3 ms·

I mean, what is the simplest way to prevent another 9/11? Steel cockpit doors and a communications shutoff between cockpit and everything outside. Well you've

by hugh3 16y ago

I mean, what is the simplest way to prevent another 9/11? Steel cockpit doors and a communications shutoff between cockpit and everything outside. Well you've still got the bomb-on-plane problem, which is what the latest three rounds of security increases have been in response to -- there was the shoe bomber, and then the liquid-mixture plot, and then the underpants bomber. You'll note that none of these plots worked. Why? Because they were increasingly shitty bombs. Why were they increasingly shitty bombs? Because they've been progressively closing loopholes. The underpants bomber might have been successful if he were shoe bomber number two, but he wasn't, because the bomb-in-shoe loophole has been closed. People like to use the words "security theater" a lot because it makes them feel clever, and yes, the TSA like any government department has its own particular forms of insanity. But there's actual security accomplished there too. In the 1980s it was possible to sneak a 747-destroying bomb into a plane in a suitcase... now they're reduced to sticking dynamite up their butts. Also, communications shutoff between the cockpit and outside is crazy. What happens when there's a medical emergency onboard? Let 'em die because the pilots aren't allowed to know about anything that happens in the passenger cabin?

StavrosK 16y ago
Out of curiosity, how many bombs in suitcases did we get back when people could do that?
- confuzatron 16y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_bombings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_bombings I suppose the time when people could do that is at earliest, the most recent of those incidents.
jcromartie 16y ago
> the latest three rounds of security increases But there haven't been security increases! They are just targeting one of an infinite number of threats, making their coverage with each of these specific measures effectively zero. Remember: the 9/11 hijackers didn't need bombs.
- hugh3 16y ago
  They are just targeting one of an infinite number of threats That's silly, there's a finite number of threats to airliners. Excluding external threats like missiles (which are themselves defended against by other agencies) you've got two basic avenues: bombs and hijackings. Hijackings require weapons. The first hijackers used guns, so the TSA (and other similar agencies around the world but I'll use the TSA as an example) made it hard to get guns on board. So the next round used knives. So the TSA made it hard to get knives on board. With the damn near impossibility of getting knives on board plus the fact that passengers in a hijacking are now much more inclined to fight back, hijacking is pretty much fully defended against. Bombings require bombs. The earliest bombers used suitcase bombs, which is ideal from their point of view because they can be very large. But security screening got better and suitcase bombs are too difficult nowadays. So they switched to shoe bombs. But now they're impossible. So they switched to underpants bombs. And with the latest (overly invasive) techniques that's more or less impossible too. The size of the largest bomb you can smuggle on board keeps decreasing, and the danger keeps getting smaller and smaller -- whatever you can stick up your butt it's never gonna blow a sizeable hole in the side of an airliner. It's a finite space of threats, and they're actually doing a pretty good job at defending against them. That's why since 9/11 there have been N foiled attempts to attack airliners, and zero successful ones (I think there was a Russian exception).
  - batasrki 16y ago
    See, this is where you've blown your cover and have shown yourself as a troll. What you're saying is that hijackers can only be passengers and therefore these security measures are good and getting better. There are so many loopholes as yet unclosed that further molesting passengers, and this now can be qualified as molestation, is a diminishing returns. Someone else here said and I agree, this is really starting to feel like more overt discouragement from air travel. It's almost as if the TSA has decided that the best way to stop hijacking and bombing of passenger planes is to eliminate passenger planes altogether. I sure as hell will not want to travel to the US by air anymore.
  - gbhn 16y ago
    I was just told by the nice folks at CNN that 6mg of PETN is enough to blow through solid steel twice as thick as airliner skin. I'm afraid cavity searches are our only option here.
hyperbovine 16y ago
now they're reduced to sticking dynamite up their butts. If a guy is willing to blow up the plane he is flying on, do you really believe that living with a stick of dynamite shoved up his ass for his final 5 hours is going to be a deterrent? This is exactly what security theater refers to: security procedures that do not have internal consistency and hence, are nothing but show.
- hugh3 16y ago
  If a guy is willing to blow up the plane he is flying on, do you really believe that living with a stick of dynamite shoved up his ass for his final 5 hours is going to be a deterrent? Nope. But I do think that a butt bomb is significantly less of a threat than a suitcase bomb. The Lockerbie bomb ripped a 747 to pieces. I'm no explosives expert, but I imagine the worst thing an anus-sized bomb could do would be to punch a hole in the side, which would probably be survivable.
  - hyperbovine 16y ago
    How so? Both are more than enough to down the plane.
    - jrockway 16y ago
      Planes have depressurized at altitude and landed safely, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_811 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_811. The plane depressurized and sucked several rows of seats out. Passengers were sucked through the engine. But still, it landed safely and most people on board survived. Yeah, it would be scary if you were on this flight... but if you want to kill 500 people there are a lot easier ways than sticking explosives up your ass and detonating them on the plane.
      - elai 16y ago
        Can the plane stay strucurally stable when a chunk of it has been blown off. Blow up in the right spot and you have a plane split in 2, and it doesn't matter if it's depressurized.
bhickey 16y ago
> You'll note that none of these plots worked. Why? Because they were increasingly shitty bombs. At the risk of the FBI stashing a tracking beacon in my car (ha! I don't even have a car!) I'm going to take your bait. Richard Reid's bomb didn't fail because he had to hide it in his shoe, rather than doing the ol' Ramzi Yousef "hide it in the life jacket routine." Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab didn't fail because he had explosives shoved down his shorts. They failed because they were untrained. These guys displayed a Carlos the Jackal level of buffoonery in their conduct. The July 21nd attackers didn't fail because of the crack police work that went on to murder Jean Charles de Menezes. They failed because they were too stupid to build bombs. (Who would want to target Hackney anyway? It's just a bunch of tyre shops and fish & chips.) For the most part, people who want to do us harm aren't particularly smart. Bright people tend to have more opportunities in life and are less to see that all go up in a puff of smoke. Of the 9/11 hijackers, only one had a girlfriend. Atta was a trained architect, but for the most part they were a bunch of college dropouts. We aren't faced with some "evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds," we're faced with a bunch of bumbling fools with nothing better to do than kill themselves. Look at the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack. They had a deadly neurotoxin that they saw fit to unleash with pointy umbrellas and newspaper rolls. Good job team, way to unleash your crazy new age apocalypse. It isn't a matter of loopholes getting closed. Attackers are simply dumb. Really dumb.
- sensemaker 16y ago
  At least there are enough security against dumb attackers.
  - bhickey 16y ago
    No. Did you notice the part where some idiot smuggled plastic explosives on board a plane in his underwear? Security failed in this situation.
CamperBob 16y ago
It's called 'security theater' because it does nothing to keep anyone safe. It just moves the security problem from the airplane cabin to the line of hundreds of densely-packed people snaking back and forth outside the TSA checkpoint.
gaius 16y ago
Well, on the other hand, in all cases the bomber waltzed onto the plane without a care in the world and was stopped by passenger action. All that extra security was for nothing. Remember that 9/11 was only possible because passengers believed they were in a conventional hijacking situation.

