Terrorism on the homefront

Screaming kids, delays and long lines can make holiday airport travel especially unpleasant. The arguably unnecessary existence of the Transport Security Administration only serves to aggravate this unpleasantness.

On Dec. 25, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit, Mich., by smuggling an explosive device hidden in his underpants onto the plane. What stopped this potentially devastating event from occurring was not the collection of information by government agencies founded to do just that. It was not the TSA that required Umar to run his shoes through the X-ray machine and keep his electronic devices off during takeoff.

Abdulmutallab was stopped by other passengers who noticed something amiss and took action.

Security expert Bruce Schneier has often said on his Web site, www.schneier.com, that the “only things that have made flying safer since 9/11 have been the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.” There will always be a security loophole to exploit and any terrorist willing and able enough to find it will use it. The TSA, clearly, can do very little about it.

This makes the TSA and most airport security measures, like forbidding liquid containers over 3 ounces for example, essentially useless. They become merely a nice little show creating the illusion of safety, assuring all passengers that everything that can be done to protect them from those nasty terrorists who hate our freedom is indeed being done. This is all based on the preconception that we are under constant threat of terrorist action. This too is grossly overstated.

The odds of dying in a terrorist attack are about 1 in 88,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and National Safety Council statistics. By comparing these odds to other causes of death one starts to see that perhaps we should be creating agencies to protect us from drowning (87 times more likely), accidental falls (404 times more likely), or just keeping people from getting on planes at all, seeing as how one is 11,000 times more likely to die in a regular old fashioned airplane crash than from intentional sabotage by terrorists. Is this starting to look ridiculous yet?

If there were a large amount of terrorists willing and able to carry out bombings on U.S. soil, much less aircraft, they probably would be doing so. Especially considering that there are always busses, subways, street corners, toll booths, classrooms, and malls. And that’s not even the half of it. So why is there a government agency, which grows more intrusive by the year, dedicated to preventing one type of terrorism that isn’t even that common?

May I also add that a terrorist, whether they die in the act of terrorism or are caught, prosecuted and jailed without committing the act, still complete their objective—that objective being to inspire fear and change the lives and habits of others. One might say that Abdulmutallab failed in his objective, yet security was tightened and more measures were put in place.

One of those new potential measures is the usage of newfangled full-body scanners, powered exclusively by George Orwell spinning in his grave. These devices take what look essentially like nude photos of passengers, potentially including small children, to be viewed by TSA officers from a remote location. Oh, and the best part is that preliminary testing suggests that the underpants bomber’s bomb would probably not have been detected by these scanners. It also wouldn’t detect anything swallowed.

The tragedies that occurred on 9/11 should never be forgotten and measures should be taken to make sure that that never happens again.

We should, however, be learning the right lessons from that tragedy and acting rationally instead of acting out of an irrational fear. Intrusive airport security will only get worse and will not prevent what it is supposedly being designed to prevent, during which we forfeit the freedoms we all enjoy and are handing terrorists their victory on a silver platter.