While it's encouraging to see such a thorough debunking of the latest security theater technology, it's always been security theater... Allow me a few quick anecdotes:
My family is friends with a gentleman who was a green beret medic during Viet Nam, and later worked for the CIA. Once, when I was younger (and metal detectors were the norm), we had the opportunity to fly with him. He entered the metal detector before me, and was waved along. Once we were past the detectors, he turned to me and said, "Guess how many blades I have on me?" He then proceded to produce seven blades. They were a combination of ceramic blades (undetectable by the metal detector and sharper than most metal as well) and traditional blades held or placed on him so that they would not set off the detector. It was part of his CIA training to be able to do that.
I went to college at Stevens Institute of Technology. The Chemical Engineering department there has a lab known as the Highly Filled Materials Institute. When I was an undergraduate, I got a tour of the lab. They informed me that they had been working on an extruder that they were selling simultaneously to Picatinny Arsenal and Hersey. It turns out that C4 and Chocolate are both colloidal suspensions with nearly identical properties. A consequence of this is that in the X-ray machines used in airports, plastic explosives are indistinguishable from chocolate.
Shortly after 9/11 my father, a very frequent traveler, had forgotten his nail clippers in his carry-on luggage. Predictably, they were confiscated. When I greeted him at the airport, he remarked on how ridiculous that was, as he produced his fountain pen from his jacket pocket. "They let me on with this," he said. "I could have stabbed anyone in the eye with this and they'd be dead. What was I going to do with nail clippers?"
I used to build a detector for explosives in academia that is now being marketed to the TSA. To get funding for these projects, its pretty standard to rip another technology apart, point out all of its flaws, then argue why yours is better. But every technology has their drawbacks and ways of skirting around it. Today, most technology deployed is more as a deterrent and less as a counter-measure.
You want to know another way to hide illicit items in those body scanners? Surround the items in water.
There are also certain materials that give off false positives and most likely the software will scan the image response against a bank of known materials. I wrote pattern detection software that did just this. Oddly enough, cheese is one of them. So stick your knife in a nice big piece of cheddar and you might make it through just fine.
There's a simple explanation - the authorities' main priority is to prevent copycat attacks.
The most embarassing thisg possible for TSA would be an exact repeat of 9/11 - same weapons (wasn't it box cutters?) etc. So that's what they target first.
A new kind of attack is harder to predict and easier for the authorities to explain by saying "nothing like this has ever happened before, there was no way we could have prepared for it." And there's no way they could cover all possibilities anyway.
And to be fair, copycat attacks do happen (e.g. July 21, 2005 in London) so it is not a total waste.
> There's a simple explanation - the authorities' main priority is to prevent copycat attacks
The weapons used on 9/11 were surprise and that standard operating procedure in a hijacking situation was to do as hijackers said. Both weapons were ineffective by the time the 4th plane found out.
The authorities main priority has been to be seen to be doing something.
I think that everybody agree on that. The question is: are those very very expensive scanners the only way to achieve that goal. If it is, then fine (I'm not american, so it's not my taxes that are blown), but if there is another way, then you should be worrying about your taxpayer's dollars.
Just as an aside, Ben Gurion airport relies much less on pseudo high tech, and has had incredibly good result.
Anecdotal (at best) evidence from this single person:
No, they use 'pseudo people reading skills'. I'm good at offsetting those unintentionally. Can lead to hours of fun.
And they use other pseudo tests as well, that tell me that so far none of the people there checking my laptop had any clues about - computers.
I've never been to the states (and - don't plan to), but I cannot imagine that the average TSA guy is more grumpy than the average [1] Ben Gurion security guy.
Don't make 'different' the right thing to do. There is obviously a high demand for security here, both ~real~ and in the public mindset. Replicating that world-wide would be just as bad as placing these back-scatter machines everywhere, in my world..
