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Interestingly, given that the US has a fifteen trillion dollar economy, that's only 0.006% (or 6e-05) of U.S. GDP. I suspect that the economic cost of an succe

by codex 14y ago

Interestingly, given that the US has a fifteen trillion dollar economy, that's only 0.006% (or 6e-05) of U.S. GDP. I suspect that the economic cost of an successful terrorist attack on a U.S. aircraft would cost the U.S. economy more than one part in fifteen thousand.

jlgreco 14y ago
> I suspect that the economic cost of an successful terrorist attack on a U.S. aircraft would cost the U.S. economy more than one part in fifteen thousand. Now include the probability of such an event actually taking place, and the probability that the TSA could prevent it... A comet strike would cause many trillions of dollars worth of damages. How much money are we spending right now on a pea-shooter based comet defense system?
- mctx 14y ago
  > pea-shooter based comet defense system? I'm pretty sure the state of art of this field is deep core drilling (as of 1998, anyway)
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    The point isn't "pea shooter" as a description of state of the art, but of its effectiveness. There's nothing we have available to us in technology that would be able to divert a mass-extinction class meteor (or even just a really-bad-day meteor) on short notice. Given a decade or more we might be able to launch a mission to moderately divert an orbit, but at very high expense. It's the cost-to-effectiveness ratio I believe TSA is being compared.
MichaelGG 14y ago
Except the TSA hasn't prevented anything that would have been a successful terrorist attack.
- codex 14y ago
  It's hard to say. By quickly adapting to new threats (like the shoe, underwear, and printer cartridge bombers) the TSA may be keeping terrorist attack technologies in a perpetual "alpha" state--unable to be refined past v0 to the point where they can work effectively and reliably. But that doesn't mean that we can stop checking for the old attack vectors. For example, the TSA has never found a bomb in checked bags, and thus has never "prevented" a bomb attack. Does that mean we should stop screening checked bags for bombs? No. Lockerbie has shown that this attack vector is effective. The fact that they do screen bags for bombs so well has prevented attacks from even being contemplated in the first place, much less attempted.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Would a plain old bombing really do those trillions of dollars of damage? A hijacking is what has the potential to cause massively disproportionate damage, and that is a solved problem (Not solved by the TSA though...). Even so, let us imagine some alternate universe where non-TSA security adaptations have not solved hijackings... The measures the TSA has taken to prevent hijackings would not. Why don't they work? Well, what happens to you if the TSA finds the pairing knife you accidentally left in your carry on? They take it, throw it in a bin, and wave you through. The only thing a prospective terrorists is out is a knife and a plane ticket. Given their abysmal false negative rate, he will eventually succeed. The TSA pretends to make us safe from yesterday's ploy. In reality they don't even do that. (To be clear, we are safe, but with no thanks to them.)
    - codex 14y ago
      To be clear, it looks like there are two different questions being conflated here. The first is whether the TSA's procedures would help a prevent 9/11-style hijackings. I think everyone agrees that the TSA doesn't add much value in the single hijacker case, simply because passengers can probably overpower a single hijacker. If the number of hijackers increases to, say, a dozen, then perhaps the TSA might help here, because a dozen men in the front of the plane armed with sufficient weapons might be able to hold off the rest of the cabin, and getting a sufficient number of serious weapons (and door-openers) though security might be too risky to make such an attack worthwhile. After all, a dozen terrorists might be more profitably used elsewhere. The second question is whether the TSA's more onerous policies, like use of full-body scanners and bans on liquids, prevent fatal bombings of airliners (not hijackings). Clearly terrorists are not only interested in using planes as weapons, but simply causing them to crash by, say, detonating a bomb from the restroom. Here I postulate that the TSA may be doing some good by preventing terrorists from refining any one technology, but that's only one theory.
edmond_dantes 14y ago
You need to also factor in the cost of Homeland Security.

by codex 14y ago

jlgreco 14y ago

> I suspect that the economic cost of an successful terrorist attack on a U.S. aircraft would cost the U.S. economy more than one part in fifteen thousand. Now include the probability of such an event actually taking place, and the probability that the TSA could prevent it... A comet strike would cause many trillions of dollars worth of damages. How much money are we spending right now on a pea-shooter based comet defense system?

mctx 14y ago
> pea-shooter based comet defense system? I'm pretty sure the state of art of this field is deep core drilling (as of 1998, anyway)
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  The point isn't "pea shooter" as a description of state of the art, but of its effectiveness. There's nothing we have available to us in technology that would be able to divert a mass-extinction class meteor (or even just a really-bad-day meteor) on short notice. Given a decade or more we might be able to launch a mission to moderately divert an orbit, but at very high expense. It's the cost-to-effectiveness ratio I believe TSA is being compared.

MichaelGG 14y ago

Except the TSA hasn't prevented anything that would have been a successful terrorist attack.

codex 14y ago
It's hard to say. By quickly adapting to new threats (like the shoe, underwear, and printer cartridge bombers) the TSA may be keeping terrorist attack technologies in a perpetual "alpha" state--unable to be refined past v0 to the point where they can work effectively and reliably. But that doesn't mean that we can stop checking for the old attack vectors. For example, the TSA has never found a bomb in checked bags, and thus has never "prevented" a bomb attack. Does that mean we should stop screening checked bags for bombs? No. Lockerbie has shown that this attack vector is effective. The fact that they do screen bags for bombs so well has prevented attacks from even being contemplated in the first place, much less attempted.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Would a plain old bombing really do those trillions of dollars of damage? A hijacking is what has the potential to cause massively disproportionate damage, and that is a solved problem (Not solved by the TSA though...). Even so, let us imagine some alternate universe where non-TSA security adaptations have not solved hijackings... The measures the TSA has taken to prevent hijackings would not. Why don't they work? Well, what happens to you if the TSA finds the pairing knife you accidentally left in your carry on? They take it, throw it in a bin, and wave you through. The only thing a prospective terrorists is out is a knife and a plane ticket. Given their abysmal false negative rate, he will eventually succeed. The TSA pretends to make us safe from yesterday's ploy. In reality they don't even do that. (To be clear, we are safe, but with no thanks to them.)
  - codex 14y ago
    To be clear, it looks like there are two different questions being conflated here. The first is whether the TSA's procedures would help a prevent 9/11-style hijackings. I think everyone agrees that the TSA doesn't add much value in the single hijacker case, simply because passengers can probably overpower a single hijacker. If the number of hijackers increases to, say, a dozen, then perhaps the TSA might help here, because a dozen men in the front of the plane armed with sufficient weapons might be able to hold off the rest of the cabin, and getting a sufficient number of serious weapons (and door-openers) though security might be too risky to make such an attack worthwhile. After all, a dozen terrorists might be more profitably used elsewhere. The second question is whether the TSA's more onerous policies, like use of full-body scanners and bans on liquids, prevent fatal bombings of airliners (not hijackings). Clearly terrorists are not only interested in using planes as weapons, but simply causing them to crash by, say, detonating a bomb from the restroom. Here I postulate that the TSA may be doing some good by preventing terrorists from refining any one technology, but that's only one theory.

edmond_dantes 14y ago

You need to also factor in the cost of Homeland Security.