I doubt administration or Congress rolls backs security measures. Fox News, Hannity and Limbaugh would jump all over it. They would use it as proof that Obama is a undercover Muslim terrorist that is weakening security measures for muslim terrorists to commit more 9/11 airplane attacks.
So why shouldn't malls be a target if their purpose is economic? Can you even imagine the crisis several mall attacks(each likely killing hundreds of people) would do to this country? If we don't respond with security measures, then NOBODY is ever going to the mall again. We'd literally do all our entire Christmas shopping online. It would suck horribly for the economy.
That's a good point but its unlikeley even a Republican President and Congress would do either. I agree with Otto's assesment that most of this is theatrical but if there is one thing the US public likes it is good theatre.
Well dealing with Israeli security sucks ass, so I would rather deal with a few episodes like a few days ago every year than have to go through Israeli security for the rest of my life.
when i flew back to the u.s. from amsterdam i was in the same terminal w/ flights going to and coming from places like tehran, karachi and nairobi - there was no tsa or anything similar to that - its was more like how flying was in the u.s. before those a-holes came in - nobody made me take off my shoes - nobody pulled me aside, made me do a jesus-pose and waved a metal wand all over me. i sat next to a guy going back to the u.s. after visiting his family in uganda. he didnt have to take off his shoes either. no hassle/no problems! how come terrorists dont try to do any hijackings of those flights?
I fly rather frequently and the writer's implication that the pre-9/11 levels of airport security were either acceptable or better than they are now is ridiculous. Other than that, the system obviously isn't perfect (nor is it cheap). All the same, a security system such is this is absolutely necessary not only for safety reasons but to also build confidence back up within the public. The industry cannot afford another post-9/11 hit. And speaking personally, neither can I since my job in about six months will rely on consumer air traffic. God forbid but had that plane went down in Detroit, the cycle would start all over again and all the progress that we've made since that point would have essentially been erased. I get what you're saying, though. Some of it is ridiculous. What I will say in TSA's defense is that they seem to be focusing on the primary threat: explosives. They're putting more funding and effort into better explosive detection machines and bomb sniffing dogs. Air marshals are definitely a good thing. I mean, you can't deny that some of the things that they're doing are a good idea. Are there weaknesses? Evidently. I was unaware that airport employees weren't thoroughly screened. That's disturbing and hopefully they'll do something about it. Another area of concern has to be the idea of homemade explosives being made after going through security checkpoints using random materials that could easily be found at airport gift shops and restaurants. People might not like it but placing one of those metal detector looking explosive sniffing machines before each gate at the airport might be a good idea -- provided, of course, it can be a proven and effective means for detecting such things.
Here's some interesting factoids... http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/odds-of-airborne-terror.html 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 mles 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.