1: Insert disclaimer about the exceptions to the rule here
You might be right. What is surprising though is that an airport that's under such security threat like Ben Gurion airport hasn't been breached in a very long time (I think the last major problem was in the 70's). Now you're going to say that most airports are in that situation. Yes, but Ben Gurion is not any airport, and I think I don't need to explain why it is under much more pressure than most airports in the world.
Now assuming that you are 100% right, and that Israeli's security protocol is as much as a mascarade as the TSA's. Then I still believe that they put up a much much cheaper mascarade than the TSA, and that useless for useless, you might want to consider the cheapest.
That was just an aside though, I'm still convinced that their security thing is not just a mascarade.
Then I still believe that they put up a much much cheaper mascarade than the TSA
Not even close. Israel spends close to 10 times as much on security pr. passenger compared to the US. Sure the absolute number is smaller, but that's because Israeli airports handle ~1 million passengers a year compared to US' ~700 million a year
> Israeli airports handle ~1 million passengers a year
That sounds too few. Even if you only consider individuals rather than flights that means that less than one in five Israelis flies any given year. Norway, with about the same population size handles 40 million passengers a year. Now there is virtually no domestic traffic in Israel because its small size, but it also has a lot more tourists than Norway.
I just rechecked the number and you're right, sorry. The numbers I quoted where only for El Al (the largest national carrier). The total number of all airlines is a bit over 13 million. But hey what's an order of magnitude between friends :)
Well because most western nation still look up to amerika (because once the where the prime nation in the world) and copy them, other then that amerika is extreamly agressiv in pushing there policies into other nations.
So most of these stupid rules flow into other nations too. To other western government I would say stop listen and looking to amerika. If you want to look somewhere look at the countries that work well.
For Drugs look to Portugal, For democracy look to Switzerland, For Prisons look to Norway, ..., and trie to improve upon it. There is almost nothing I would copy from amerika if I would "create" a new country.
I don't know what "amerika" is, but there are a number of things I'd copy from America if I were creating a new country, including the Bill of Rights. Americans do have a degree of individual autonomy and individual rights that are largely unknown outside the US, and Constitutional protections are an important mechanism for maintaining them. Now if the government could just pay for people to get flu shots and some better trains, we'd really be on to something :)
Well on paper that is true but in reality I don't see it, look at all the indexes for pressfreedom and other things. Sure Amerika is not North Korea but its not anywhere ontop.
(Does the Bill of Rights not say seperation of church and state? At the same time you are not allowed to be elected into Office as an Athist.
One thing that the US does pretty well is opening up data and code after a gov project is finished.
> At the same time you are not allowed to be elected into Office as an Athist.
Not true at all. For one, the Constitution and various Federal and State laws allow elected persons to take an affirmation instead of an oath, and Article Six of the Constitution specifically prohibits a religious test on any public office.
Third, just because atheists are not elected doesn't mean that they aren't allowed to be elected—just that most people in the US want a religious leader (or that not many atheists choose to run for office, or that religious politicians have more popular plans, etc.)
According to[1] Israel spends almost 10 times as much pr passenger on Security than the US does. Also Israel handles 1.3 million passengers a year, compared with over 700 million in the US. So the amount of scaling that needs to be done is far from trivial both in terms of money and manpower, and might not even be possible.
A man tries to set fire to plastic explosive in his shoes, so long queues form (in airports) for people to remove their shoes.
Intelligence comes in about liquid / gel / paste explosives, so now those long queues have to abandon any liquids / gels / pastes in bins, near those long queues, inside an airport. Those "potential explosives" are not allowed on a plane, but are allowed to be left for hours (days?) near lots of people in an airport.
Cops have generalist training that can be used across a wide variety of situations where you have to think on your feet. It would be a waste of that training to just chain it to a scanner week-in, week-out.
He meant the other way around. Train the TSA agents to be cops instead and have them do actual police duty instead of hanging around airports being annoying obstacles for travelers.
