Re:Hitchens: The truth about airplane security measures
by karzeem on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @01:12PM
(#1020919)
I think people are rightly responding more to the stupidity of the new security measures than their ineffectiveness. Those are slightly different.
We can debate the usefulness of a security measure, but the real problem is that the TSA is acting as if this was some kind of unknown attack vector. What have we learned that we didn't know before? Did we not know that people could hide explosives in their underwear, or in their body, or, to take just one more example, in prosthetic limbs? Is this news to anyone? So why the new rules?
Since these are all long-known methods of attacking an airplane, it makes no sense for the TSA to wait until an actual attack to implement "preventative" measures. Either implement the measures long beforehand or decide they're not useful and never implement them. What they're doing is like waiting for your hard drive to crash before you make backups.
We can debate the usefulness of a security measure, but the real problem is that the TSA is acting as if this was some kind of unknown attack vector. What have we learned that we didn't know before? Did we not know that people could hide explosives in their underwear, or in their body, or, to take just one more example, in prosthetic limbs? Is this news to anyone? So why the new rules?
Since these are all long-known methods of attacking an airplane, it makes no sense for the TSA to wait until an actual attack to implement "preventative" measures. Either implement the measures long beforehand or decide they're not useful and never implement them. What they're doing is like waiting for your hard drive to crash before you make backups.