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:Nope

[Rei]

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.

A better article about Schneier exploits

[joeflies]

The Atlantic published an article about Schneier exploiting airport security by pointing out the fundamental flaw that airport scanners don't actually check the no fly list.

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?

Re:Uh No

[dgatwood]

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.