You address the problem by capturing or killing the people that seek to kill us.
That is exactly what we did for the DC sniper.
You don't address it by taking away civil liberties.
I'd hardly call a body scan or frisk at an airport "taking away civil liberties". But let's say, just for the sake of argument, that it is.
The fact of the matter is that unless you can provide civil liberties to the OTHER people who travel on the airplanes, the liberal ideal will not work. Egyptians, Saudis, et al do not experience or share Western living conditions, ideals, or liberties. As long as they are allowed to travel on the same airplanes that we travel on, you have a collapse of ideology and need to inject a bit of pragmatism.
Note that our founding fathers were VERY pragmatic, and did not extend libertarian ideals to anyone other than well-off white males. I'm not advocating that position, but I'm not sure why people hold these people as such idealists. They were very compromising.
I want to know why pilots have to go through security checks.
The point was made above that you don't want someone impersonating a pilot just to get past security. Just like the recent incident where the young guy from China impersonated an old man with a rubber mask.
the airline should be free to hire their own security force and institute their own procedures. They are not.
The problem is that if the airline fails, it doesn't just affect the airline and it's passengers. It also affects whatever the airplane hits. We tried "free market" security, and they let 19 co-conspirators through on the same day.
But even if you disagree with my statement, why must you torture Libertarian principles by trying to apply them to corporations? A corporation is just an abstraction enabled by government. They are just an extension of government, really.
Why would you take all of these nice Liberal ideals and apply them to a government creation rather than an individual?
In other words, having an "airline" contract security is not really any different than having the government contract security - the airline receives it's charter from and is regulated by the government. The government even takes them over under certain conditions - bankruptcy, for instance.
They both want to restrict your movement and slowly erode your freedoms.
That's a pretty odd terrorist. The ones we've encountered recently just want us out of the Middle East.
The real noodle shaker is being reminded who originally trained, funded and geared up many of these terrorists in the first place.
Why is that a "noodle shaker"? Actions have unforeseen consequences. I'm not sure how, other than learning, our past actions should affect what needs to be done in the present. So we created a monster... do we kill it or just give up? Or did I totally mis-characterize your point?
He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security. He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.
You quote Franklin, and then go on to state that you would prefer the government knows enough about you to make a decision as to whether you are a threat to the plane, possibly including an Israeli-style interrogation?
This contrasted with the alternative, which is letting the government see a black-and-white photo of you naked?
We have universal health care in the US, too. Maybe it's not as comprehensive as in Canada or parts of Europe, but any damn fool can walk into an emergency room and get treatment... by law.
The problem is that ER care is expensive, no one pays and then the hospitals either rely on government subsidies or simply close.
We also have a large single-payer system: Medicare and Medicaid. Together these systems are probably larger than most single-payer systems in the world. And then of course we have the VA system, which is state-run, more like Britain. It serves 8 million actively and is open to 23 million or so.
All have advantages and disadvantages, and it's not going to help the debate to paint this as such a black-and-white issue. Certainly it doesn't help to call someone names.
There is some merit to this. The pool of people who are clever enough to find novel ways around airport security is much smaller than the pool of people who can copy what the last successful guy did.
There's a bit of debate about whether he was in fact a terrorist. He was certainly mentally unstable, and he certainly did cause people to be terrified - but the prosecution felt that his prime motivation was an elaborate plan to kill his wife.
In any case, if we start having a sniper problem then we would need to take some steps to address the problem.
One of the greatest advantages of gold is that it's pretty damned hard to inflate it.
When everything was gold based, there was no long-term inflation. True for the most part.
However, there were huge short-term swings up and down in the relative value of gold... as much as 40% by the estimates I was looking at. And as you allude, there was no way to compensate, no way to direct monetary policy. Economic depressions, panics, and recessions are age-old.
And gold is completely arbitrary, and it has industrial uses so it is being used up.
Anyway, why do you care if the dollar declines? You aren't hoarding cash, are you? You can still hoard gold, you know.
The US could supply rare-earths (and we used to). Environmental rules mean it's more expensive, though. After the latest shenanigans, I expect the cost issue to carry less weight.
You make it sound feasible, but I imagine there's more to bombmaking than the average suicide bomber can handle in a bathroom stall with only the tools available in his rectum. Each person you add also increases the odds of something going wrong considerably. Even just the skill level jump is a significant obsticle... apparently they are having trouble recruiting people who can set off a pre-made bomb, let alone assemble one from pieces found in each other's asses.
Each hoop improves safety. The pool of people who want to hurt the US is very large. The pool who want to kill themselves in the process is much smaller. The people in that pool with the means to find a competent bombmaker even smaller in number. The people in the pool who can keep their cool under stress... shrinking. The people with the ability to get on a plane with a US visa... even smaller. Now you've added two more pool-shrinking criteria: some technical skill and that you need multiple individuals at the same time!
But all that aside, you could stick a bomb sniffer in the bathrooms - if this is not already done.
My experience was more stressful. They opened my luggage in front of me, and started asking me questions. My interview was about 10-15 minutes. Then the person disappeared and a new interviewer came out and we went through it again. Then the original came out and they started pointing out inconsistencies in my answers. I also had to be prepared with a letter from my employer stating the purpose of my visit. All told, the delay was at least 45 minutes.
Then again, I'm not Jewish, and I was there on business, so maybe I got higher scrutiny.
That kind of profiling would never work in the US.
The problem is that you can protect a building doing things that are cheap and easy. You need a massive truck bomb to bring down a building, so just wall off the area. Simple. Small things (people, bikes, carts, strollers) can still get through. Simple.
You can't protect an airplane like that. Apparently, something as small as a couple of ounces of homemade explosive constitute a real danger to the airframe. Your "bollards" (forgive my metaphor) have to be much smaller to screen out the smaller stuff.
I'm not a big fan of air travel, and most of that is because going through security sucks. I get that. But going through security in Israel sucks even more, even though their system has so far been perfect. If these scanners can improve security a bit without adding a 45-minute interview, I'm for it.
That's why we watch Monty Python! God, it's like you aren't even listening!:)
bad teeth, bad food
Okay, now I'm just taking crazy pills. The only British "restaurants" I've ever encountered in any country that I've ever visited are all pubs that serve an admittedly nice ale and some of the blandest, most overcooked food on the planet. Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate some fish and chips with some malted vinegar... but we're not exactly talking about fine cuisine. Any problems with US food sit squarely with our humble culinary origins as a realm of the Queen. We're up there with Canada, Australia, and the other great British former colonies. Thank God the French gave us some flavor down in New Orleans, the Spanish colonized Mexico, and you Brits were nice enough to import some Africans to bring us some good Southern cooking.
As for the teeth... you mean they are too bleached white and shiny? That's more of a California thing but I agree that the almost blue-white teeth are very off-putting. Then again, so are Hugh Grant's yellow scagleys. Can we call this a tie? Neither country seems content with straight, slightly off-white teeth.
armed police.
Yeah, to the bad teeth!
Doesn't mean you don't have CCTV everywhere.
Many (most?) private companies and now even individuals choose to install them, but there are very few public cameras that I'm aware of. There was a pilot program in NYC for a while, but I haven't been following it. Wikipedia seems to think less than 10,000 in a city of 6 million... a 1:600 ratio that is far lower than the UK's supposed 1:14. The tech is so cheap now that you can pick up a complete set for your home for under $1000, and you can look at your empty house over the internet:)
That might be too general - like saying "vehicles". You can't take the same action to secure all vehicles, and you can't take the same action to secure all buildings. The threats to a train vary from the threats to a plane, and the threats to a church are very different from the threats to a mall or stadium.
I do remember that 9/11 was primarily about the buildings, but they failed to bring them down in the 90s even with a huge truck bomb. And by the way, they don't just react to air attacks - high profile buildings all have barricades around them and forbid trucks from parking underneath them. Airport screening isn't the only security "theater". (Pun intended.)
Not to ding the Israeli experience, because it did keep me safe... but that wouldn't work in the US. It adds a ton more time to your trip, and they ask very personal questions and scare the devil out of you with the third-degree. I'm not even sure it would be legal for the government to ask you questions about race and culture in this country:)
Tell that to the suicidal Darwin award candidates* we hear about every day.
You are right, but I meant to frame my conversation in terms of the Western world. We don't get a whole lot of bombed markets or mosques. It happens, but not on the scale you see in Iraq or Pakistan.
performing random strip searches on the road should be legal
Why, are we having a road terrorism problem? I'm being pragmatic - don't try to pry some weird idealism or consistency out of me. I'm not an "ism".
Maybe you're just an idiot
Name calling in only your second paragraph. Nice.
comparing strip-searches to visits to a doctor.
