid enough to blow themselves up, yet bright enough to make it through security. This is why El Al's approach to security (personal interviews with all passengers) is effective - you'd have to be close to genius level to get through their screening without triggering a (real-world, not TSA-Pansy) pat-down and luggage check - at which point, if you were that bright, you probably wouldn't be volunteering for kaboom duty.
        sorbus 17y ago
        Or they could send someone through multiple times, giving them a prepared briefcase each time, but only put a bomb in it the last time, but telling them that there was a bomb each time; eventually, even an idiot will get used to it, and stop triggering their screening. Hell, depending on what sort of records they keep, they might eventually interpret his nervousness to just be who he is (dislikes flying, say), and wave him through anyways.
        ghshephard 17y ago
        If my (discredited by most on HN, but I still hold to it) theory regarding El Al security screening is correct, they aren't principally looking for people who are nervous, or acting guilty (though they'll pull those people aside as well) - rather they are trying to identify individuals that fall within the category of people that might bomb El Al, and then pull them aside for selective screening. Your average Muslim individual would have little chance convincing a screener they were an observant Jew, and would always fail regardless of how many times they attempted. By the time they had learned a patter that would get them through security, they would probably be bright enough to say "Hey, why am I wasting my life by blowing myself up? I should probably _run_ operations instead of being in them" The supposed success of El Al isn't (in my opinion) that they can stop a broad community of attackers, rather it is that they are effective in profiling quickly, and passing through 95% of the passengers quickly, and only subjecting 5% to selective screening. I'd be interesting in hearing of the experiences of any Palestinian or Muslim passengers that have flyed on El Al for anecdotal confirmation of this.
  - bensummers 17y ago
    Defenders must prevent every possible attack. Attackers must evade the defenses just once.
- elblanco 17y ago
  It's like the old Star Trek joke: Kirk: Mr. Spock, how many ways are there to die on this planet? Spock: 3 Captain Kirk: Very good, let's bring 3 guys in red shirts down to the planet with us.
CWuestefeld 17y ago
Relevant parts: Paradoxically, the best terrorist strategy (as long as they have enough volunteers) under unpredictable screening may be to prepare a cadre of suicide bombers for the least rigorous screening to which they might be subjected, and not, as the strategy assumes, for the most rigorous. Sent on their way, each will either succeed at destroying a plane or be caught, but either outcome serves the terrorists' objective. ... We might reflexively assume that any passenger screening system needs to be 100% effective at detecting all possible weapons and dangerous objects, an obviously difficult task. But, fortunately, that's not the requirement. Instead, the mechanisms need only be highly effective at detecting objects that can create actual terror under the conditions they will be subjected to in an actual flight. That is, in order to have meaningful security screening, we first must understand what it realistically takes to bring down an airplane. The security system can then be designed specifically to eliminate the preconditions for successful terrorism. The TSA's much maligned "three ounce" liquid rule is, in fact, a nice example of good security engineering of this kind. ...
- tptacek 17y ago
  The idea that Matt Blaze thinks the three-ounce rule is sensible was surprising to me; I hit it, jumped back to the top, and re-read the whole article. What's the flaw in his reasoning? The three-ounce rule always seemed like one of the more ridiculous TSA measures.
  - rogersm 17y ago
    After all, the latest bomber was carrying 80 grams, less than three ounces.
    - ghshephard 17y ago
      Note that it was 80 grams of _powder_, not liquid.
      - deleted 17y ago
        [deleted]
itistoday 17y ago
It's perfectly possible that an organization headed by the government whose primary focus is the security of airline passengers is completely incompetent and ineffective. But is it not also possible that the TSA is purposefully putting on the guise of an incompetent governmental entity? That would seem like an excellent strategy to take, as it follows the principles in Sun Tzu's Art of War to the letter. If you are strong, appear weak, if you are weak, appear strong, etc. If these terrorists think they can easily game the system, it will likely lead them to be less cautious, exactly as stated in the article: Paradoxically, the best terrorist strategy (as long as they have enough volunteers) under unpredictable screening may be to prepare a cadre of suicide bombers for the least rigorous screening to which they might be subjected, and not, as the strategy assumes, for the most rigorous. That seems like a good thing to me, and if this is the TSA's actual strategy, it's a smart one. Say one thing publicly, but do another privately.
