We have to be reactive in this matter, we can’t be proactive. We can only respond to threats as they arise.
9/11 could have been prevented had the cockpit door of the aircraft been...wait for it...LOCKED SHUT. The terrorists could've been wielding ****ing great-white-hunter-cutting-through-thick-ass-jungle-sized machetes and it wouldn't have made any difference; they would've been stuck in the cabin getting the **** kicked out of them by the passengers. Proactive? A little common sense should suffice.
If I may paraphrase an episode of Seinfield: "The standard airliner cockpit door lock can effectively prevent a terrorist from entering and taking over the cockpit. It does however have one fatal flaw...THE DOOR MUST BE CLOSED!!!"
Limiting yourself to reactive is like saying you have to get hit by a car at least once before you know to check for traffic before crossing the road.
If we try to imagine what kind of threat the terrorist will pose in the future and try to take preemptive action, there are several problems associated with that. For one, it will be very difficult to justify spending millions or billions of dollars on some preventive technology when there isn’t a threat, people won’t go for it. Now that there has been a terrorist attempt, people will support the introduction of body scanners, but before the terrorist attempt, the support for body scanners was a lot less.
What's so hard about imagining a bunch of guys with box-cutters making a mad dash for the cockpit?
Security experts couldn't predict a guy on a terrorist watch-list putting explosive in his waistband?
People not supporting new measures isn't really a big factor; people want to be safe and if you can objectively show that there is a threat and justify the cost as proportional to that threat, then people will usually go along with it (no fear mongering needed).
As someone else said before, much of our airline security is for the most part designed to make the passenger feel safe, not as a truly effective means of preventing an attack.
The Israeli airline, El Al has the most effective security measures to-date and even makes use of missile countermeasures to protect the aircraft from external threats. If you really care about passenger security, use that airline as an example. Otherwise it's just going to filter out the occasional lunatic but little else.
That said, keeping planes safe from attack should be a walk-in-the-park here in Canada. Instead, it's a fiasco--fortunately there's not really much of a real threat so airline security can afford to be pathetically inept here.
The problem isn't the occasional would-be terrorist, the problem is governmental incompetence/negligence (i.e. inability/unwillingness to impose strict but appropriate regulations on airlines and airports).
We can only be reactive. It is an unending game. Terrorists come up with some threat, in response governments round the world take action, then terrorists think up a way of circumventing those measures, in response to that, governments take further measures and so on.
Sure it's just like the idea of a nuclear missile shield; there's always going to be a better missile that can make it through. But you can certainly take step to stay ahead of the game and be ready to act when **** happens.
I don't like the idea of using x-rays, even at low levels but the backscatter system is more effective than padding down (and strip-searching people is really time-consuming as well as being humiliating to passengers). Puffers also work but can be bypassed if the terrorist is careful about it.
Ultimately, they're capable of just surgically implanting the device and that won't be picked up by anything other than ultrasound or medical-level x-ray (assuming they use materials the x-ray can pick up). Easier to just manually check for scarring from recent surgery (i.e. partial strip-search). Interrogatory methods (e.g. interviewing each passenger) also can be bypassed via conditioning to prevent unconscious microexpressions. (Granted, this is way more sophisticated than what your typical bomber is capable of.)
Best way to avoid terrorism IMO is to not invite it. How about starting by not supporting the world's worst perpetrator of international acts of aggression, much of which is presently being directed at already dirt-poor Arab-speaking countries? (Or did people think the two were unrelated--lemme guess, the aggression is in
response to the terrorism. :roll: )
Even then, most of the Islamic world's population isn't in the business of blowing up airliners (let alone airliners here in Canada); aside from the occasional lunatic, this isn't a major threat.
Where very real threats to passengers are concerned, I'd be more worried about lax prevention measures against contagion in both Canadian airports and airliners.
You want security? You sacrifice liberty for it.
You tend to stay away from bears when you're in the bush, right? So you've sacrificed your ability to go where they are in order to be safe. It's a trade off.
Never realized the two had to be mutually exclusive.
Liberty is a subjective term. By this rationale, our whole society is just one big gulag because it has laws and thus limits action.
Here's the logic: laws punishing those who harm others limits your freedom to harm others. But your freedom would only be reduced if you wanted to harm others. Since you don't want to harm others, then your liberty is unaffected. (If that same law prevented you from harming others out of necessity in the process of defending yourself, then that would be of a loss of liberty.)
Security only affects liberty when the end can't justify the means, like when the counter-terrorism measures do more to inconvenience the passengers than the terrorist.
The line is drawn between necessary security and oppressive security. IMO what is happening in the USA is more of the latter. We haven't gotten that bad here...yet.
