Saturday, October 18, 2008

On the complete uselessness of the TSA

Jeffrey Goldberg has a piece in this month's The Atlantic on how easy it is to penetrate airport security in the United States. Goldberg relies primarily on the advice of security guru Bruce Schneier. To say that Goldberg demonstrates the uselessness of post-9/11 security procedures is an understatement. I strongly recommend that people read this article. The article does drive one point home which is worth repeating explicitly here: none of the security precautions will stop a smart terrorist. All they will do is possibly catch dumb terrorists.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This reminds me of when Condoleezza Rice came to speak to us at Georgetown a few months ago and there was this kid in the 5th row wearing a Hezbollah t-shirt and a keffiyeh around his neck. No one gave him any trouble getting into the auditorium, presumably to protect his freedom of speech. All the shirt said to me, though, was "the guy wearing me is naive and probably an attention whore."

Anonymous said...

Well if we're going to play with the TSA...

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/09/metal_plates_send_message.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

Even the TSA thinks it's funny: http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2008/10/message-in-carry-on.html