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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?"
no
The odds of airborne terror are so low it's ridiculous that we focus on it as much as we do. Here's an excellent post on the subject:
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Not going to do any editorializing here; just going to do some non-fancy math. James Joyner asks:
"There have been precisely three attempts over the last eight years to commit acts of terrorism aboard commercial aircraft. All of them clownishly inept and easily thwarted by the passengers. How many tens of thousands of flights have been incident free?"
Let's expand Joyner's scope out to the past decade. Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides a wealth of statistical information on air traffic. For this exercise, I will look at both domestic flights within the US, and international flights whose origin or destination was within the United States. I will not look at flights that transported cargo and crew only. I will look at flights spanning the decade from October 1999 through September 2009 inclusive (the BTS does not yet have data available for the past couple of months).
Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.
These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.
Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.
There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.
Again, no editorializing (for now). These are just the numbers.
As it says in the Constitution, Lenin is in my shower.
Benjamin Franklin said it best when he said "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."
Except Benjamin Franklin never said that.
A frequently-misquoted phrase commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Many misquotations simplify or generalise the sentence somewhat, or add parts not in the original quote, such as "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both", one of the more common variants.
The original quote is taken from, "A Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania," first published anonymously in London in 1759. The quote is an excerpt from a letter written in 1755 from the Assembly to the Governor of Pennsylvania.
Benjamin Franklin did publish the edition printed in Philadelphia, and most likely the original, but denied writing any part of it. The quote however may have originated from Franklin, but was excerpted for the book by the author.
Bruce points out that the no fly list only gets checked when you purchase the ticket, and your ID isn't checked when you actually use it. For example, bad guy steals a credit card and buys a ticket under a fake name. That gets him a valid ticket and avoids the no fly list
Next, the bad guy takes a boarding pass and modifies it in photoshop to show his real name, and uses that fake boarding pass along with his real id to get through airport screening. Security checks if his id matches the name on the boarding pass, but they never check the computer to see if the name is on the no fly list or even if the boarding pass is valid.
Finally, the bad guy can rip up the fake boarding pass and use the real boarding pass purchased with the stolen credit card at the gate and gets on the plane. Notice throughout the whole process, nobody checked if the bad guy's id against the no fly list?
Schneier is right, as always.
Politicians always react to one specific attack, and just do something to make people feel more secure, not to actually improve security. Many of these actions just limit the freedom or conflict with peoples privacy, which ironically makes most people think they are more secure.
He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither. -- Benjamin Franklin
I find it interesting that this stance in the piece - which I agree with - is opposite that of computer and network security. In computer security we defend against every attack vector because trying to unravel motivations and possible sources is a waste of time (although I am sure someone is doing it). There is a neat write up about this over at ATW: http://www.pantos.org/atw/35703.html (see relying on attacker's motivations).
For example, if I grab you in the alley, your gun is useless;
What does this have to do with martial arts? The first step to ensuring your own safety is to be aware of your surroundings. Letting someone get close enough to grab you while you're walking alone through an alley means you already failed at the most basic level of self defense.
Actually the number is about 4-5x times that. I am remembering 14,000, but you can find a breakdown on the NRA site (http://www.vpc.org/nrainfo/phil.html): 11,920 firearms homicides in the USA in 2003.
Israel, on the other hand, requires that all of its citizens undergo military training -- and curiously enough, being armed in public is commonplace. Carrying knives onto planes is legal. Very few terrorists succeed despite the large numbers of attempts occurring daily, because at any point a citizen has the training to take a terrorist down and knows that they are surrounded by others who also have training and know what to do, look for, and react when a situation occurs.
Sorry, but no - I'm Israeli, and I was never allowed on an EL AL (or other) plane carrying a knife, or anything resembling a weapon.
And also sorry to break your illusion, Israelis are just like the next person - only very very small percent of Israelis has the training to subdue a terrorist on a place - just like any other nationals.
can find a breakdown on the NRA site um... that is link to an anti-gun site, not the NRA...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Most people can probably carry an amount of explosives rectally, and I wouldn't put it outside the realm of possibility that they could learn to trigger it with sphincter muscles.
There's already been a "butt bomber" attack this year. The only person killed was the bomber.
was completed by early morning on 11 September 2001.
Once upon a time, people hijacked airplanes. Airplanes were flown to Cuba, Russia, Taiwan, Mainland China, Africa, wherever people wanted to go for whatever personal or political axes they had to grind.
After this, the ICAO convened a treaty in 1970 which required that any country that flew airplanes treat hijacking as a felony. No exceptions. In the old days, if an airline pilot flew from (China/Taiwan) to (Taiwan/China), he would get gold, women, his name in the paper, etc. as a propaganda tool to show that (Capitalism/Communism) was a superior form of government which people yearned for. No more. Do that today, you go to prison. Period.
