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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 technolo

by 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.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    If you want to do some sort of worth calculation on the TSA using cost of a terrorist attack, then you have to break it down by attack type. Damage done by the attack and probability of success both must be considered. Binary liquid bomb attacks are extraordinarily unlikely, extraordinarily hard to do successfully, and cause relatively little damage. Terrorists are interested in airplanes for two reasons: they can be hijacked to great effectiveness (not anymore), and they know we react irrationally to threats to airplanes (this is what we should seek to fix). With both of these fixed, the threat terrorists pose to airplanes would be no more notable than the threat they pose to any other modestly sized group of people. Re: a dozen terrorists with sufficient weapons/tools Even assuming they could get these weapons/tools past pre-9/11 security, which is very doubtful, the chances of it working out the way they wanted are still absurdly small. What pilot would not fly the plane straight into the ground if the locked cockpit door was actually being breached? People know that hijackings are not survivable anymore. You are either killed or someone sits on a terrorists for a few hours, there aren't any other outcomes. A dozen men with weapons sufficient to hold off an entire plane can do plenty of damage on the ground, and they don't even need to walk through a metal detector to do it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks Why bother having a chance to kill a few hundred people on a plane when you can do the same on the ground? Yet we don't see either being attempted... Frankly, all of these threat scenarios are fantasies.
    - sigkill 14y ago
      I think it was over 2 years ago but a guy on reddit pointed out that terrorists would obviously target the weakest link. He said something on the lines that instead of trying to hijack airplanes they'd just go blow up some mall or something. If my memory serves me well, I think they put a tracker on him for that comment. Here's the comment in question - http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ciiag/so_if_my_deodorant_could_be_a_bomb_why_are_you/c0sve5q http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ciiag/so_if_my_de... Actually this whole thread actually is relevant - http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ciiag/so_if_my_deodorant_could_be_a_bomb_why_are_you/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ciiag/so_if_my_de... [Edit - They put a tracker on his friend, not him]

by codex 14y ago

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.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  If you want to do some sort of worth calculation on the TSA using cost of a terrorist attack, then you have to break it down by attack type. Damage done by the attack and probability of success both must be considered. Binary liquid bomb attacks are extraordinarily unlikely, extraordinarily hard to do successfully, and cause relatively little damage. Terrorists are interested in airplanes for two reasons: they can be hijacked to great effectiveness (not anymore), and they know we react irrationally to threats to airplanes (this is what we should seek to fix). With both of these fixed, the threat terrorists pose to airplanes would be no more notable than the threat they pose to any other modestly sized group of people. Re: a dozen terrorists with sufficient weapons/tools Even assuming they could get these weapons/tools past pre-9/11 security, which is very doubtful, the chances of it working out the way they wanted are still absurdly small. What pilot would not fly the plane straight into the ground if the locked cockpit door was actually being breached? People know that hijackings are not survivable anymore. You are either killed or someone sits on a terrorists for a few hours, there aren't any other outcomes. A dozen men with weapons sufficient to hold off an entire plane can do plenty of damage on the ground, and they don't even need to walk through a metal detector to do it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks Why bother having a chance to kill a few hundred people on a plane when you can do the same on the ground? Yet we don't see either being attempted... Frankly, all of these threat scenarios are fantasies.
  - sigkill 14y ago
    I think it was over 2 years ago but a guy on reddit pointed out that terrorists would obviously target the weakest link. He said something on the lines that instead of trying to hijack airplanes they'd just go blow up some mall or something. If my memory serves me well, I think they put a tracker on him for that comment. Here's the comment in question - http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ciiag/so_if_my_deodorant_could_be_a_bomb_why_are_you/c0sve5q http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ciiag/so_if_my_de... Actually this whole thread actually is relevant - http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ciiag/so_if_my_deodorant_could_be_a_bomb_why_are_you/ http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ciiag/so_if_my_de... [Edit - They put a tracker on his friend, not him]