by hugh3 16y ago

StavrosK 16y ago

Out of curiosity, how many bombs in suitcases did we get back when people could do that?

confuzatron 16y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_bombings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_bombings I suppose the time when people could do that is at earliest, the most recent of those incidents.

jcromartie 16y ago

> the latest three rounds of security increases But there haven't been security increases! They are just targeting one of an infinite number of threats, making their coverage with each of these specific measures effectively zero. Remember: the 9/11 hijackers didn't need bombs.

hugh3 16y ago
They are just targeting one of an infinite number of threats That's silly, there's a finite number of threats to airliners. Excluding external threats like missiles (which are themselves defended against by other agencies) you've got two basic avenues: bombs and hijackings. Hijackings require weapons. The first hijackers used guns, so the TSA (and other similar agencies around the world but I'll use the TSA as an example) made it hard to get guns on board. So the next round used knives. So the TSA made it hard to get knives on board. With the damn near impossibility of getting knives on board plus the fact that passengers in a hijacking are now much more inclined to fight back, hijacking is pretty much fully defended against. Bombings require bombs. The earliest bombers used suitcase bombs, which is ideal from their point of view because they can be very large. But security screening got better and suitcase bombs are too difficult nowadays. So they switched to shoe bombs. But now they're impossible. So they switched to underpants bombs. And with the latest (overly invasive) techniques that's more or less impossible too. The size of the largest bomb you can smuggle on board keeps decreasing, and the danger keeps getting smaller and smaller -- whatever you can stick up your butt it's never gonna blow a sizeable hole in the side of an airliner. It's a finite space of threats, and they're actually doing a pretty good job at defending against them. That's why since 9/11 there have been N foiled attempts to attack airliners, and zero successful ones (I think there was a Russian exception).
- batasrki 16y ago
  See, this is where you've blown your cover and have shown yourself as a troll. What you're saying is that hijackers can only be passengers and therefore these security measures are good and getting better. There are so many loopholes as yet unclosed that further molesting passengers, and this now can be qualified as molestation, is a diminishing returns. Someone else here said and I agree, this is really starting to feel like more overt discouragement from air travel. It's almost as if the TSA has decided that the best way to stop hijacking and bombing of passenger planes is to eliminate passenger planes altogether. I sure as hell will not want to travel to the US by air anymore.
- gbhn 16y ago
  I was just told by the nice folks at CNN that 6mg of PETN is enough to blow through solid steel twice as thick as airliner skin. I'm afraid cavity searches are our only option here.

