Bruce Schneier On Airport Security

the4thdimension writes "Bruce Schneier has an opinion piece on CNN this morning that illustrates his view on airport security. Given that he has several books on security, his opinion carries some weight. In the article, Bruce discusses the rarity of terrorism, the pitfalls of security theater, and the actual difficulty surrounding improving security. What are your thoughts? Do you think that we can actually make air travel (and any other kind of travel, for that matter) truly secure?"

Comments

Re:The only way to fly safe!

[wizardforce]

somehow put them all into a coma for the duration of the flight.

DON'T GIVE THEM IDEAS!

Re:Just what I've always said

[Itninja]

Impressive. I can see you have said this hundreds of times.

Re:Mod Up

[Jeng]

Where do I subscribe to your newsletter?

Re:Uh No

[anexkahn]

this is recycling a very old idea....ever see the movie roots?

Re:Uh No

[D Ninja]

we'd all have to board planes naked (you could strangle someone with the elastic band from your underwear!)

They still wouldn't let me board the plane as security would quickly realize I could still strangle people...

Bruce Schneier at an airport

[slasho81]

I ran into Bruce Schneier at an airport once. While we were waiting for a plane, I asked him if he would show me a "cool computer trick". He popped the RAM out of my laptop and quickly tasted the edge with the gold leads. He then told me that at 11:23pm the previous night I had visited ideepthroat.com with Firefox. Damn he's good.

Re:Bruce Schneier at an airport

[selven]

Bruce Schneier gets the jokes in the Voynich manuscript.
Bruce Schneier can determine if a program terminates just by looking at it. And then the program terminates itself.
Bruce Schneier once decrypted a box of AlphaBits.
Most people use passwords. Some people use passphrases. Bruce Schneier uses an epic passpoem, detailing the life and works of seven mythical Norse heroes.
Bruce Schneier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret.
Bruce Schneier can read captchas.
Bruce Schneier's password has so much entropy, that gzipping it results in a stream sixty four times as long. And yet he can type it with a single roundhouse kick to the keyboard.
Bruce Schneier knows Chuck Norris's private key.

Re:Bruce Schneier at an airport

[slasho81]

Bruce Schneier's secure handshake is so strong, you won't be able to exchange keys with anyone else for days.
Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat.
Bruce Schneier writes his books and essays by generating random alphanumeric text of an appropriate length and then decrypting it.
When Bruce Schneier observes a quantum particle, it remains in the same state until he has finished observing it.
Though a superhero, Bruce Schneier disdanes the use of a mask or secret identity as 'security through obscurity'.

Re:Mod Up

[bluefoxlucid]

It's boring and wordy and mostly amounts to Basket Case whining about how people are told that self-defense is wrong, or Letters to the Editor that read along the lines of "you are fucking stupid, you think you can take someone with a gun, anyone who has a gun just has to shoot you and you're dead!"

You'd be better off 1) taking your gun to a firing range and learning to fire it; 2) taking a self-defense-with-guns class to learn how to use it; and 3) taking a close-combat martial art to learn how to deal with situations where your firearm is useless (or you don't have it).

Or you could just learn to play guitar. By the time someone offs you, you'll just be staring down the barrel thinking, "Eh, I've got blow jobs from like four thousand girls, I had a fun enough ride."

guns are better.

[zippthorne]

You have to train a lifetime to become a Ninja, and you have to learn a lot of useless skills like clever ways to poison people. Further, the equipment is expensive and must often be custom forged and relentlessly cared for.

A Pirate can be trained in a matter of days and requires no more expensive equipment than a pile of shabby rags and a rusty flintlock pistol. What they lack in manners and aim, they make up for in volume and gusto.

Re:Uh No

[Culture20]

On September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld was giving a press conference about how $2B was missing from the Pentagon.

On September 10, 2001, the WTC security contract with Securacom ended. Marvin Bush, W's brother, was a principle in the company, and also sat on the Board of directors of KuwAm, an Kuwaiti-American investment firm which financially backed Securacom.

...and Earth has 4 corner simultaneous 4-day TIME CUBE in only 24 hour rotation. Care to connect more dots, Gene?