8 ms·
The term you're looking for is security theatre
by dtech 4y ago
The term you're looking for is security theatre
- HeckFeck 4y ago"The illusion of safety has a positive psychological benefit, therefore we should be obstructive, suspicious and procedural" - or something The fact that this works with so many people makes me warier of them than anyone it purports to protect me against. I don't feel safe being harassed by scowling officials in faux-important uniform.
- meghan_rain 4y agoRight, but to their defense, there have not been 9/11 attacks or anything remotely similar since 9/11... so either it was all fake anyways or the security theater also deters potential low IQ attackers?
- vlovich123 4y agoI also found a magic rock that keeps away tigers. Would you like to purchase it? No tigers have ever been spotted in my area since I found it.
- staringback 4y agoLisa, I want to buy your rock
- cm2187 4y agoI am also not aware, in the history of aviation, of a terrorist attack that was stopped at an airport security check.
- discretion22 4y agoHere's one : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_affair Though it was the airline's own additional airport security check rather than the security checkpoint.
- vlovich123 4y agoMy snark aside, you’re missing a totally other reasonable explanation. Prior to 9/11 hijackings were relatively safe affairs. They would land and negotiate for money / demands and release passengers unharmed. So sitting passively was the safest approach, Post 9/11 the cockpit is completely locked down (regulatory requirement for flights to/from US) and passengers know that any hijacking might be a suicide attacker and thus won’t sit passively. See underwear and shoe bombers as examples where bomb materials got through security but passengers subdued the attacker. That’s why US Marshals stopped flying. Attacks are too rare to warrant meaningful useful security on even a small fraction of flights. Now arguably those were international flights into the US. You could argue that security was lax abroad but generally TSA regulations and technical requirements apply to security screenings for inbound flights so there’s not any particular reason to believe that the TSA would have done a better job.
- onlypositive 4y agoDon't worry, the TSA has inserted itself into overseas airports too. When travelling to the US we get subjected to random/targeted searches in the gating area by US TSA staff before being allowed to board. This is after our own typical screening and scanning.
- tyingq 4y agoThe end of 9/11 happening again occured right in the middle of 9/11, with UAL 93. Passengers figure out it's not a hijacking they might survive, and that you're going to crash the plane into a valuable target. Then, having nothing to lose, they revolt and ruin your plan. So that particular type of plan isn't going to work again. Passengers no longer assume "hijacking I might survive".
- mdrachuk 4y agoThere also wasn’t a 9/11 before the 9/11.
- 0xDEF 4y agoThere were dozens of terror attacks against air travel in the 80s and 90s. The global post-9/11 "security theater" did make flying in the developing world much safer.
- actionfromafar 4y agoI always attributed that to: - before 9/11, the advice was: sit down in your seat and wait for the ransom demands - after 9/11: fight for your life now or die in a blaze of fire Hijackers must feel this too. No quarter will be given.
- delecti 4y agoWasn't that a contributing factor to UA93 being "unsuccessful"? The passengers had gotten word of the other three flights, and stopped being quite as compliant (though "compliant" is obviously not the full story for the other three flights).
- actionfromafar 4y agoYes! Without this incident, I wouldn't be as optimistic about people fighting back. Turns out, people can be pretty rational after all.
- dtech 4y agoThe TSA checks are ineffective, they fail detection 95% of the time [1]. That's a pretty good indication that it's security theater. Personally, I'd expect the decrease to be mostly attributable to increased cockpit access security like locked reinforced doors. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-...
- CamperBob2 4y agoSecuring cockpit doors is what prevents the next 9/11. It was both necessary and sufficient.
- rob74 4y agoSecuring cockpit doors contributed to the death of 150 people however: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 > Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, Lubitz locked the cockpit door and initiated a controlled descent that continued until the aircraft hit a mountainside.
- amelius 4y agoYes. Did they fix the doors/protocol in the meantime?
- wil421 4y agoYou aren’t supposed to let a pilot be alone in the cockpit and they violated protocol when this happened. 2 authorized personnel should be in the cockpit at all times but German airlines dropped the rule.
