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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?"
We do all of these stupid things to pretend to have security that even the most brain-dead terrorist could work around.
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. Any sort of saturated porous or fibrous solid is fine. You can bring any sort of solid hydrate with you, too. Heck, on my way back from Christmas, I realized that I had reusable heat packs in my pockets, and that those were liquid. To keep them? I simply activated them so that they crystalized (releasing heat). Bam -- they're no longer liquids. But they're the exact same stuff.
Can't bring knives on board? Heck, I had a freaking dull garden spade confiscated from me, as though I was going to hijack a plane with a dull spade. But you can sure as heck bring a glass or ceramic plate or other such object and break it into long, heavy, surgically-sharp shards in a cloth towel. You can also bring any sort of electronics or other devices with you whose internal frame components are made of long, sharp pieces of metal. Even if you personally sharpened them.
Do they think terrorists are retarded? Do they think that they can't figure this sort of stuff out? No, they'd rather just put on this "Security Theatre" and inconvenience millions upon millions of travelers for no damned reason.
If they actually cared about security, it would be obvious: the approach to dealing with threats would be proactive, not reactive. It wouldn't be a case of, "someone tried to blow up a plane with shoes? Everyone has to take their shoes off". Taking shoes off would come before someone tried it. Same with liquids and all of these other ridiculous regulations. They're just trying to pretend that they're on top of it, when what they're doing isn't helping anyone. It's just making flying a pain in the arse.
One of these days, when I have enough time before a plane flight, I'm going to follow the letter of the rules while showing off (in a non-threatening manner) how easily they can be worked around: by attempting to cook a full four-course meal onboard a plane during the flight from my coach seat ;) Electric or allowed-chemical heat (no flames), minimal cook times, liquids pre-stored in dehydrated food or reconstituted from powders and water-fountain water past the security checkpoint, etc.
As it says in the Constitution, Lenin is in my shower.
The answer: No.
The sooner most people grow and learn that "Shit Happens (tm)" and that no one can every prepare for every eventuality, the better. The "Security Theatre" is just a new opening for corrupt politicans and power-hungry individuals to remove more freedom from people.
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."
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
> Given that he has several books on security, his opinion carries some weight.
One would hope that experts be judged by quality rather than quantity.
Bruce Schneier has earned street cred in the industry over many years of work. He knows security top-to-bottom, cryptography to psychology to economy.
Once in a while some media outlets decide to air an actual competent professional instead of a fud-mongering buffoon, and people in the industry send them to Bruce.
. . .simply, that as far as the TSA and similar efforts go, the Emperor not only has no clothes, nobody ever remotely NEAR him has a stitch on.
About the only people doing airline security right are the Israelis, and their model only works because of the relatively limited scope of El Al's operations.
The Christmas Day "panty bombing" showed cascade failures in the intelligence and investigation systems that are the only effective methods of defense against terrorism.
In a RATIONAL world, **one** terrorism flag (i.e. one-way ticket, buying with cash, no luggage, watch list, etc) would yield pulling the passenger aside and "enhanced investigation": two flags, and the person is getting a very thorough body and luggage search, and three or more flags, it's grab the latex gloves, because it's a strip-search and fine-tooth comb search through luggage and posessions.
But, alas, because some people don't bother checking, or reporting (assuming it's their job to do so. . .) in a timely matter, really obvious cases are allowed to pass, and the aftermath of Enhanced Security Theater does nothing but inconvenience the public, and potentially cause so much noise as to effectively mask any REAL events or dry-runs in progress. . .
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.
I think you missed Schneier's point, if you RTFA.
The approach to dealing with threats should be intelligence gathering, our criminal justice system, and resilience in response to successful attacks.
A proactive approach that you suggest would require listing possible attack vectors, then taking action to prevent each of them. Carried to its logical conclusion, we'd all have to board planes naked (you could strangle someone with the elastic band from your underwear!), or even restrained (hands are weapons too!) in order to prevent terrorist actions on planes.
It's simply unreasonable to take that kind of preventative action.
In truth, (and one of Schneier's points), we cannot realistically defend against all attack vectors. To try to do so is pointless, except that it gives people a feeling of security. True defense against terrorism isn't served by reactive restrictions, nor by proactive restrictions -- unless they absolutely limit our ability to conduct regular tasks.
You're right, though, what they're doing isn't helping and is a royal pain in the ass. But the solution is not to become proactive in travel restrictions. It's most of what Schneier wrote in the piece.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Roughly 16,000 people were killed by automobiles in the first six months of this year. Roughly 22,000 were killed by preventable medical errors. If we crashed two or three 747s per week, we still wouldn't be at that level of deaths. If the money we waste on TSA were spent elsewhere, we'd be ahead of the game.
