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The New York Times, which now has more random blogs than there are grains of sand on the beach, has a worthwhile post on their Jetlagged site explaining what a counterproductive farce the public screening aspect of airport security has become:
To understand what makes these measures so absurd, we first need to revisit the morning of September 11th, and grasp exactly what it was the 19 hijackers so easily took advantage of. Conventional wisdom says the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard box-cutters. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings.[...]What weapons the 19 men possessed mattered little; the success of their plan relied fundamentally on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.For several reasons — particularly the awareness of passengers and crew — just the opposite is true today. Any hijacker would face a planeload of angry and frightened people ready to fight back. Say what you want of terrorists, they cannot afford to waste time and resources on schemes with a high probability of failure. And thus the September 11th template is all but useless to potential hijackers.The author goes on to mock our system of pat-downs ("No matter that a deadly sharp can be fashioned from virtually anything found on a plane, be it a broken wine bottle or a snapped-off length of plastic, we are content wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened"), deride the mania over toothpaste tubes and Listerine bombs ("The plot’s leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports, airline tickets and, most critical of all, they had been unsuccessful in actually producing liquid explosives"), and generally dismantle the insistently inefficient, misguided, and misdirected screening procedures we've constructed to make us feel safe/protect the profits of airplane merchants on things that come in bottles. Well worth a read, particularly for the quiet fury of the concluding paragraph.