The TSA _are_ deterring crimes. Drug related crimes (possession) has gone up substantially at airports, and there are known cases of credit card fraud, animal smuggling and child porn being found while searching belongings of travelers.
Whether or not you think that the TSA should be involved in anything past securing the ability for persons to travel is the question.
Somehow it seems to have worked OK judging by results. See my separate comment about 106 million flights since 9/11/01 without any successful terrorist attacks.
At the time, SOP when a hijacker took over a plane was to do whatever they said. They nearly always held the plane for ransom, and it really was best to let authorities on the ground handle things. After 9/11, the entire plane's population would attack you, becuase being smashed into a skyscraper is not in anyone's best interests.
Even on 9/11 this happened. That's why the 4th plane crashed in a field. Passengers found out about the first 3, realised all bets were off, and took back the plane/
I used to work at the airport and one of the odder duties was to test the screeners every few days with metal gun, grenade and bomb shaped items. The guy who trained me had a couple ways of getting them past without fail if he wanted to (usually he didn't care because they failed enough if they were put through normally on the belt).
The sad thing is these are the exact items they are supposed to be looking for and the things they are best equipped to detect and still a 20%+ failure rate.
Was there any financial bonus for the screeners to find the fake guns and bombs? For example, would a screener get $100 if they found one of these planted items?
I would think that would be a good way to reduce the failure rate. Or does the failure rate have more to do with limitations in equipment, rather than screening being a mundane job?
You start from the assumption that it's in anybody's interest that these machines do actually work. It isn't.
The real interest is for well-connected companies to sell equipment; for the approving bureaucrat to get his kickback while not being seen as abusing his position; and for the low-level unskilled TSA employee to keep quiet and keep cashing his salary.
The suggestion you give would mean the above-mentioned bureaucrat should spend additional money (which would require a lengthy fight with his superiors in order to get additional budget, possibly even triggering a review of previous expenditure) in order to push his underlings to point out flaws in the equipment he bought, so that... he can be made a fool of ?
So you see why it isn't going to happen any time soon.
"Was there any financial bonus for the screeners to find the fake guns and bombs? For example, would a screener get $100 if they found one of these planted items?"
In about 5 seconds after such a bonus program was initiated, screeners would be offering kickbacks to the testers in return for being given advance notice of the test.
If it is a random 25% or so, that might be sufficient deterrence. say, you plan an attack. Would you run a 75% chance of it being thwarted before you enter the plane, or do you start looking elsewhere?
I read on here the other day from someone who studied Al-Qaida and was a part of the terrorist watch group with the FBI that when they plan something it has to be 100% that the plan will work before they attempt it. He was saying they wouldn't dare risk it even if it was a 75% risk. Which is interesting. Just thought i'd throw that in here.
Al Qaida (and similar groups) want to be seen as always successful. If there's regular news about their plots failing, their backers quit backing them and move on to a group that fails less.
Capable staff is perhaps the largest challenge facing terrorist organizations. If Al Qaeda could have sent four people with shoe bombs or underwear bombs, you'd better believe they would have. And if explosives were the limiting factor, that would mean Richard Reid and Umar Abdulmutallab were the most capable of agents on hand. And that simply doesn't paint a picture that suggests they have a very large pool of capable, dedicated terrorists to work with.
Despite what the fear-merchants would have us believe, all indications are that there simply aren't that many intelligent, capable people who are willing to give their own lives to lash out at Western civilians.
You remind me of the occasional TSA "good catch" where they find some weed stashed in a jar of peanut butter. Peanut butter and C4 have the same density. Not a good place to hide your weed. ;)
>It was part of his CIA training to be able to do that.
In the '90s, long before 9/11, I was traveling with a girlfriend. She didn't want to remove her belt with a big metal buckle so she just went through the metal detector with it on. The machine buzzed and the agent sent her through again. A female agent looked sympathetic and told her to twist her belt buckle horizontally so it wouldn't set off the machine. That was my intro to security theater.