- thesethings 17y ago
  Whoa. You must blew my mind. I really want this to be true :D
- pvg 17y ago
  But is it not also possible that the TSA is purposefully putting on the guise of an incompetent governmental entity? It's extremely unlikely. For one thing, appearing incompetent in order to encourage the incautious, freelancers, amateurs and copycats is essentially using the public as bait - if you happen to miss one, people die. As a strategy it's morally and probably legally questionable.
- kscaldef 17y ago
  Personally, my take on the "unpredictable security measures" is that what's really being said is "things are pretty chaotic here and we don't really have a well-though-out plan in place, but we're going to try to cover that up by claiming that the inconsistency is actually intentional".
tptacek 17y ago
This article demonstrates what I like about Matt Blaze's physical security writing that I don't like about Schneier's. Both are computer security experts by training, but Blaze's writing has a concrete engineering-driven perspective that Schneier's lacks. Schneier's writing always "feels" right, but leaves you with the sense that's it's not based on any operational reality. It's probably not a coincidence that Matt Blaze has done formal research on physical security topics (safecracking, wiretapping, etc) --- in addition to being a bona fide computer scientist.
- rogersm 17y ago
  First of all I must say I don't believe in these kind of unpredictable systems: rarely doing this 'select randomly the process from a set of processes' works better than using the best process in the set. But I don't think this applies: But terrorist organizations -- especially those employing suicide bombers -- have very different goals and incentives from those of smugglers, fare beaters and tax cheats. Groups like Al Qaeda aim to cause widespread disruption and terror by whatever means they can, even at great cost to individual members. In particular, they are willing and able to sacrifice -- martyr -- the very lives of their solders in the service of that goal. The fate of any individual terrorist is irrelevant as long as the loss contributes to terror and disruption. Training a terrorist has a cost, and he should succeed the "fate of any individual terrorist is not irrelevant". The terrorist group does not have an infinite number of terrorists (as he correctly concedes in the next paragraph). So random screening works, not because that influences the behavior even of those who aren't checked, but because makes executing the attack more expensive to overcome the possibility of being detained in the random test. Of course random screening is not as good as full screening, but from a realistic point of view is the only thing you can apply without shutting down world economy.
  - alterego 17y ago
    But if you read the article, I believe the point was that if the terrorist gets caught under a random system, the terrorist still achieves a positive result for the terrorists (the govt becomes forced to shut down aviation and then apply the maximum screening to everyone, causing expensive chaos and terror of its own).
sethg 17y ago
the best terrorist strategy (as long as they have enough volunteers) Do they have enough volunteers? The Shoe Bomber and the Undie Bomber, compared with the team that pulled off 9/11, are a couple of amateurish mooks. If these are the best men that al-Qaeda can send against the United States, they must not have a very deep bench.
- mattm 17y ago
  If you recall, at least one of the 9/11 hijackers almost missed his flight because he was late. Al-Qaeda is not sending its best men for these missions. Why would an organization send its best men if they are going to end up dead or in jail? It doesn't make sense. You send the worst people possible that have a chance of pulling it off.
- CamperBob 17y ago
  That's just it... the people who pulled off 9/11 were a bunch of amateurish mooks. A bunch of amateurish mooks with an 18 in the Luck department is still dangerous. Just as in this case, there were any number of measures already in place that could have stopped 9/11, if they had only been followed. More rules are not the answer.
  - dandelany 17y ago
    Well, sort of. They were 19 amateurish mooks who had gone to flight school. That's a far cry from a couple of idiots with unsuccessful bombs.
RedJones 17y ago
"A few days later the TSA, to it's credit..." Fail.
