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Comment by throwaway9475 | Hacker News Reader

Does that include inappropriately frisking children because what if they're secretly lightning rods and they're going to kill us all? No. Because that's ridiculous. Just like it's ridiculous in airports.

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Terrorists have been known to place bombs on children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_suicide_bombers_in_the_I...

You see where this is going, right? This is exactly why terrorism "works": because the kinds of people who will frisk children "because terrorists have been known to use children" can be goaded into doing just about anything in that fashion. That's the real threat from terrorism: not to our overall physical security, which even at their worst no terrorist group has ever threatened existentially, but to our psychological security --- which they demonstrably have threatened to that degree.

Whereas some people will object to any security measure on the grounds that "terrorists aren't a threat".

But if we actually followed their advice, terrorists would be an enormous threat because we'd take no steps to protect ourselves.

So far we seem to be objecting to the wholesale copying of phones, aggressive physical inspection of women with back braces, and the frisking of children --- each of which you've defended as vital to defending against the terrorist threat.

I feel as if you might be making my point for me.

Whatever exception you make - for children, for back braces, whatever - will be the exception terrorists will exploit.

If terrorists know you don't search children, they'll place bombs on children.

It's little use locking the front door while leaving the back door wide open.

I think you underestimate the difficulty in loading a child with explosives and successfully getting them onto a plane then detonating them in flight. There are so many places along the chain where this would almost certainly fail. We could easily make this a nearly impossible threat without abandoning our civil rights. We already have sniffer dogs, explosive materials swabs, backscatter machines, and layers of human intelligence before this point. If we're at the point where TSA has to grope everyone, why bother, the terrorists have achieved their goal, as we are no longer a free society.

Additionally I think you are vastly overestimating the number of terrorists out there trying to carry out these attacks. We didn't do much at all in the 1970's and 1980's beyond signals and human intelligence and attacks were very rare then. And this was when we were engaged in several proxy wars with Russia. There just aren't that many people out there that are both willing, interested, and capable of attacking US civilians in spectacularly deadly ways.

You are fear mongering. You are part of the problem, and people making you arguments are destroying our freedom of movement and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

To quote Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

> We already have sniffer dogs, explosive materials swabs, backscatter machines, and layers of human intelligence before this point. If we're at the point where TSA has to grope everyone, why bother, the terrorists have achieved their goal, as we are no longer a free society.

Perhaps I'm misinformed, but I thought pat-downs were only used on people who refused to go through the back scatter machines.

And I haven't seen sniffer dogs or explosive detection swabs routinely used on all passengers.

Insult me if you wish, but at least try to be honest about reality.

The pat downs are used for people who refuse, and arbitrary other people at the "discretion" of the TSA. As for the swabs, my carry on gets swabbed at almost every airport I go through. I can't remember the last time it wasn't.

And my main point was the even before the security theatre, at the height of post WWII global violence, terrorist attacks in the US were exceedingly rare and they still are. This suggests that we likely didn't buy anything for the sale of individual liberty.

> If terrorists know you don't search children, they'll place bombs on children.

Do they have the operational capacity to carry out thousands of attacks like this a year? You might as well say: "if we only lock cockpit doors, but don't weld them shut, well then they'll cut through them."

We make exceptions all of the time based on feasibility and cost/benefit.

Do terrorists have children? Sure.

Do terrorists have bombs? They seem to know how to make them with extremely limited resources.

What do you think they're missing?

The operational ability to successfully carry out sophisticated attacks with children and the will to sacrifice (many) children in this manner.

> Do they have the operational capacity to carry out thousands of attacks like this a year?

They don't have operational capacity to carry out thousands of attacks per year outside their primary area of strength by any means, and this isn't really all that relevant to attacks in that area.

So the question is: how much of an impact on their operational capacity to strike into, say, the US would it be to do this. Doesn't seem like it would be much.

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