I'm posting this James Fallows piece a little late for it to help people actually traveling today, but I was struck by one of the stories: the TSA agent grilling a person for opting out of the use of the scanner and accepting a pat-down. There's simply no reason for such an intrusion. Why do [...]
In a post about how the latest TSA security theater has led to an increase in charter flights, James Fallows expands to make a vital point about how this privatization of airline travel is a symptom of a larger national problem: BUT: it's hard to see this news as something other than Chapter 4,312 in [...]
A brilliant post from Bruce Schneier: since securing the Washington Monument is so difficult, he says we should "let it stand, empty and inaccessible, as a monument to our fears." This is a must-read post. One that highlights just how seriously off-track our nation has become when it comes to security theater and our fear.
Bruce Schneier reports on his blog about a New York Times story announcing that the Department of Homeland Security is finally going to do a wise thing: eliminate the stupid and useless terrorist color alert system brought to us by the Bush Administration. The color-coded threat levels were doomed to fail because "they don’t tell [...]
Capital Games and Gains’ Andrew Samwick links to a Wall Street Journal story by Holman Jenkins examining what the recent foiled terrorist attack says about Al Qaeda and our nation’s response: Considering the ease with which a suicide bomber could stroll into a Starbucks in any American city and kill a dozen people, you have [...]
From Urban Cartography, we see that Jesus Diaz has taken Nate Silver’s data on airline terrorism over the past decade and put them in graphical form.
FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver does the math. 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 [...]
The Transportation Security Administration has so far comprehensively failed in its first public test in the aftermath of the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253. Alas, it’s just the latest failure in the history of an awful decision to merge a group of agencies in response to the September 11 attacks. It’s not just the [...]
Behind on my reading, I only now saw this outstanding post by Bruce Schneier about what should be done to improve airport security. His plan: This would be my real answer: “Establish accountability and transparency for airport screening.” And if I had another sentence: “Airports are one of the places where Americans, and visitors to [...]
Juan Fernando Gómez hasn’t done anything wrong, but he gets detained when he travels back into the United States because he’s on a Transportation Security Administration list. He’s not sure which one. No one will tell him. There also appears to be no way to get off the list. As I have written before, I [...]