pedrocr 17y ago
The problem is that with non-random screening the terrorists can be much more efficient. They can get a pool of candidates together and send them on flights without any explosives on them. They can then find out which of the guys get screened at a rate less than chance and send those on the actual attack. That's why random screening is the best system possible because any other system would have to be perfect, otherwise any flaw can be detected on dry runs and exploited for the attack. This was thoroughly explored last time the TSA tried to be smart about screening and implemented its Computer-Assisted Passenger Screening System. MIT article exploring it: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers/spring02-papers/caps.htm http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers...
- alterego 17y ago
  I think this article isn't talking about random vs. profiled (which is what the mit paper is about), but random vs. 100% (where there 100% has been analyzed carefully to be sufficient to detect large bombs, etc.).
  - pedrocr 17y ago
    He was hand-waving at the end about the 100% but that's not a solution. They are doing it randomly because 100% is simply not possible. My point was that in a situation where 100% is not possible, as in real life, any system is potentially worse than randomness. Maybe this just means we need to come up with screening mechanisms that can be applied to 100%, but given the current capabilities, choosing random screening is better than profiling.
- zmimon 17y ago
  It seems to me that the right approach should always have a significant random element, not as a deterrent, but as a check on how well the non-random component is working. The random part will examine in depth to find anything that should have been found in the non-random part but wasn't (say, body searches to find large metal objects making it through the x-ray screen at the airport). Without that you would be blind to defects in the system.
bdr 17y ago
The problem with this post is his answer to the question "What do we do when we detect a terrorist through random screening?" His answer is "shut down all commercial aviation until the the most rigorous screening possible can henceforth be applied universally, effectively creating the same kind of havoc that occurs after a successful attack", and his whole post rests on this point, but I think it's totally flawed. - Shutting down commercial flight is better outcome (for the defender) than the the destruction of 9/11 - There are alternative responses, such as heightened screening, tighter in-flight security, or checking passenger lists for people with known connections to the terrorist caught.
neilk 17y ago
The article hinges on the proposition that a failed attack still serves the terrorist network's purposes. Seriously, can you imagine a terrorist being briefed like this? "Well, if you succeed, you may shock the world and rally the Muslim nations to our cause, while drawing the Great Satan into an unwinnable war costing over a trillion dollars. If you fail... well, you're going to cause a lot of air travellers to be a little annoyed for five minutes." There is this idea that terrorists are like devils, delighting in causing misfortune of any kind. I don't think that's the case. Al-Qaeda has concrete goals, like advancing Wahabbi ideology or ejecting the USA from the holy places. Failed missions don't support that, do they?
- pyre 17y ago
  Do you really think that they would tell the suicide bomber that he/she might fail?
  - neilk 17y ago
    It was just to demonstrate a certain absurdity. No, that conversation might not happen, but the point was that the terrorist planners have objectives beyond "cause mayhem". And that increasing airline security costs probably don't even rank on their scale of worthy goals. In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is bleeding the USA of billions of dollars every month. But the article suggests that merely inconveniencing air travellers -- to the tune of maybe a few hundred million a year, widely dispersed -- might rank as an acceptable second best to a terrorist.
    - pyre 17y ago
      al-Qaeda wants 'The West' to fear them. People get scared of air travel every time there is an incident, even if that incident is a terrorism attempt that was caught before it ever got off the ground. If al-Qaeda doesn't have some sort of media presence, then people will start to think that they are a non-issue. Maybe al-Qaeda doesn't really think of things in these terms, but I have a hard time believing that they are all religious fundamental crazies. For them to be so organized, some of them have to be thinking on a more practical level.
johnl 17y ago
Random usually ends up being discrimination so I would go with a set of more stable rules that apply to everyone.

56 points by alterego 17y ago

wendroid 17y ago

4 in 5 people scanned, send 5 people

chaosmachine 17y ago
Those still aren't very good odds.
- tptacek 17y ago
  You can't talk about odds without talking about returns. 1-in-5 is f'ing fantastic if a $1 bet pays $1000.
  - chaosmachine 17y ago
    True, but if someone is going to go to the trouble of planning and financing an attack, I imagine they'd want a better than 20% chance of success. Especially since one attacker being caught could ruin the chances of all the others.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      WHY? Really, how much do you think a PETN bomb costs? Re-read the article: nothing that happens in response to these attacks fails to help the terrorists. They send 5 people and one blows up a plane: huge positive ROI. They send 5 people and nobody blows up a plane, but commercial air travel is disrupted to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars: huge positive ROI.
      - chaosmachine 17y ago
        You have a good point, if you measure it in terms of financial damage, the terrorists win either way. A side point: I suspect bombs are at bottom of the price chart in terms of financing an attack. More likely, the most expensive part is finding someone stupid enough to blow themselves up, and getting them to the right place at the right time. The cost of doing this undetected would probably increase non-linearly with the number of people involved in your attack.
        tptacek 17y ago
        Which is why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed never gets on the suicide flights. Terrorist management is expensive. Terrorist suckers are cheap, and if the history of the Iraq and Palestinian experience is an indicator, will get cheaper as AQ gets more operational experience.
        ghshephard 17y ago
        The good news for our side, is that these people have to be simultaneously stupid enough to blow themselves up, yet bright enough to make it through security. This is why El Al's approach to security (personal interviews with all passengers) is effective - you'd have to be close to genius level to get through their screening without triggering a (real-world, not TSA-Pansy) pat-down and luggage check - at which point, if you were that bright, you probably wouldn't be volunteering for kaboom duty.
        sorbus 17y ago
        Or they could send someone through multiple times, giving them a prepared briefcase each time, but only put a bomb in it the last time, but telling them that there was a bomb each time; eventually, even an idiot will get used to it, and stop triggering their screening. Hell, depending on what sort of records they keep, they might eventually interpret his nervousness to just be who he is (dislikes flying, say), and wave him through anyways.
        ghshephard 17y ago
        If my (discredited by most on HN, but I still hold to it) theory regarding El Al security screening is correct, they aren't principally looking for people who are nervous, or acting guilty (though they'll pull those people aside as well) - rather they are trying to identify individuals that fall within the category of people that might bomb El Al, and then pull them aside for selective screening. Your average Muslim individual would have little chance convincing a screener they were an observant Jew, and would always fail regardless of how many times they attempted. By the time they had learned a patter that would get them through security, they would probably be bright enough to say "Hey, why am I wasting my life by blowing myself up? I should probably _run_ operations instead of being in them" The supposed success of El Al isn't (in my opinion) that they can stop a broad community of attackers, rather it is that they are effective in profiling quickly, and passing through 95% of the passengers quickly, and only subjecting 5% to selective screening. I'd be interesting in hearing of the experiences of any Palestinian or Muslim passengers that have flyed on El Al for anecdotal confirmation of this.
- bensummers 17y ago
  Defenders must prevent every possible attack. Attackers must evade the defenses just once.
elblanco 17y ago
It's like the old Star Trek joke: Kirk: Mr. Spock, how many ways are there to die on this planet? Spock: 3 Captain Kirk: Very good, let's bring 3 guys in red shirts down to the planet with us.

CWuestefeld 17y ago

Relevant parts: Paradoxically, the best terrorist strategy (as long as they have enough volunteers) under unpredictable screening may be to prepare a cadre of suicide bombers for the least rigorous screening to which they might be subjected, and not, as the strategy assumes, for the most rigorous. Sent on their way, each will either succeed at destroying a plane or be caught, but either outcome serves the terrorists' objective. ... We might reflexively assume that any passenger screening system needs to be 100% effective at detecting all possible weapons and dangerous objects, an obviously difficult task. But, fortunately, that's not the requirement. Instead, the mechanisms need only be highly effective at detecting objects that can create actual terror under the conditions they will be subjected to in an actual flight. That is, in order to have meaningful security screening, we first must understand what it realistically takes to bring down an airplane. The security system can then be designed specifically to eliminate the preconditions for successful terrorism. The TSA's much maligned "three ounce" liquid rule is, in fact, a nice example of good security engineering of this kind. ...