Not strip searches - x rays that don't see clothes. And anyway, why is it such a stretch? You get a skin cancer screening so that you don't die and you get "seen naked" at the airport so you don't die. Why is that so idiotic? Because you disagree?
Because I very rarely hear about any attempted attack against a plane
If your definition of "rarely" means "about twice a year or so I read it in a major newspaper" then we agree. It's not exactly easy to smuggle explosives onto a plane... don't you think that there might be a deterrent effect as well?
Now guess what would be pretty spectacular? Someone blowing himself up on a busy city street. Is that a good reason to strip-search everyone coming to the city center?
Ask the people running the green zone checkpoints in Iraq. Damn right it's a good idea if you have a problem of people blowing themselves up in the street. We don't currently have that problem in the US - I think one guy tried to blow up a truck in Times Square - which, yes, is a high profile target like an airplane.
I seem to recall someone trying to take down WTC this way years before the 9/11 - yet not every vehicle being parked is investigated.
They went far more Draconian. They flatly banned trucks from parking garages after the first WTC bombing. I'd have been all for allowing trucks after a search, which would have been better than a straight ban.
Or have I simply missed all the stories of terrorists trying to smuggle explosives onboard but caught by airport security?
Caught? Isn't that the point of the new scanners? That the existing scanners don't work because they only detect metal? I fail to see how you look at Richard Reid and the Christmas bomber and say, "Oh, well - we gave it a good go... I give up!". It's like counterfeit money - you won't catch all of it, but you have to at least dissuade people from trying.
and that's just what a terrorist wants: hysterics
And I don't want to give them that. Thus my hope that the scanners improve security. It'd be great to get to the same level as the Israelis without making every passenger crap their pants in an interview with the intelligence services.
The current process doesn't actually catch anything, as far as I know. I'd say the scanner is much faster than the Israeli screening process, which has been proven effective but would never work in the US. I'm presuming that our "security theater" was going to have to be improved.
Slashdot Mirror
You address the problem by capturing or killing the people that seek to kill us.
That is exactly what we did for the DC sniper.
You don't address it by taking away civil liberties.
I'd hardly call a body scan or frisk at an airport "taking away civil liberties". But let's say, just for the sake of argument, that it is.
The fact of the matter is that unless you can provide civil liberties to the OTHER people who travel on the airplanes, the liberal ideal will not work. Egyptians, Saudis, et al do not experience or share Western living conditions, ideals, or liberties. As long as they are allowed to travel on the same airplanes that we travel on, you have a collapse of ideology and need to inject a bit of pragmatism.
Note that our founding fathers were VERY pragmatic, and did not extend libertarian ideals to anyone other than well-off white males. I'm not advocating that position, but I'm not sure why people hold these people as such idealists. They were very compromising.
I want to know why pilots have to go through security checks.
The point was made above that you don't want someone impersonating a pilot just to get past security. Just like the recent incident where the young guy from China impersonated an old man with a rubber mask.
Bang-up security :)
the airline should be free to hire their own security force and institute their own procedures. They are not.
The problem is that if the airline fails, it doesn't just affect the airline and it's passengers. It also affects whatever the airplane hits. We tried "free market" security, and they let 19 co-conspirators through on the same day.
But even if you disagree with my statement, why must you torture Libertarian principles by trying to apply them to corporations? A corporation is just an abstraction enabled by government. They are just an extension of government, really.
Why would you take all of these nice Liberal ideals and apply them to a government creation rather than an individual?
In other words, having an "airline" contract security is not really any different than having the government contract security - the airline receives it's charter from and is regulated by the government. The government even takes them over under certain conditions - bankruptcy, for instance.
They both want to restrict your movement and slowly erode your freedoms.
That's a pretty odd terrorist. The ones we've encountered recently just want us out of the Middle East.
The real noodle shaker is being reminded who originally trained, funded and geared up many of these terrorists in the first place.
Why is that a "noodle shaker"? Actions have unforeseen consequences. I'm not sure how, other than learning, our past actions should affect what needs to be done in the present. So we created a monster... do we kill it or just give up? Or did I totally mis-characterize your point?
God doesn't love THEM!
He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security.
He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither.
You quote Franklin, and then go on to state that you would prefer the government knows enough about you to make a decision as to whether you are a threat to the plane, possibly including an Israeli-style interrogation?
This contrasted with the alternative, which is letting the government see a black-and-white photo of you naked?
You have a weird definition of "liberty".
We have universal health care in the US, too. Maybe it's not as comprehensive as in Canada or parts of Europe, but any damn fool can walk into an emergency room and get treatment... by law.
