{"id":12898,"date":"2012-01-03T12:51:25","date_gmt":"2012-01-03T17:51:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=12898"},"modified":"2012-01-03T12:51:25","modified_gmt":"2012-01-03T17:51:25","slug":"security-theatre-so-much-inconvenience-for-so-little-benefit-at-such-a-staggering-cost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/01\/03\/security-theatre-so-much-inconvenience-for-so-little-benefit-at-such-a-staggering-cost\/","title":{"rendered":"Security Theatre: “So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charles C. Mann<\/a> visits the airport with security guru Bruce Schneier:<\/p>\n

\n

Since 9\/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.1 trillion on homeland security.<\/p>\n

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9\/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as \u201csecurity theater\u201d: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

From an airplane-hijacking point of view, Schneier said, al-Qaeda had used up its luck. Passengers on the first three 9\/11 flights didn\u2019t resist their captors, because in the past the typical consequence of a plane seizure had been \u201ca week in Havana.\u201d When the people on the fourth hijacked plane learned by cell phone that the previous flights had been turned into airborne bombs, they attacked their attackers. The hijackers were forced to crash Flight 93 into a field. \u201cNo big plane will ever be taken that way again, because the passengers will fight back,\u201d Schneier said. Events have borne him out. The instigators of the two most serious post-9\/11 incidents involving airplanes — the \u201cshoe bomber\u201d in 2001 and the \u201cunderwear bomber\u201d in 2009, both of whom managed to get onto an airplane with explosives — were subdued by angry passengers.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Terrorists will try to hit the United States again, Schneier says. One has to assume this. Terrorists can so easily switch from target to target and weapon to weapon that focusing on preventing any one type of attack is foolish. Even if the T.S.A. were somehow to make airports impregnable, this would simply divert terrorists to other, less heavily defended targets — shopping malls, movie theaters, churches, stadiums, museums. The terrorist\u2019s goal isn\u2019t to attack an airplane specifically; it\u2019s to sow terror generally. \u201cYou spend billions of dollars on the airports and force the terrorists to spend an extra $30 on gas to drive to a hotel or casino and attack it,\u201d Schneier says. \u201cCongratulations!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charles C. Mann visits the airport with security guru Bruce Schneier: Since 9\/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.1 trillion on homeland security. To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,84,10],"tags":[387,201,257,202,451],"class_list":["post-12898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-government","category-liberty","tag-alqaeda","tag-securitytheatre","tag-terrorism","tag-travel","tag-tsa"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3m2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12898"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12899,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12898\/revisions\/12899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}