tptacek 17y ago
The idea that Matt Blaze thinks the three-ounce rule is sensible was surprising to me; I hit it, jumped back to the top, and re-read the whole article. What's the flaw in his reasoning? The three-ounce rule always seemed like one of the more ridiculous TSA measures.
- rogersm 17y ago
  After all, the latest bomber was carrying 80 grams, less than three ounces.
  - ghshephard 17y ago
    Note that it was 80 grams of _powder_, not liquid.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]

itistoday 17y ago

It's perfectly possible that an organization headed by the government whose primary focus is the security of airline passengers is completely incompetent and ineffective. But is it not also possible that the TSA is purposefully putting on the guise of an incompetent governmental entity? That would seem like an excellent strategy to take, as it follows the principles in Sun Tzu's Art of War to the letter. If you are strong, appear weak, if you are weak, appear strong, etc. If these terrorists think they can easily game the system, it will likely lead them to be less cautious, exactly as stated in the article: Paradoxically, the best terrorist strategy (as long as they have enough volunteers) under unpredictable screening may be to prepare a cadre of suicide bombers for the least rigorous screening to which they might be subjected, and not, as the strategy assumes, for the most rigorous. That seems like a good thing to me, and if this is the TSA's actual strategy, it's a smart one. Say one thing publicly, but do another privately.

thesethings 17y ago
Whoa. You must blew my mind. I really want this to be true :D
pvg 17y ago
But is it not also possible that the TSA is purposefully putting on the guise of an incompetent governmental entity? It's extremely unlikely. For one thing, appearing incompetent in order to encourage the incautious, freelancers, amateurs and copycats is essentially using the public as bait - if you happen to miss one, people die. As a strategy it's morally and probably legally questionable.
kscaldef 17y ago
Personally, my take on the "unpredictable security measures" is that what's really being said is "things are pretty chaotic here and we don't really have a well-though-out plan in place, but we're going to try to cover that up by claiming that the inconsistency is actually intentional".

tptacek 17y ago

This article demonstrates what I like about Matt Blaze's physical security writing that I don't like about Schneier's. Both are computer security experts by training, but Blaze's writing has a concrete engineering-driven perspective that Schneier's lacks. Schneier's writing always "feels" right, but leaves you with the sense that's it's not based on any operational reality. It's probably not a coincidence that Matt Blaze has done formal research on physical security topics (safecracking, wiretapping, etc) --- in addition to being a bona fide computer scientist.

rogersm 17y ago
First of all I must say I don't believe in these kind of unpredictable systems: rarely doing this 'select randomly the process from a set of processes' works better than using the best process in the set. But I don't think this applies: But terrorist organizations -- especially those employing suicide bombers -- have very different goals and incentives from those of smugglers, fare beaters and tax cheats. Groups like Al Qaeda aim to cause widespread disruption and terror by whatever means they can, even at great cost to individual members. In particular, they are willing and able to sacrifice -- martyr -- the very lives of their solders in the service of that goal. The fate of any individual terrorist is irrelevant as long as the loss contributes to terror and disruption. Training a terrorist has a cost, and he should succeed the "fate of any individual terrorist is not irrelevant". The terrorist group does not have an infinite number of terrorists (as he correctly concedes in the next paragraph). So random screening works, not because that influences the behavior even of those who aren't checked, but because makes executing the attack more expensive to overcome the possibility of being detained in the random test. Of course random screening is not as good as full screening, but from a realistic point of view is the only thing you can apply without shutting down world economy.
- alterego 17y ago
  But if you read the article, I believe the point was that if the terrorist gets caught under a random system, the terrorist still achieves a positive result for the terrorists (the govt becomes forced to shut down aviation and then apply the maximum screening to everyone, causing expensive chaos and terror of its own).

sethg 17y ago

the best terrorist strategy (as long as they have enough volunteers) Do they have enough volunteers? The Shoe Bomber and the Undie Bomber, compared with the team that pulled off 9/11, are a couple of amateurish mooks. If these are the best men that al-Qaeda can send against the United States, they must not have a very deep bench.

mattm 17y ago
If you recall, at least one of the 9/11 hijackers almost missed his flight because he was late. Al-Qaeda is not sending its best men for these missions. Why would an organization send its best men if they are going to end up dead or in jail? It doesn't make sense. You send the worst people possible that have a chance of pulling it off.
CamperBob 17y ago
That's just it... the people who pulled off 9/11 were a bunch of amateurish mooks. A bunch of amateurish mooks with an 18 in the Luck department is still dangerous. Just as in this case, there were any number of measures already in place that could have stopped 9/11, if they had only been followed. More rules are not the answer.
- dandelany 17y ago
  Well, sort of. They were 19 amateurish mooks who had gone to flight school. That's a far cry from a couple of idiots with unsuccessful bombs.

RedJones 17y ago

"A few days later the TSA, to it's credit..." Fail.

pedrocr 17y ago

The problem is that with non-random screening the terrorists can be much more efficient. They can get a pool of candidates together and send them on flights without any explosives on them. They can then find out which of the guys get screened at a rate less than chance and send those on the actual attack. That's why random screening is the best system possible because any other system would have to be perfect, otherwise any flaw can be detected on dry runs and exploited for the attack. This was thoroughly explored last time the TSA tried to be smart about screening and implemented its Computer-Assisted Passenger Screening System. MIT article exploring it: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers/spring02-papers/caps.htm http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers...

alterego 17y ago
I think this article isn't talking about random vs. profiled (which is what the mit paper is about), but random vs. 100% (where there 100% has been analyzed carefully to be sufficient to detect large bombs, etc.).
- pedrocr 17y ago
  He was hand-waving at the end about the 100% but that's not a solution. They are doing it randomly because 100% is simply not possible. My point was that in a situation where 100% is not possible, as in real life, any system is potentially worse than randomness. Maybe this just means we need to come up with screening mechanisms that can be applied to 100%, but given the current capabilities, choosing random screening is better than profiling.
zmimon 17y ago
It seems to me that the right approach should always have a significant random element, not as a deterrent, but as a check on how well the non-random component is working. The random part will examine in depth to find anything that should have been found in the non-random part but wasn't (say, body searches to find large metal objects making it through the x-ray screen at the airport). Without that you would be blind to defects in the system.

bdr 17y ago

The problem with this post is his answer to the question "What do we do when we detect a terrorist through random screening?" His answer is "shut down all commercial aviation until the the most rigorous screening possible can henceforth be applied universally, effectively creating the same kind of havoc that occurs after a successful attack", and his whole post rests on this point, but I think it's totally flawed. - Shutting down commercial flight is better outcome (for the defender) than the the destruction of 9/11 - There are alternative responses, such as heightened screening, tighter in-flight security, or checking passenger lists for people with known connections to the terrorist caught.

neilk 17y ago

The article hinges on the proposition that a failed attack still serves the terrorist network's purposes. Seriously, can you imagine a terrorist being briefed like this? "Well, if you succeed, you may shock the world and rally the Muslim nations to our cause, while drawing the Great Satan into an unwinnable war costing over a trillion dollars. If you fail... well, you're going to cause a lot of air travellers to be a little annoyed for five minutes." There is this idea that terrorists are like devils, delighting in causing misfortune of any kind. I don't think that's the case. Al-Qaeda has concrete goals, like advancing Wahabbi ideology or ejecting the USA from the holy places. Failed missions don't support that, do they?

pyre 17y ago
Do you really think that they would tell the suicide bomber that he/she might fail?
- neilk 17y ago
  It was just to demonstrate a certain absurdity. No, that conversation might not happen, but the point was that the terrorist planners have objectives beyond "cause mayhem". And that increasing airline security costs probably don't even rank on their scale of worthy goals. In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is bleeding the USA of billions of dollars every month. But the article suggests that merely inconveniencing air travellers -- to the tune of maybe a few hundred million a year, widely dispersed -- might rank as an acceptable second best to a terrorist.
  - pyre 17y ago
    al-Qaeda wants 'The West' to fear them. People get scared of air travel every time there is an incident, even if that incident is a terrorism attempt that was caught before it ever got off the ground. If al-Qaeda doesn't have some sort of media presence, then people will start to think that they are a non-issue. Maybe al-Qaeda doesn't really think of things in these terms, but I have a hard time believing that they are all religious fundamental crazies. For them to be so organized, some of them have to be thinking on a more practical level.

johnl 17y ago

Random usually ends up being discrimination so I would go with a set of more stable rules that apply to everyone.