the problem in a nutshell
Found this excellent Slate article while wandering, which brings up an important point in the so-called 'War on Terror'--the enemy, in this instance, is inventive, flexible and fluid. Our government and our TSA agents are not. Who's going to win?
Yeah.
More to the point, while it doesn't come out and state it plainly, it infers heavily a truth which some of us seem to be willfully ignoring: there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop a sufficiently inventive zealot bent on suicide to achieve their goals.
Flat out. That is the unvarnished truth. Catch the shoe bomber? They'll move to shampoo. Wait, we caught that one? Ink cartridges. We caught that one? Well, there are other hiding places.
Anything that can be inserted has been or will be. Anything that can be woven can potentially contain something contraband--from drugs to poisons to messages. In extreme cases, I'm sure there will be ways where fervent men who await awards in heaven will have explosives planted in their hearts along with a pacemaker triggered to go off at a predetermined point.
They're going to die anyway. They don't czre. All they want is to sow chaos and disruption.
So far, with the 'security' measures? They have effectively cowed many of us, and people? THAT WAS THEIR POINT.
No one has to kill to frighten a population. Not knowing when--or if--or how they'll strike, and being brutalized by our own people in the pursuit of some form of 'protection', means they've won. The 'thousand cuts' they speak of, on the other side? Are mostly, these days, inflicted by our own people.
I still stubbornly cling to Israel's solution. Israel's airports are very, very secure. But they have more people trying to harm them. So why does what they do work, and what we do fails?
Training. Intelligence. Perception. Three things which people hired by the TSA seem to profoundly lack across the board.
When anyone enters the Israeli airport, they are met--outside the airport--by a smiling employee, usually female, who asks how they are and what they're bringing in. Just that. If she detects any hint of nervousness or suspicious behavior, she waves them through--and calls ahead.
The next stop features two people, also smiling and pleasant. They ask the same thing. If the answers they're given seem in any way confused, nervous, or aggressive, they wave them on--and call ahead to the next checkpoint.
There are several stops along the way. None invasive, no pat-downs, nothing in front of the public, and only if they are still concerned about a given passenger, are they quietly taken aside to a private room for further security scans. This happens all the time, so that's also no big deal. Few voices are ever raised and none are raised by airport staff. What the public sees is calm and pleasant efficiency.
This requires intelligence. This requires training in what to look for, how to detect it. This requires extensive study of how people express emotion, their tells, things nearly all humans will do when angry, scared, nervous, contemptuous. The process works because a good half of this training takes place in the military, which every single Israeli citizen must join, or have a damned good excuse why not to join, for at least two years.
Think about that for a moment. Nearly the entire population of Israel has had combat training. And, along with combat training, they have had classes in how to detect the enemy, how to draw them out, what to watch for, how to handle it. This is then paired with security training when those individuals seek airport jobs.
The US does not do this. I'm not even sure airport security positions require a college degree, let along advanced anti-terrorist training in discernment and detection. And it seems, more frequently than not, we are hiring tinpot dictators, who get off on the power or who seem to view it as a strike against the privileged and the beautiful to push them through the body scans--which give off an insane amount of surface-skin-only radiation, thus risking mass skin cancer outbreaks in time--or give them invasive public pat-downs.
Was this the America men and women have died to protect? This crippled, hobbled thing where rights vanish every day and we no longer trust our own government to protect us? Because if this is really the government we want, and it gets worse--because it will get worse...we have only ourselves to blame.
Yeah.
More to the point, while it doesn't come out and state it plainly, it infers heavily a truth which some of us seem to be willfully ignoring: there is absolutely nothing we can do to stop a sufficiently inventive zealot bent on suicide to achieve their goals.
Flat out. That is the unvarnished truth. Catch the shoe bomber? They'll move to shampoo. Wait, we caught that one? Ink cartridges. We caught that one? Well, there are other hiding places.
Anything that can be inserted has been or will be. Anything that can be woven can potentially contain something contraband--from drugs to poisons to messages. In extreme cases, I'm sure there will be ways where fervent men who await awards in heaven will have explosives planted in their hearts along with a pacemaker triggered to go off at a predetermined point.
They're going to die anyway. They don't czre. All they want is to sow chaos and disruption.
So far, with the 'security' measures? They have effectively cowed many of us, and people? THAT WAS THEIR POINT.
No one has to kill to frighten a population. Not knowing when--or if--or how they'll strike, and being brutalized by our own people in the pursuit of some form of 'protection', means they've won. The 'thousand cuts' they speak of, on the other side? Are mostly, these days, inflicted by our own people.
I still stubbornly cling to Israel's solution. Israel's airports are very, very secure. But they have more people trying to harm them. So why does what they do work, and what we do fails?
Training. Intelligence. Perception. Three things which people hired by the TSA seem to profoundly lack across the board.
When anyone enters the Israeli airport, they are met--outside the airport--by a smiling employee, usually female, who asks how they are and what they're bringing in. Just that. If she detects any hint of nervousness or suspicious behavior, she waves them through--and calls ahead.
The next stop features two people, also smiling and pleasant. They ask the same thing. If the answers they're given seem in any way confused, nervous, or aggressive, they wave them on--and call ahead to the next checkpoint.
There are several stops along the way. None invasive, no pat-downs, nothing in front of the public, and only if they are still concerned about a given passenger, are they quietly taken aside to a private room for further security scans. This happens all the time, so that's also no big deal. Few voices are ever raised and none are raised by airport staff. What the public sees is calm and pleasant efficiency.
This requires intelligence. This requires training in what to look for, how to detect it. This requires extensive study of how people express emotion, their tells, things nearly all humans will do when angry, scared, nervous, contemptuous. The process works because a good half of this training takes place in the military, which every single Israeli citizen must join, or have a damned good excuse why not to join, for at least two years.
Think about that for a moment. Nearly the entire population of Israel has had combat training. And, along with combat training, they have had classes in how to detect the enemy, how to draw them out, what to watch for, how to handle it. This is then paired with security training when those individuals seek airport jobs.
The US does not do this. I'm not even sure airport security positions require a college degree, let along advanced anti-terrorist training in discernment and detection. And it seems, more frequently than not, we are hiring tinpot dictators, who get off on the power or who seem to view it as a strike against the privileged and the beautiful to push them through the body scans--which give off an insane amount of surface-skin-only radiation, thus risking mass skin cancer outbreaks in time--or give them invasive public pat-downs.
Was this the America men and women have died to protect? This crippled, hobbled thing where rights vanish every day and we no longer trust our own government to protect us? Because if this is really the government we want, and it gets worse--because it will get worse...we have only ourselves to blame.