Even wacky countries we don't like much like Libya, Cuba, North Korea, etc. are signatories to this treaty. Hijack an airplane, go to jail. No exceptions. Anywhere.
It was a very effective treaty. As a result, a set of "rules of engagement" came up around hijacking. Keep calm. Don't make any sudden moves. Fly the airplane wherever in the world the hijackers want to go. Wherever you land, there will be negotiators if they play nice, and SWAT teams in reserve if they don't. Getting in a fight in the air can only endanger innocent people's lives.
After 2001, nobody is EVER going to follow those rules of engagement again.
The #1 issue with cellphones is the fact that when you are in an airplane up in the air, your phone is in range of so many towers (and passing between towers so fast) that your phone would overload the network rather than get a stable signal.
There is talk of micro-cells in airplanes that would allow your phone to connect to them instead of anything on the ground which would overcome the problems.
Your numbers are way, way off.
First, the underwear bomber had about 80 grams. The shoe bomber had 50 grams. And 50 grams was enough to blow a hole in the side of an aircraft in controlled tests.
Second, the only reason this was not a devastating explosion is that the bomber did not ignite it properly. As best I understand it, to trigger explosives like PETN, you have to have a starter that burns really hot. If you just light the stuff, most or all of it burns up before it gets hot enough to explode. That's what happened, and since they put the fire out, it never got hot enough to explode at all. Because it is so hard to ignite, for all practical purposes, PETN isn't very useful except in a lighter cord, as a heart medication, or as a secondary charge....
Had it been ignited properly and gone off all at once, 80 grams of PETN is equivalent to about 132 grams of TNT, with a potential explosive force of about 552 kilojoules. That's about a quarter of a stick of dynamite, or nearly an entire hand grenade, not a third of a grenade. I'm pretty sure that's more than enough to kill several people and blow a hole in the side of an airframe. Would it bring the plane down? Probably not, unless the explosion just happened to damage some critical control cables or something. Would it be a very serious disaster? You bet.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
We also know that the most secured airline in the world (El Al) hasn't had any successful attacks.
Have you ever flown El Al? I have, and I can tell you that, unlike the TSA, El Al does *not* engage in security theatre. Israeli airport security doesn't ban nail clippers or pocket knives or liquids. They don't bother with pat downs, either, nor do they x-ray your baggage, and Schneier knows all of this. In fact, he's written essays in which he pointed to El Al's approach as the right way to do airline security and contrasted it with what we do.
Israeli airport security is focused on identifying and removing terrorists, not their weapons. That's because it's fundamentally impossible to deny them weapons, and the Israelis understand that. They do search your belongings. By hand. Thoroughly. But they do it less to see what you have than to watch your reaction while they do it. While one agent is searching your stuff, two more are watching you. And they also ask a lot of questions about who you are, why you're traveling, where you've been, where you're going, etc., and they demand proof of your statements. They quizzed me in detail about every person I'd met with while in Israel, and then they actually called some of them on the phone to verify my statements. They also separated me from the people I was traveling with, asked us all questions individually, and then conferred with one another to compare the answers.
That's what real, serious airport security looks like. And it does work. The security theatre we have doesn't, not against anyone with a clue. It's trivial to smuggle a weapon onto a plane; I've done it accidentally! Really smart terrorists won't bother bringing anything through the front door, either. Have maintenance, cleaning crews, etc. bring the weapons in. US airport security in those areas is laughable. Not so on El Al flights.
You're right that security can be effective. Schneier is right that what we do is not security.
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Can't bring liquids on board? Sure, but you can bring freeze-dried watermelon that you've reconstituted with a liquid of your choice onboard.
Nope, no can do. During Christmas time, one of the Finnish traditions is to eat ham. Not just a slice, but 10-20 pounds of big part of pig that is then cooked at home. Some buy their ham fresh, some buy it frozen (Cheaper). You are not allowed to take frozen ham onboard, it's considered as liquid. Ref: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kauppalehti.fi%2F5%2Fi%2Ftalous%2Fuutiset%2Fetusivu%2Fuutinen.jsp%3Foid%3D2008%2F12%2F16969%26sort%3Dfalse%26request_ahaa_info%3Dtrue&sl=fi&tl=en
(Article translated from Finnish to English)
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fi&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kauppalehti.fi%2F5%2Fi%2Ftalous%2Fuutiset%2Fetusivu%2Ftulostus.jsp%3Foid%3D2008%2F12%2F16969%26type%3Detusivu
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