The problem is that ER care is expensive, no one pays and then the hospitals either rely on government subsidies or simply close.
We also have a large single-payer system: Medicare and Medicaid. Together these systems are probably larger than most single-payer systems in the world. And then of course we have the VA system, which is state-run, more like Britain. It serves 8 million actively and is open to 23 million or so.
All have advantages and disadvantages, and it's not going to help the debate to paint this as such a black-and-white issue. Certainly it doesn't help to call someone names.
Get rid of the useless security theatre.
And go back to the days of the hijacking of the week? No thanks.
TSA - protecting you from yesterday, tomorrow.
There is some merit to this. The pool of people who are clever enough to find novel ways around airport security is much smaller than the pool of people who can copy what the last successful guy did.
There's a bit of debate about whether he was in fact a terrorist. He was certainly mentally unstable, and he certainly did cause people to be terrified - but the prosecution felt that his prime motivation was an elaborate plan to kill his wife.
In any case, if we start having a sniper problem then we would need to take some steps to address the problem.
One of the greatest advantages of gold is that it's pretty damned hard to inflate it.
When everything was gold based, there was no long-term inflation. True for the most part.
However, there were huge short-term swings up and down in the relative value of gold... as much as 40% by the estimates I was looking at. And as you allude, there was no way to compensate, no way to direct monetary policy. Economic depressions, panics, and recessions are age-old.
And gold is completely arbitrary, and it has industrial uses so it is being used up.
Anyway, why do you care if the dollar declines? You aren't hoarding cash, are you? You can still hoard gold, you know.
The US could supply rare-earths (and we used to). Environmental rules mean it's more expensive, though. After the latest shenanigans, I expect the cost issue to carry less weight.
You make it sound feasible, but I imagine there's more to bombmaking than the average suicide bomber can handle in a bathroom stall with only the tools available in his rectum. Each person you add also increases the odds of something going wrong considerably. Even just the skill level jump is a significant obsticle... apparently they are having trouble recruiting people who can set off a pre-made bomb, let alone assemble one from pieces found in each other's asses.
Each hoop improves safety. The pool of people who want to hurt the US is very large. The pool who want to kill themselves in the process is much smaller. The people in that pool with the means to find a competent bombmaker even smaller in number. The people in the pool who can keep their cool under stress... shrinking. The people with the ability to get on a plane with a US visa... even smaller. Now you've added two more pool-shrinking criteria: some technical skill and that you need multiple individuals at the same time!
But all that aside, you could stick a bomb sniffer in the bathrooms - if this is not already done.
My experience was more stressful. They opened my luggage in front of me, and started asking me questions. My interview was about 10-15 minutes. Then the person disappeared and a new interviewer came out and we went through it again. Then the original came out and they started pointing out inconsistencies in my answers. I also had to be prepared with a letter from my employer stating the purpose of my visit. All told, the delay was at least 45 minutes.
Then again, I'm not Jewish, and I was there on business, so maybe I got higher scrutiny.
That kind of profiling would never work in the US.
Cheap and easy while being pretty effective.
The problem is that you can protect a building doing things that are cheap and easy. You need a massive truck bomb to bring down a building, so just wall off the area. Simple. Small things (people, bikes, carts, strollers) can still get through. Simple.
You can't protect an airplane like that. Apparently, something as small as a couple of ounces of homemade explosive constitute a real danger to the airframe. Your "bollards" (forgive my metaphor) have to be much smaller to screen out the smaller stuff.
I'm not a big fan of air travel, and most of that is because going through security sucks. I get that. But going through security in Israel sucks even more, even though their system has so far been perfect. If these scanners can improve security a bit without adding a 45-minute interview, I'm for it.
famous for having no sense of humour
That's why we watch Monty Python! God, it's like you aren't even listening! :)
bad teeth, bad food
Okay, now I'm just taking crazy pills. The only British "restaurants" I've ever encountered in any country that I've ever visited are all pubs that serve an admittedly nice ale and some of the blandest, most overcooked food on the planet. Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate some fish and chips with some malted vinegar... but we're not exactly talking about fine cuisine. Any problems with US food sit squarely with our humble culinary origins as a realm of the Queen. We're up there with Canada, Australia, and the other great British former colonies. Thank God the French gave us some flavor down in New Orleans, the Spanish colonized Mexico, and you Brits were nice enough to import some Africans to bring us some good Southern cooking.
