After the attempted bombing last week, the bit topic seems to be a measure of how our system failed us. Napolitano's comment isn't winning the government any awards, and in general the question seems to be - what's next?

Disturbingly (to me), the talk among conservatives seems to parrallel two lines of thought - make our airports similar to El Al's security, and begin profiling. One conversation included the claim that all young Muslim men should be pulled for extra checks, and apparently I was the only one who found issues with this... El Al might have great security, but they only have 30 some odd planes, so not quite the scale of searches needed for major US carriers.

Any thoughts?

It's unfortunate that so many in our government, on both sides of the aisle, insist on reacting from a position of fear and weakness. The more of this they layer on, the less safe we actually are. For every extra shadow we start jumping at, there's only more false-positive noise to conceal real criminals.

Worse, under the proposed rules about keeping passengers seated during the last hour of international flights, the people who subdued this "terrorist" could have been facing felony charges (not that they got to him before he had already failed to ignite the powder). How absurd.

and begin profiling

While i'm opposed to profiling in general it sure has'nt been any Buhdhists or catholics trying to blow up airliners. last i checked AQ was a radical muslim group basing itself in muslim countries recruiting young muslim men to do thier dirty work.

Would this suck for someone like Jedd? you betcha it would. it would be a major inconvienance for sure but nothing more than an inconvienance. maybe then those that embrace the peacefull side of Islam would do more to weed and eradicate the radical nut jobs giving them a bad name. much in the same way it's up to your normal Mormons to eliminate those sects that condone polygamy and banging 12 yo's.

This false "security" increase is most comical because it wouldn't even prevent the case they're knee-jerking over.

I've been saying it for years, along with hundreds of other people who have any understanding of math, but the sift-and-filter "no fly list" crap is provably worthless and always has been. They have never caught anyone using that, and statistically probably never will. In fact, the glut of information regarding that likely even worked against what was real human intelligence as provided by at the attacker's own father.

El Al's model works, and is a lot better than ours no matter what. However we are unlikely to accept the cost model of it. We'll throw billions at worthless database technology but are unwilling to pay well enough for anyone who isn't a retard to want to work for TSA, much less the thousands of non-retards you'd need. You see, El Al's security works because they established trusted, professional security personnel and then, rather than applying mountains of absurd rules, let them do what they are trained and paid to do and make sound decisions based on on-the-spot analysis.

Half the problem is that the TSA was primarily staffed during Bush Jr's reign of incompetence and is chock full of people who have fundamental beliefs that government is implicitly broken and are doing their best to make it true. The entire organization needs to be razed and replaced.

Here's what actually provably makes air travel safer:

Luggage x-rays and air-sampling explosive detectors are great, but only if staffed by non-trogs.

Locked cockpit doors prevent realistic access to a flight crew in the air, which short circuits a number of attack vectors.

Passenger awareness that attackers may not be taking hostages, but instead trying to cause casualties, has made it more difficult for any complex action to be undertaken by someone in flight.

Random air marshals haven't actually stopped any terrorists (statistics again, probabilistically impossible for a marshal and attacker to be on the same flight) but they do great at taking care of much more common problems like rowdy drunks.


Everything is a pure waste of time and money and demonstrably worse than the null case -- that is, it costs us more in both time, money, and in some cases lives, to implement a measure than it does to simply allow the exceedingly rare bad thing to happen and fix the damage.


Also, regarding "profiling," El Al is also very aware of the militant right-wing Jewish extremists and has been keeping an eye out for them too, but it's not racism to run the numbers and realize than 95% of women and 98% of everyone outside the age range of 15-50 are simply not ever going to be involved in crime and giving them the lack of attention they deserve. That's what people are missing, they aren't picking out bearded muslims for searches, they are excluding much safer groups from scrutiny. But on El Al, everyone gets at least a brief look-over and interview. To my understanding, very frequent travelers can get certain exceptions since they are "on file."

I have a hard time reconciling profiling with American values - especially that whole innocent until proven guilty bit. I also don't think the operators of Al Qaeda are stupid - since we've already seen female terrorists and non-brown skinned members of Al Qaeda, stopping all young Muslim males only adds to the atmosphere of fear, and it shouldn't take too long for a plane to get blown up by an 80 year old grandmother convert.

You don't have to stop all young Muslim men. But if you have 3 hours to interview 300 people, you're going to ask a lot more questions of the 10 young Muslims than the mother with three children in their soccer jerseys.

You can never totally prevent any sort of attack on public infrastructure. It's impossible, and fruitless to try. What you can do is allocate resources to prevent the most problems. This isn't any more profiling than police "profile" by patrolling high crime areas more frequently. You could argue for a stochastic police patrol schedule, but you'll notice no city, state, or nation in the world uses such a thing because having your beat cops walking streets where no one ever goes just as often as the streets with multiple late-night clubs is a clear and obvious waste of time.

The only reason the same logic isn't easily applied to terrorism is because terrorism is so incredibly rare than it's impossible to statistically differentiate on any grounds ... except commonalities between the attackers. Even if someone's 80 year old grandmother blows up a bus, that still leaves her as a mere .05% of terrorists, who are only .00000001% of the population anyway. Unless you have repeated granny hashassins, it's still pointless to over-screen for them.

I wouldn't mind questions and a delay in my travels if I am promised not to miss my flight. Ask me any questions you want if you don't keep me from getting on the plane. Just don't treat me like a criminal or a terrorist.

We need to start listenening to people, and not rely on technology so much.

If they just would have listen to this guy's father, he never would have made it on the plane.

At this point my preference is no more rules. If the current trend continues than you won't be able to bring luggage and have to be chained naked with legirons to your 5 gallon pail for a seat and cuffed. Even then, there is still a greater chance that the pilot is drunk or asleep in the cockpit than there is some wannabe jihadist with dynamite stiched into his chonies so who is fooling who anyway? I want my blanket. I want my Ipod and I want the ability to take a piss when I have to go. Otherwise, making flying even less enjoyable will just make driving or not traveling all that much more appealing. Even with new rules, the savages will find a way to get around them and if things get any more knee jerk as far as rules than I might just be thankful that the plane got blown up and put me out of my misery. Yes, flying is a privelege and honestly its one I opt to choose less and less but unfortunately work demands it.