What bothers me most about airport "security" is not just the hassle (although it is annoying and time-consuming) but the fact that the hassle is such ineffective window-dressing that is doing no bloody fucking good at all. It's a giant, immediately visible band-aid on the bleeding wound that is U.S. intelligence and disaster preparedness failures. Every time I have to put my "freedom baggie" full of "freedom-sized" toiletries through the scanner with my motherfucking All Star sneakers I wonder what our incompentent government is messing up. And every time the rules are applied differently at different airports, or some innocent grandmother is hassled by a TSA-uniformed high school dropout on a power trip, my blood pressure goes up just a little more. Shame on any sheep who think any of this is making us safer. It's protecting us from the aborted idiot attacks of yesterday, not from the Next Big Attack. First it was laptops out and random searches. Fine. Then it was taking your shoes off. Whatever. Now it's random searches, take your shoes off, laptop out, jackets off, no more than a baggie full of liquid (and if you have more they'll dump it oh-so-safely into a barrel with bottles of other potentially terroristic liquids). What the fuck is next?
Bruce Schneir makes my day. These are excerpts from an entry in his blog from yesterday:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archive...it_of_the.html
Quote:
Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots -- and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse -- is wrong.
...
I don't think these nut jobs, with their movie-plot threats, even deserve the moniker "terrorist." But in this country, while you have to be competent to pull off a terrorist attack, you don't have to be competent to cause terror. All you need to do is start plotting an attack and -- regardless of whether or not you have a viable plan, weapons or even the faintest clue -- the media will aid you in terrorizing the entire population.
...
(snip stuff about the Lackawanna Six, Miami Seven, and the JFK airport plot and the goddamn wannabe liquid bombers)
...
Following one of these abortive terror misadventures, the administration invariably jumps on the news to trumpet whatever ineffective "security" measure they're trying to push, whether it be national ID cards, wholesale National Security Agency eavesdropping or massive data mining. Never mind that in all these cases, what caught the bad guys was old-fashioned police work -- the kind of thing you'd see in decades-old spy movies.
...
I'll be the first to admit that I don't have all the facts in any of these cases. None of us do. So let's have some healthy skepticism. Skepticism when we read about these terrorist masterminds who were poised to kill thousands of people and do incalculable damage. Skepticism when we're told that their arrest proves that we need to give away our own freedoms and liberties. And skepticism that those arrested are even guilty in the first place.
...
There is a real threat of terrorism. And while I'm all in favor of the terrorists' continuing incompetence, I know that some will prove more capable. We need real security that doesn't require us to guess the tactic or the target: intelligence and investigation -- the very things that caught all these terrorist wannabes -- and emergency response. But the "war on terror" rhetoric is more politics than rationality. We shouldn't let the politics of fear make us less safe.
|
I'm a lot more afraid of our economy collapsing in debt from this ridiculous war and living out my retirement years in postapocalyptic poverty than I am about some terrorist bringing down my plane between fucking Greensboro and Minneapolis.