Moral of the story is that if you're a pretty white girl, you don't need CIA training to learn security secrets from lazy guards.
I cannot speak to the CIA training but I've received some concealed weapon scenario training mostly developed from lessons learned at penitentiaries. It is a terrible thing to be impressed by but inmate ingenuity staggers the mind. You've likely had several items in your carry on that could do much worse than the pen to eye (which I don't think would be fatal). In the attack tree, a shiv smuggled past the checkpoint would need to have the potential to coerce the cockpit before it would factor in to a risk matrix for the plane.
I served in Special Forces before and after 9/11. The 'security theater' points that many of you make are valid. I don't, however, believe the reactionary measures were to calm the fears of the American people. The severe restriction placed on travelers is similar to a trend of restrictions placed upon soldiers following 9/11. The reaction is CYA for senior leadership/command.
Accountability became a tremendous focus following the early campaigns following 9/11. A single casualty was regarded as a devastating loss. Clearing buildings early in the bloodshed of Iraq taught many commanders that the peacetime tactics largely learned from SWAT were not as effective in combat. The procedure was too slow for such a dynamic and hostile environment. Too many soldiers died because the common procedure for clearing a building broke down in structures of irregular layout and in cities crawling with hostiles. Before commanders and NCOs were prepared to blame the procedures, however, they were taking accountability for the loss.
An after action review (AAR) follows every mission and leaders are encouraged to highlight their mistakes before someone else must do it for them. An atmosphere of blame settled in while civilians back CONUS were tiring of the involvement. Casualties were frequent enough that many ODAs had suffered through a few. For most, it was their first time facing a grieving widow with a young child hugging her leg. Those stories, coupled with the blame, changed the landscape of command. CONOPS that were once routinely approved were rejected for increasingly vague reasons. Ultimately, the tone was that the risk was too great compared with the operational gain- almost like the soldier was too valuable to put in harm's way. But we signed up for that. The truth, I suspect, was that the appetite for risk taking at the senior levels was shrinking. If an ODA lost a man, the mission's CONOP would be scrutinized for evidence that all of the risks were accounted for, that the courses of action reflected sound decision making when assuming risk, that the operational gain justified the risk, and that good faith efforts were made to mitigate perceived risks. The AAR became a trial. While I was working through these challenges during deployments, I believe something similar was happening with security measures and leadership back home.
Creating an illusion of safety seems less likely the hope than creating an exemption from accountability. Negligence would be too likely the charge if tight restrictions were not put in place.
In the vein of "Don't attribute to malice..." this would be my vote for most likely explanation for the TSA and countless other changes in the US since 9/11. The longer I live, the more I'm convinced that much of human behavior, or even human history as a whole, can be largely summarized by two maxims: "nothing risked, nothing gained" and "those who have the most are willing to lose the least".
Edit: Also, regarding the pen... The full conversation was longer. My father was complaining that the "weapons" they were catching were likely all from upstanding citizens, and that the terrorists would have figured out how to get weapons on board regardless. Instead of making the plane safer, they were in fact making it easier for potential terrorists to take control. He remarked, though, that he wasn't worried because he had his pen (and mind you, this was an old-school solid metal fountain pen...possibly not lethal, but I wouldn't want to find out).
So many people forget that one very, very important factor in the 9/11 attacks was that almost everyone on the planet had been conditioned by decades of politically motivated plane hijackings that the proper course of action was to aquiesce to the hijackers every demand. In fact a friend whose mother was a flight attendent at the time told us that they received explicit training informing them to do just that! I doubt you could repeat 9/11 today, security theater or no...
It was the very definition of a zero-day attack: even the fourth attempt, less than an hour after the first plane was crashed, failed (to reach its intended target) because passengers knew it wasn't a "normal" hijacking.
Shortly after 9/11 I was serving with the Royal Marines and we were deployed to Sierra Leone. The RAF required us to turn in our leathermans/pocket knives prior to the flight... I can't even comprehend the thinking behind this.
1) Were we some form of hijack risk?
2) If 100 marines are some sort of hijack risk, is taking their folding pair of pliers away from them going to anything at all to mitigate that risk?
CYA and security theatre are the worst combination.
Thanks for the comment, but when writing for an audience that consists mostly of people who aren't familiar with military terms, you may want to avoid slang or at least explain what it means. Points in case: CONUS, ODA, CONOPS. (probably 'shiv' too, I only know it because I used to listen to a lot of rap music).
Ten years of USian crusades have let military slang creep into mainstream language. I'm French and even I can spell those offhand - Continental US, Operational Detachment Alpha, Concept of Operations...
I'm American, I read the wartime news every day, and I work with a few people who have been deployed overseas and I have never heard any of the terms you just outlined.
My apologies. A few others have filled in for me. I'll expand a bit hoping to make it up to you.
CONUS is the contiguous/continental US. Generally used to mean "back home". Outside of CONUS is OCONUS. You wouldn't say OCONUS to mean a combat theater. The two terms are designations for military assignments rather than geographic shorthand. During a deployment to a combat zone (documented more frequently as a hazardous duty zone), you wouldn't say you were OCONUS. Stationed in Germany, however, you would.
An ODA is Operational Detachment-Alpha. It is an element of Special Forces, which is Army branch. You might be familiar with A-Team. There's also an Operational Detachment-Bravo. Their mission is to support the ODA. While it is true they are the 'B-team', it is more often that they are awaiting an opening on an A-Team (perhaps lacking experience), rather than being less stellar. Additionally, there is an Operational Detachment-Delta. Think Delta Force or The Unit. The three detachments differ in mission set and operational demands (intensity, perhaps).
A CONOP is a concept of operation(s). It is a proposal. One of the unique aspects of Special Operations Forces is the way they are engaged in the fight. Traditional units are given orders from higher command. They are told the objective and given clear guidance on how to best achieve the command's intent. Unconventional units, like an ODA, are very different. They are given the commander's intent, often in general language, and then propose operations to accomplish the intent. The practice was popularized with blitzkrieg. The depth of training given to an ODA is meant to ensure that they can conduct operations in the absence of centralized command (faster execution). When possible, CONOPS compete so that the best ideas for achieving intent are the ones that are chosen. This includes a CONOP that proposes to circumvent an engagement through careful execution of several small operations (a point I make because some might not know that raids are not common).
The intent is rarely to obliterate an area. More often, it is to disrupt or defeat the effectiveness of an oppositional force. Countless CONOPS have been approved, and later studied, for finding a way to win the favor of locals who might then refuse to support the operations of the oppositional force. Rather than scouring a country looking for fire fights, we more often try to bring medicine to remote areas. On occasion, we discover a desperate area. A CONOP is prepared to conduct extended operations in the area to establish a clear interest in the betterment of the locals and country. The hope is that word spreads that most of our work is productive, rather than destructive. An ODA traveling far from the main element, and with numbers only at a dozen or so, appears to be an easy target. The risk to the ODA is high and the gain is much higher for locals than the ODA. We once had an easy time communicating the importance of taking that risk to show locals that an ODA was very different from a conventional 'warrior'. Following 9/11 (that landscape shift of blame and CYA), it grew incredibly difficult to get such a CONOP approved.
Special Operational Forces have been quietly working to convince command from the bottom up that it is much more important to "win hearts and minds" than to crush everything that moves. This is the longest running tradition of Special Forces, which is why every SF soldier is required to demonstrate a functional proficiency in a target foreign language in order to graduate the training. It has always been our greatest source of pride that we deploy to liberate oppressed peoples, not triumph over poorly equipped opposition.
A bit off the mark from explaining acronyms but defining ODA would never have covered what it really means.