hyperbovine 16y ago

now they're reduced to sticking dynamite up their butts. If a guy is willing to blow up the plane he is flying on, do you really believe that living with a stick of dynamite shoved up his ass for his final 5 hours is going to be a deterrent? This is exactly what security theater refers to: security procedures that do not have internal consistency and hence, are nothing but show.

hugh3 16y ago
If a guy is willing to blow up the plane he is flying on, do you really believe that living with a stick of dynamite shoved up his ass for his final 5 hours is going to be a deterrent? Nope. But I do think that a butt bomb is significantly less of a threat than a suitcase bomb. The Lockerbie bomb ripped a 747 to pieces. I'm no explosives expert, but I imagine the worst thing an anus-sized bomb could do would be to punch a hole in the side, which would probably be survivable.
- hyperbovine 16y ago
  How so? Both are more than enough to down the plane.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    Planes have depressurized at altitude and landed safely, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_811 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_811. The plane depressurized and sucked several rows of seats out. Passengers were sucked through the engine. But still, it landed safely and most people on board survived. Yeah, it would be scary if you were on this flight... but if you want to kill 500 people there are a lot easier ways than sticking explosives up your ass and detonating them on the plane.
    - elai 16y ago
      Can the plane stay strucurally stable when a chunk of it has been blown off. Blow up in the right spot and you have a plane split in 2, and it doesn't matter if it's depressurized.

bhickey 16y ago

> You'll note that none of these plots worked. Why? Because they were increasingly shitty bombs. At the risk of the FBI stashing a tracking beacon in my car (ha! I don't even have a car!) I'm going to take your bait. Richard Reid's bomb didn't fail because he had to hide it in his shoe, rather than doing the ol' Ramzi Yousef "hide it in the life jacket routine." Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab didn't fail because he had explosives shoved down his shorts. They failed because they were untrained. These guys displayed a Carlos the Jackal level of buffoonery in their conduct. The July 21nd attackers didn't fail because of the crack police work that went on to murder Jean Charles de Menezes. They failed because they were too stupid to build bombs. (Who would want to target Hackney anyway? It's just a bunch of tyre shops and fish & chips.) For the most part, people who want to do us harm aren't particularly smart. Bright people tend to have more opportunities in life and are less to see that all go up in a puff of smoke. Of the 9/11 hijackers, only one had a girlfriend. Atta was a trained architect, but for the most part they were a bunch of college dropouts. We aren't faced with some "evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds," we're faced with a bunch of bumbling fools with nothing better to do than kill themselves. Look at the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack. They had a deadly neurotoxin that they saw fit to unleash with pointy umbrellas and newspaper rolls. Good job team, way to unleash your crazy new age apocalypse. It isn't a matter of loopholes getting closed. Attackers are simply dumb. Really dumb.

sensemaker 16y ago
At least there are enough security against dumb attackers.
- bhickey 16y ago
  No. Did you notice the part where some idiot smuggled plastic explosives on board a plane in his underwear? Security failed in this situation.

CamperBob 16y ago

It's called 'security theater' because it does nothing to keep anyone safe. It just moves the security problem from the airplane cabin to the line of hundreds of densely-packed people snaking back and forth outside the TSA checkpoint.

gaius 16y ago

Well, on the other hand, in all cases the bomber waltzed onto the plane without a care in the world and was stopped by passenger action. All that extra security was for nothing. Remember that 9/11 was only possible because passengers believed they were in a conventional hijacking situation.