As for the teeth... you mean they are too bleached white and shiny? That's more of a California thing but I agree that the almost blue-white teeth are very off-putting. Then again, so are Hugh Grant's yellow scagleys. Can we call this a tie? Neither country seems content with straight, slightly off-white teeth.
armed police.
Yeah, to the bad teeth!
Doesn't mean you don't have CCTV everywhere.
Many (most?) private companies and now even individuals choose to install them, but there are very few public cameras that I'm aware of. There was a pilot program in NYC for a while, but I haven't been following it. Wikipedia seems to think less than 10,000 in a city of 6 million... a 1:600 ratio that is far lower than the UK's supposed 1:14. The tech is so cheap now that you can pick up a complete set for your home for under $1000, and you can look at your empty house over the internet :)
How about buildings?
That might be too general - like saying "vehicles". You can't take the same action to secure all vehicles, and you can't take the same action to secure all buildings. The threats to a train vary from the threats to a plane, and the threats to a church are very different from the threats to a mall or stadium.
I do remember that 9/11 was primarily about the buildings, but they failed to bring them down in the 90s even with a huge truck bomb. And by the way, they don't just react to air attacks - high profile buildings all have barricades around them and forbid trucks from parking underneath them. Airport screening isn't the only security "theater". (Pun intended.)
Is that feasible?
Could you cram enough explosive up your ass to bring down a plane?
9/11/2001
I know it was over nine years ago, but JEEZ. Not only did those hijackers board here, they lived here for a while. And then they bombed us.
Not to ding the Israeli experience, because it did keep me safe... but that wouldn't work in the US. It adds a ton more time to your trip, and they ask very personal questions and scare the devil out of you with the third-degree. I'm not even sure it would be legal for the government to ask you questions about race and culture in this country :)
Tell that to the suicidal Darwin award candidates* we hear about every day.
You are right, but I meant to frame my conversation in terms of the Western world. We don't get a whole lot of bombed markets or mosques. It happens, but not on the scale you see in Iraq or Pakistan.
performing random strip searches on the road should be legal
Why, are we having a road terrorism problem? I'm being pragmatic - don't try to pry some weird idealism or consistency out of me. I'm not an "ism".
Maybe you're just an idiot
Name calling in only your second paragraph. Nice.
comparing strip-searches to visits to a doctor.
Not strip searches - x rays that don't see clothes. And anyway, why is it such a stretch? You get a skin cancer screening so that you don't die and you get "seen naked" at the airport so you don't die. Why is that so idiotic? Because you disagree?
Because I very rarely hear about any attempted attack against a plane
If your definition of "rarely" means "about twice a year or so I read it in a major newspaper" then we agree. It's not exactly easy to smuggle explosives onto a plane... don't you think that there might be a deterrent effect as well?
Now guess what would be pretty spectacular? Someone blowing himself up on a busy city street. Is that a good reason to strip-search everyone coming to the city center?
Ask the people running the green zone checkpoints in Iraq. Damn right it's a good idea if you have a problem of people blowing themselves up in the street. We don't currently have that problem in the US - I think one guy tried to blow up a truck in Times Square - which, yes, is a high profile target like an airplane.
I seem to recall someone trying to take down WTC this way years before the 9/11 - yet not every vehicle being parked is investigated.
They went far more Draconian. They flatly banned trucks from parking garages after the first WTC bombing. I'd have been all for allowing trucks after a search, which would have been better than a straight ban.
Or have I simply missed all the stories of terrorists trying to smuggle explosives onboard but caught by airport security?
Caught? Isn't that the point of the new scanners? That the existing scanners don't work because they only detect metal? I fail to see how you look at Richard Reid and the Christmas bomber and say, "Oh, well - we gave it a good go... I give up!". It's like counterfeit money - you won't catch all of it, but you have to at least dissuade people from trying.
and that's just what a terrorist wants: hysterics
And I don't want to give them that. Thus my hope that the scanners improve security. It'd be great to get to the same level as the Israelis without making every passenger crap their pants in an interview with the intelligence services.
Those people make use of the privacy screens, paper modesty guards, and backwards opening robes at the doctor's office,
Well, that's the real theater. Because at the end of the day, the doctor still saw all your naughty bits and was still knuckle deep in your rectum.
They don't speed up the process though.
The current process doesn't actually catch anything, as far as I know. I'd say the scanner is much faster than the Israeli screening process, which has been proven effective but would never work in the US. I'm presuming that our "security theater" was going to have to be improved.