Missives from the 6th Floor

A year and a half ago, while traveling back from CA with Dawnise, I had my carry-on bag subjected to a hand screening. They took everything out of my bag, including all my toiletries from my travel case. After ignoring two unmarked plastic squeeze bottles (one contained shampoo, the other hair gel), the inspector commenced to walk away - leaving Dawnise and I with unsupervised access to my bag for a good 60 seconds while he asked his supervisor if the book of paper matches were verboten.

After the debacle was over, I discretely commented to Dawnise that had this been a real emergency, a plane load of people would be in serious trouble about now. Binary explosives aren't difficult to synthesize (says the guy with a year of college Chemistry), and explosives aren't the only binary compound suitable for a terrorist attack.

Clearly, were that inspection to happen today the outcome would be different. But more fundamentally, I wonder if we're nearing an inflection point in the trade-off between security and convenience. Security experts, quoted in the mainstream press, are starting to talk about real threat vectors, and that our current countermeasures are almost completely ineffective against most of them.

The only worse than the ineffective security theater we've been dealing with since 9/11 may be actual, well thought-out, comprehensive security.

As security checkpoints get more restrictive and thorough, congregating more people into a small space for longer periods, the airports themselves become attractive targets. This can't be easily solved by pushing the security perimeter outside the airport - it's an ingress problem. Unless you can massively paralellize the inspection process, thereby reducing the queue size and making it an uninteresting target you just move the problem, not eliminate it.

Electronics, of any form, pose a real and credible threat - but that doesn't mean I want to be prohibited from carrying my phone, mp3 player, notebook, or noise canceling headphones on the plane.

We're still focusing on airborne threats, but it's not hard to imagine other vectors. Yesterday there were three near-simultaneous crowd-drawing events in Seattle, already a dense population center and bustling commercial port. The schedule of these events was known well in advance. And there's no security perimeter around the city, or the stadiums....