Gyroscope

A newsletter for those unmoved by spin.
No. 23, January 5, 2004

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The appearance of security.

An airplane sits on the tarmac with an armored personnel carrier beside it. Soldiers in combat gear walk through the terminals carrying rifles. Staff examine your boarding pass several times as you get on the aircraft.

Boy, we are really getting serious about security, aren't we? Except that, none of things I just listed has the slightest effect on our security. Think about September 11th, or hijackings down through the years. Would a single one of them have been stopped by any of the measures I just described? No.

What about fingerprinting arriving visitors, x-raying all luggage, hand scanning people who set off metal detectors and cranking the sensitivity of metal detectors up higher?

Those accidentally may have some benefit, but the cost is amazingly high compared to the chance they will catch someone. Since September 11th, no one has, as far as I know, been caught at the gate with weapons to hijack a plane by any of these methods, but it is possible this security has deterred some terrorists from trying.

Contrast the energy given to these measures with the somewhat haphazard approach to providing bullet-proof cockpit doors and making sure the FAA, the FBI and the CIA are talking to each other and passing on information - methods that are effective in stopping actual hijack attempts.

Lately, there has been a spate of energy given to stopping flights from entering the U.S. A dozen or so, I think, have been turned back on the basis of security information. All the media is reporting solemnly that their sources have leaked to them that there was a real threat, and there might have been, I don't know.

However, there is reason to be skeptical. If the problem is that some of the passengers on these rejected flights were actually planning to hijack the aircraft, then how does removing them from this flight and putting them on another one help? Is it thought that terrorists have some fanatical hatred of a particular flight number. If the problem is, as has been reported, that the passengers were not properly screened, one wonders how the U.S. officials can tell that from thousands of miles away in the space of an hour or so. Since not one single person, as far as I've read, has ever been arrested from one of these rejected flights, it doesn't seem to me that this can be regarded as anything but yet another over reaction.

"An evangelical parrot has disappeared just days before he was due to preach at a prayer meeting in Canada. Solomon, an African grey, has a vocabulary of more than 2,500 words, including the phrases, 'It's time to repent or perish.'" reports the Sunday Times, of December 7th, p. 18

"A man who put on police uniform and stopped traffic in Cleveland, Ohio, has been arrested after he called headquarters for back-up" reports the Sunday Times, of December 7th, p. 18.

In an unprecedented protest, 27 Israeli air force pilots - including 9 on active duty - condemned Israel's air strikes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as 'immoral' and refused to fly such missions." reports the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Nov. 2003, p. 35.

"The Reuters news service recently noted that the U. S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed (392) during the first three years of the Vietnam War, 1962 through 1964" reports the Seattle Weekly, Dec. 17, p. 19.

From 1982 to 2002, OSHA determined that 1,242 workers died on the job due to employers "willful" safety violations. in 93 percent of those cases no criminal charges were filed. "When Congress established OSHA in 1970, it made it a misdemeanor to cause the death of a worker by willfully violating safety laws. The maximum sentance, six months in jaile, is half the maximum for harassing a wild burro on federal land." reports the New York Times, Dec. 22, p. A1.

"Europe is the best protection that the United States has against its inner evils: its isolationist narcissism, its ignorance of the way others feel and think." - Dominique Moisi, Foreign Affairs, Nov. 2003, p. 70.

"Very few of the 1,200-odd people in the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority [The US occupation administration] dare walk around Baghdad, getting to know the people and offering reassurance. Instead, they are cocooned in an array of grandiose buildings behind a massive web of concrete blocks, barricades and barbed wire in a so-called Green Zone which they rarely leave unescorted." reports the Economist, December. 6, p. 21.

So what is going on? If all this energy is being spent on activities that do not increase security, while needed security efforts are going lagging then one is left with the usual choice: do they really have no idea what to do, or is there another purpose here? Some do have other purposes, I think. One possible reason is the general desire among security people to keep everything under control. People moving around are unregulated, free, "we don't know what they are doing", "they can go wherever they want" - I know from experience how nervous that concept of freedom and privacy make some security people. And fingerprinting visitors from Mexico is all about stopping illegal immigration, not hijacking.'

I do think though, that some of this is just nervous activity rather than conspiracy. We don't know what to do, we cannot talk about how our foreign policy creates terrorists, and so we have to charge around looking busy because we know doing nothing would be wrong. There is a psychic satisfaction from having grim-faced youth stomp about in camouflage with rifles. We see the firepower, are a bit afraid ourselves, and think, "these people can really take care of any threat." But what we constantly forget is that hijackers are not going to assault the airport with teams of commandos. They operate by stealth and concealment. They are spies, not soldiers.

What would I do? I'd be much more interested in making sure the FBI, the CIA and the FAA communicate effectively. That, and armor plated cockpit doors. Not very sexy, but effective.