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Comment by jedwhite | Hacker News Reader

The dangerous thing about security theatre is that it distracts resources and personnel away from the things that would actually improve security, in the interests of PR and cosmetics based on inconveniencing the non-terrorists.

As the author points out, detailed background checks would be far more effective than either looking at or touching people's privates.

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But would it be less of an invasion of our privacy?

Yes. Simple background checks based on public records and customer history / credit checks are things that we already accept every time we deal with any financial institution or government agency. A programmatic check would exclude the vast majority of travellers as potential terrorists. And manual inspection by a junior intelligence analyst most of the rest, leaving senior analysts to evaluate more serious threat cases.

That would be far less intrusive and far less invasive a procedure than violating the physical privacy of very many and in some cases every traveller, which is where this is already heading at several major airports.

Hmm.. You mean like "Your dad is from Egypt, let's put a gps sender on your car and treat you 'special' at the airport from now on, since our background check thinks you're part of the target group"?

Seriously, how would a background check work? What are you looking for? Ethnic background obviously would be the biggest failure (although still done, see above). Credit history? Police records (international? Good luck with that)?

Either you disclose what you are looking at and "the bad guys" can trick your check. Or you don't and you're back on the security by obscurity road, doing "arbitrary" (to the public) things, annoying probably just as much.

I think this idea is just as flawed as the current procedure. And I surely hope no one is starting something like that, since this whole security BS seems like a race of arms to me lately..

You need to take an exclusion approach. Most passengers on US air flights have clearly established records. If you can take the majority of people out of the current overkill security theatre, that means they can go through standard-level security queues quickly (note no one is proposing dropping security here). I dread standing in the densely packed security lines at DIA. A single suicide bomber could kill several hundred people on a busy day there without ever passing a security checkpoint (as the author points out this is now the bigger risk). If you can reduce the number of people who need to remove shoes, liquids and have back-scatter and pat-downs to a small minority, then everyone will be safer. I'm a libertarian (in the Jefferson sense). But I agree to reasonable security checks voluntarily by choosing to fly. But invasion of privacy has gone too far when someone makes me walk through a Dick Measuring Machine or is "meeting resistance" for the sake of public relations theatre.

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