I cannot argue with the points you have made. Indeed, I feel that your post supports a point that you did not make explicit. Such risk-averse behavior seems to me to be explainable by the fact that the war in Iraq was a war of choice, which is a euphemism for something else. Civilians "tire" of all wars. But when a war cannot be explained on the basis of strategic necessity, much less on the basis of immediate national survival, then it is not surprising that the pervasive vibe in-theater is not very satisfying for warriors. Here's hoping the next war will fulfill your expectations!
It is easy for me to misunderstand what you could mean by, "Here's hoping the next war will fulfill your expectations!" I've met a lot of people who would say something like that with hate in their heart. But I've been promoted by people who would say something like that in earnest. Perhaps you'd like to be more explicit? I would also be interested in your perspective on strategic necessity as it relates to both global and domestic concerns.
It really is all just security theater... keeping the peanut gallery scared, entertained... and at the same time self-satisfied about their unearned 'exceptionalism'...
BTW, has it occurred to anyone that someone intending a terrorist act could just blow up a carry-on before ever getting to the ridiculous scanner...
It'll shut down the airport for sure... and do it at a couple of airports simultaneously and you'll shut down the whole network for a day or two...
Stop letting government treat us like childish idiots... yes... things could happen... reasonable precautions should be taken. But this isn't a smart approach.
What you're referring to is a "soft target". You have to pay rather close attention, but terrorists have long recognized the opportunity presented by soft targets: malls, hotels, and yes, the TSA waiting line. Interestingly enough, it's the real security machinations of the US that have been preventing attacks of this form. Which raises the question further: if we already have real security, why do we even need security theater?
In theory you need cheap security theatre to distract people from the very expensive, secretive, and sometimes unconstitutional (or nearly so) real security work.
In practice, security theatre turns out to be pretty expensive.
Well more than that CulturalNgineer, if you do this in multiple locations thanks the congestion caused by the TSA you can get similiar death counts as the original attacks. Atleast low thousands.
after being sick of trying to find a light for a cigarette after getting off a flight I started smuggling lighters with me onto flights. Over 30 international flights now and not once have they found the lighter.
it took me two flights of trial and error to work out the right method to smuggle it through. security theatre indeed.
The weeks immediately following 9/11 were much worse than what we have now. I remember flying home for Thanksgiving, and literally everyone was setting off the metal detectors they had them tuned so high. The only reason I didn't was I had prepared by wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt and I had put everything from my pockets, except my ID and boarding pass, into my backpack.
My family is friends with a gentleman who was a green beret medic during Viet Nam, and later worked for the CIA. Once, when I was younger (and metal detectors were the norm), we had the opportunity to fly with him. He entered the metal detector before me, and was waved along. Once we were past the detectors, he turned to me and said, "Guess how many blades I have on me?" He then proceded to produce seven blades. They were a combination of ceramic blades (undetectable by the metal detector and sharper than most metal as well) and traditional blades held or placed on him so that they would not set off the detector. It was part of his CIA training to be able to do that.
I went to college at Stevens Institute of Technology. The Chemical Engineering department there has a lab known as the Highly Filled Materials Institute. When I was an undergraduate, I got a tour of the lab. They informed me that they had been working on an extruder that they were selling simultaneously to Picatinny Arsenal and Hersey. It turns out that C4 and Chocolate are both colloidal suspensions with nearly identical properties. A consequence of this is that in the X-ray machines used in airports, plastic explosives are indistinguishable from chocolate.
Shortly after 9/11 my father, a very frequent traveler, had forgotten his nail clippers in his carry-on luggage. Predictably, they were confiscated. When I greeted him at the airport, he remarked on how ridiculous that was, as he produced his fountain pen from his jacket pocket. "They let me on with this," he said. "I could have stabbed anyone in the eye with this and they'd be dead. What was I going to do with nail clippers?"
...I could go on, but why?