- rob74 4y agoI'm not an expert, but the Wikipedia article sounds like this protocol was implemented after the Germanwings crash: > In response to the incident and the circumstances of the co-pilot's involvement, aviation authorities in some countries implemented new regulations that require the presence of two authorised personnel in the cockpit at all times. Three days after the incident, the European Aviation Safety Agency issued a temporary recommendation for airlines to ensure that at least two crew members—including at least one pilot—were in the cockpit for the entire duration of the flight. Several airlines announced that they had already adopted similar policies voluntarily. But by 2016, the EASA stopped recommending the two-person rule, instead advising airlines to perform a risk assessment and decide for themselves whether to implement it. Germanwings and other German airlines dropped the procedure in 2017. I guess the underlying assumption is that the regular medical tests that pilots are subjected to should keep pilots capable of mass murder-suicide out of a cockpit. Indeed, Lubitz had been declared "unfit for work" by a doctor, but apparently the doctor trusted Lubitz himself to pass this on to his employer, because "medical secrecy requirements prevented his physician from making this information available to Germanwings".
- vkou 4y agoThe biggest thing that stopped 9/11 attacks since 9/11 was locks on cockpit doors. The second biggest thing that stopped them since 9/11 is passenger awareness that they could just... Not let a few assholes with boxcutters fly a plane into a building.
- sokoloff 4y agoSince mid-morning on 9/11, in fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93
- spzb 4y agoRecognising that domestic flights also need security and not treating them like flying Greyhound buses probably helped.
- a2tech 4y agoAfter 9/11 people are not going to let hijackers run the plane. They may hurt you in retaking the plane, but if they fly it into a building you'll be dead for sure.
- jsjohnst 4y agoEdit: <not worth engaging>
- drstewart 4y agoThis is a meme that gets repeated often, always with no source. I bet you heard this from someone repeating it exactly in this same context too, complaining about security theater.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mercutio2 4y agoNot everything in life (in fact, almost nothing) can be “proved” by a “source”. Human emergent behavior can be observed and reported on in this way, perhaps. But questions like “why aren’t more people sacrificing their lives to hijack or destroy airplanes for the last 20 years” are not answerable by “sources”. Do you have some reason to think a different posture towards hijackers and better security around cockpits didn’t have a strong effect on would-be hijackers’ willingness to give their lives to a violent political statement?
- citrin_ru 4y agoIt can be both - security theatre and jobs program for otherwise unemployable people (good security requires highly skilled labour but security theatre doesn’t).
- AmericanChopper 4y agoSecurity theatre is a different thing. That’s when you perform a pointless ritual to convey the feeling of security. People coming up with onerous new rules and restriction just to remind you who’s in charge is something else.
- hobofan 4y ago> That’s when you perform a pointless ritual to convey the feeling of security. That's exactly what going through the security checkpoint at the airport is. A pointless ritual to convey the feeling of security. Yes, arbitrary liquid thresholds and similar rules are more about giving airport security tools to remind travelers "who is charge", but it's all part of security theater at a more meta level.
- techdragon 4y agoI always viewed the continual cycle of changing the rules which usually coincides with some negative publicity be it an attempt or attack or investigation… as a form of being seen to do something for the sake of having to do something in response to the recent event, as just another layer of the security theatre. Like the production of a whole season of shows by a live theatre group is just as much a layer above the repetition of the performance each night and no less part of making the “theatre” happen than each individual performance is.
- gumby 4y agoAnd they claim republicans don’t believe government should support the arts!
- pjc50 4y agoYup. It's baffling how quickly the mask and travel check measures were dropped, even at a time when COVID was causing multiple airliners worth of deaths per day, while the totally pointless liquid bans remain. The liquid bomb threat really is the thing that conspiracy theorists would love: it's a totally made up possible threat by the Big State that hasn't been seen in the wild and is used to justify inconveniencing millions of people for no good reason. And yet it's just not talked about.
- andyjohnson0 4y ago> The liquid bomb threat really is the thing that conspiracy theorists would love: it's a totally made up possible threat by the Big State that hasn't been seen in the wild Incorrect. Betwee 2006 and 2010, seven people were convicted in the uk for conspiring to attack passenger airplanes with liquid explosives (acetone peroxide according to wikipedia). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- the__alchemist 4y agoThe phase of matter doesn't strike me as an appropriate level of granularity.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 4y agoStill not "in the wild"; they were arrested in the planning stages, and there is no evidence that at any point they successfully produced TATP let alone getting any of their components through security or whether it would have worked on a plane. That was one group, thirteen years ago, and since then everyone is limited to 100ml? Forever?