Impressive. I can see you have said this hundreds of times.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
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?
You don't even have to work around the list of things you can't carry on board; items on the list get missed all the time. Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic had an article from last year detailing all the things he's managed to sneak onto planes, including pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, bottles of Fiji Water, and box cutters. He's even brought two cans' worth of beer through security by wearing a Beerbelly under his clothes and walking it through the metal detector. And this in spite of the fact that he was selected for secondary inspection at the time he was wearing it.
He's also tried forging and printing out his own boarding pass (with help from Bruce Schneier) and getting through security with it, with similar results:
I'm actually chair of the National Ninja Warrior's Advocacy Group; packing a gun is silly in most situations, mostly because you don't know how to use it or you don't know how to deal with situations where a gun is useless. For example, if I grab you in the alley, your gun is useless; I'm skilled enough to recognize your attempt at a weapon (assuming it's a knife) and block it (then find out it's a gun you're currently being forced to hold pointed at your foot...). However, if you're highly trained in Judo, my head is probably going into the nearest brick wall for trying.
A gun is a great self defense weapon. So are your fists. Your fists won't work from 30 feet away, and if you're being shot at you've got a slight problem. I believe we should train everyone to react in hostile situations. Anything, Judo, Boxing, Aikido, Ninjutsu, Kung Fu, it doesn't matter. If you hold a second level rank after 8 months, you're pretty dangerous; if you hold fifth Dan level after 17 years of training, you're carrying around one hell of a concealed weapon. If you're on a plane and some idiot pulls out a box cutter, he now has a plane full of ninjas to deal with; oops.
We should all learn to be some kind of martial artist, so we have a nation of ninja warriors. Nobody will fuck with anybody ever again. It's infeasible. On one point, everyone can kick your ass; on the other, everyone's reaction to being threatened is now to actively seek a way to destroy you. Maybe I'll stand here nice and quiet while you point a gun at some girl's head; but as soon as you glance behind you, and that thing slides just a bit up, angled away from her skull? I'm there, and your whole arm is gone, and neck snapped right in half. First chance I get.
This is the most stable form of society possible.
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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...
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.
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."
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Let's say that we make airline flights 100% terrorist proof. Then what? Simple, the terrorists move on to bombing other things. Can you imaging the panic that would happen if they bombed a large high school graduation? There are a nearly infinite number of potential targets for terrorists and it is impossible to secure them all.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
The real TSA screeners are not the highschoold dropout instructing you to remove your shoes.
In most airports, there is nobody filling that role except the highschool dropout telling you to remove your shoes. If you think there is some hidden screener out there who is REALLY keeping you safe, you are sadly mistaken. There might be a very small number of airports that do this, but even so most people would be able to slip by anyway. Act bored and you win. They won't spot a thing.
It is pretty trivial to get knives past TSA, unless you are being honest about it. A friend of mine accidentally brought a boxcutter (the kind that can extend out to a 4-5" blade) through at least six TSA screenings, and he had simply put it in a pocket and forgotten about it. How's that for security?
You can get explosive rope these days, if you're clever you could probably sneak a half pound of the rope and another four or five pounds of standard plastics on board in a suitcase and nobody would be the wiser. You could do some major damage with that combo. The guy who got caught recently was just dumb as shit, and didn't know what the hell he was doing, and he STILL got explosives past security. They make you stay seated for the last hour and a half of an international flight now, but so what? The guy lit the bomb off in his chair anyway, what's the "remain seated" bullshit supposed to stop?
If you look at what happened on 9/11, the main problem was our attitude about hijackings at the time. Hijackings were supposed to be about ransoming for cash, not blowing up a target, so the standard procedure was do whatever the hijackers say and wait till it is over. Now, standard procedure is subdue the hijacker as soon as possible. Had that been done on 9/11 the news would have been about how 19 hijackers were thwarted in an attempt to hijack four airplanes, and a few passengers were injured in the process. That new policy is what protects us in the sky now, not any of the bullshit security theater which is absolutely worthless at catching all but the most basic and obvious weapons. People see someone with a weapon now, they won't hesitate any more - that guy is going down in a hurry. 9/11 would not happen again today and the TSA has nothing to with that at all.
It's all designed to make us feel safer, since the folks in the know realize they can't actually make us any safer. What we were doing before is as good as what we are doing now as far as airport screenings, the only real changes that can be made are in the background, with inteligence agencings tracking suspected terrorists and such. TSA is just the government saying "Look! aren't you glad we're making you so safe?"
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller