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Comment by dtech | Hacker News Reader

The term you're looking for is security theatre

Yup. It's baffling how quickly the mask and travel check measures were dropped, even at a time when COVID was causing multiple airliners worth of deaths per day, while the totally pointless liquid bans remain.

The liquid bomb threat really is the thing that conspiracy theorists would love: it's a totally made up possible threat by the Big State that hasn't been seen in the wild and is used to justify inconveniencing millions of people for no good reason. And yet it's just not talked about.

> The liquid bomb threat really is the thing that conspiracy theorists would love: it's a totally made up possible threat by the Big State that hasn't been seen in the wild

Incorrect. Betwee 2006 and 2010, seven people were convicted in the uk for conspiring to attack passenger airplanes with liquid explosives (acetone peroxide according to wikipedia).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl...

Still not "in the wild"; they were arrested in the planning stages, and there is no evidence that at any point they successfully produced TATP let alone getting any of their components through security or whether it would have worked on a plane.

That was one group, thirteen years ago, and since then everyone is limited to 100ml? Forever?

Anyway, you’re allowed 10 times 100mL, in separate containers. You can easily blow up an airplane with a liter of the right liquid…

> You can easily blow up an airplane with a liter of the right liquid

Yeah... The thing is that you can't. Not easily.

You can't do much with a liter of some liquid that won't happen by chance on the way to the airport. And you can't change the liquid a lot while on the plane. You can barely fit seated there.

My understanding is that there is some form of reasoning behind the 100mL limitation. Sufficiently easy to procure liquids can blow up a plan when they are in a container bigger than 100mL (300mL, 1L, I don’t know what the findings were).

Now, what I do know is that pouring liquids together in a largers plastic bag is very easy, you can do that inside a backpack. I had to do this multiple times due to leaky milk bottles, leaky shampoo bottles, etc. The plastic bag simply has to be strong enough to stay in form while filling up.

Hence my point that this 100mL limitation is useless (from a volume limitation point of view), and I assume (not an expert on explosives) that if there was a limitation at 100mL, there must be something dangerous enough above this volume. Hence the overall regulation is useless.

Hope it clarifies my reasoning.

Where does the popular idea that you can simply mix things into explosives come from?

You can't make a strong explosive in a portable plastic bag. If you get the chemistry right, you will just burn yourself and maybe your neighbor. You won't even lose fingers, that requires better conditions. AFAIK, that's exactly what happened to the original liquid bomber, that was caught after he burned himself mixing things on the bathroom. In much more stable conditions than a bag, but still not nearly stable enough.

The guy that tried to carry solid explosives on his underwear was also caught only after he burned himself, because that's also not a practical way to carry them. As did the guy that tried to carry them on his shoes.

There are some very robust reasons why all those plots are doomed to failure, but those are the ones the US focus on (and basically impose on the rest of the world), while there are many perfectly viable vulnerabilities to exploit that nobody wants to close because they would impose more restrictions on the passengers. And that nobody is exploiting because it requires knowing what to do, and people that know what to do aren't normally prone to killing random strangers.

Are you saying that even with 1L it’s not possible?

Well, then the rule is even more stupid than I thought =)

The phase of matter doesn't strike me as an appropriate level of granularity.

“We can't breathe in business class. Somebody's got mace or something.”

“Nobody knows who stabbed who, and we can't even get up to business class right now 'cause nobody can breathe.” - Betty Ong, Flight 11

Not necessarily explosive, but tactical chemical attacks have been a known capability for a while, and part of anti-terrorist training long before 2001. Something truly sophisticated from a superpower state would likely escape detection, (and therefore likely implicate such a state,) but the Tokyo Sarin attack by a cult in 1995 involved big bags of liquid.

(This isn’t a justification of any particular security search, just pointing out that liquid agents are not a non-existent threat.)

>"We can't breathe in business class. Somebody's got mace or something.”

100ml of mace would be enough though, right? So why the limit?

Also why is liquid a special category? That doesn't make sense either.

I once lost a 3/4 full normal-size tube of toothpaste because of one of these limits.

Made me wonder how paste-like something has to not count as a liquid to them. Playdough?

How closely do they look at deodorant? Some stick-form ones are more liquid than toothpaste is.

Thanks to the TSA holding the power, at the very least in the "Well if you have a dispute with my ruling just step to the side and I'll get my manager, hope they wander over before your flight leaves..." way, I have in fact had TSA agents take away my stick deodorant before.

I had never really thought of that, but the ability to make you miss a flight is an amazingly strong coercive power relative to the stakes.

The x-ray scanners usually have bold signs on them instructing you how to opt out. But if you do, they act as slowly as possible to ensure you never do it again.

I opt out every time - I've never used the scanners - and the delay has never been long enough to make me miss a flight.

There are non-liquid chemical attacks that could be facilitated from something like anthrax to powdered pepper spray. Disallowing liquids does nothing to stop those

they can harass you for non-liquids too. I honestly don't even know anymore I've had so many random things confiscated. My favorite was a wine bottle opener which got me into trouble after many years of flying in my bag... in France facepalm

"The illusion of safety has a positive psychological benefit, therefore we should be obstructive, suspicious and procedural" - or something

The fact that this works with so many people makes me warier of them than anyone it purports to protect me against. I don't feel safe being harassed by scowling officials in faux-important uniform.

And they claim republicans don’t believe government should support the arts!

It can be both - security theatre and jobs program for otherwise unemployable people (good security requires highly skilled labour but security theatre doesn’t).

Security theatre is a different thing. That’s when you perform a pointless ritual to convey the feeling of security. People coming up with onerous new rules and restriction just to remind you who’s in charge is something else.

> That’s when you perform a pointless ritual to convey the feeling of security.

That's exactly what going through the security checkpoint at the airport is. A pointless ritual to convey the feeling of security.

Yes, arbitrary liquid thresholds and similar rules are more about giving airport security tools to remind travelers "who is charge", but it's all part of security theater at a more meta level.

I always viewed the continual cycle of changing the rules which usually coincides with some negative publicity be it an attempt or attack or investigation… as a form of being seen to do something for the sake of having to do something in response to the recent event, as just another layer of the security theatre. Like the production of a whole season of shows by a live theatre group is just as much a layer above the repetition of the performance each night and no less part of making the “theatre” happen than each individual performance is.

Right, but to their defense, there have not been 9/11 attacks or anything remotely similar since 9/11... so either it was all fake anyways or the security theater also deters potential low IQ attackers?

I also found a magic rock that keeps away tigers. Would you like to purchase it? No tigers have ever been spotted in my area since I found it.

Lisa, I want to buy your rock

My snark aside, you’re missing a totally other reasonable explanation. Prior to 9/11 hijackings were relatively safe affairs. They would land and negotiate for money / demands and release passengers unharmed. So sitting passively was the safest approach, Post 9/11 the cockpit is completely locked down (regulatory requirement for flights to/from US) and passengers know that any hijacking might be a suicide attacker and thus won’t sit passively. See underwear and shoe bombers as examples where bomb materials got through security but passengers subdued the attacker. That’s why US Marshals stopped flying. Attacks are too rare to warrant meaningful useful security on even a small fraction of flights.

Now arguably those were international flights into the US. You could argue that security was lax abroad but generally TSA regulations and technical requirements apply to security screenings for inbound flights so there’s not any particular reason to believe that the TSA would have done a better job.

Don't worry, the TSA has inserted itself into overseas airports too.

When travelling to the US we get subjected to random/targeted searches in the gating area by US TSA staff before being allowed to board.

This is after our own typical screening and scanning.

The biggest thing that stopped 9/11 attacks since 9/11 was locks on cockpit doors.

The second biggest thing that stopped them since 9/11 is passenger awareness that they could just... Not let a few assholes with boxcutters fly a plane into a building.

After 9/11 people are not going to let hijackers run the plane. They may hurt you in retaking the plane, but if they fly it into a building you'll be dead for sure.

Since mid-morning on 9/11, in fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93

Recognising that domestic flights also need security and not treating them like flying Greyhound buses probably helped.

There also wasn’t a 9/11 before the 9/11.

There were dozens of terror attacks against air travel in the 80s and 90s. The global post-9/11 "security theater" did make flying in the developing world much safer.

There's been dozens of hijackings since 9/11

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings#20...

To be fair there's been a lot less hijackings in the 2000s and 2010s compared with previous decades - although as the decline started in the 90's - its not likely to be solely due to increased security.

It has to do with several things, among them you have:

- the end of the cold war, with the clear hegemony of the US which halted state-sponsored terrorism from unaligned-but-socialist-minded countries (especially Libya)

- targeted assassination of terrorist leaders and infrastructures (no more training summer camps) no matter the country they are in (mostly through drones nowadays), leading to a progressive reduction in sophistication in terror attacks committed, and the rise of lone wolfs instead of structured terrorist commandos.

It's completely due to prior to 9/11 you left the hijackers alone and they would land the plane, get arrested or die in a shootout with the police.

Now if you attempt to hijack a plane 100-300 passengers will beat your ASS and stop you before you get anywhere near control of the aircraft.

There will never be another hijacking attack where the pilot loses control of the plane from a threat of a would be hijacker.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, hijackings occurred, on average, once every five days globally.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-ai...

That lists twenty, and the minimum to be "dozens" would be 24.

Grammatically, 1.5 donut is wrong and 1.5 donuts is correct. So, in this case "1.66~ dozens" (because 20 / 12 = 1.66~) is pedantically correct.

(...But logically and intuitively everything I just said is extremely stupid because by that logic 12.01 counts as "dozens" and that's ridiculous, so your complaint is absolutely correct and I agree with you 100%)

Grammatically, 0.2 donut is wrong also. So by that logic, 0.01 also counts as dozens.

I'd argue that "dozens" obviously means there are a multiple of 12.

I always attributed that to:

  - before 9/11, the advice was: sit down in your seat and wait for the ransom demands

  - after 9/11: fight for your life now or die in a blaze of fire

Hijackers must feel this too. No quarter will be given.

Wasn't that a contributing factor to UA93 being "unsuccessful"? The passengers had gotten word of the other three flights, and stopped being quite as compliant (though "compliant" is obviously not the full story for the other three flights).

Yes! Without this incident, I wouldn't be as optimistic about people fighting back. Turns out, people can be pretty rational after all.

Really? So that’s attributable to us not carrying bottles of water and to us taking our shoes off?

Yes, everyone knows that terrorists can't take off their shoes.

The TSA checks are ineffective, they fail detection 95% of the time [1]. That's a pretty good indication that it's security theater.

Personally, I'd expect the decrease to be mostly attributable to increased cockpit access security like locked reinforced doors.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-...

Securing cockpit doors is what prevents the next 9/11. It was both necessary and sufficient.

Securing cockpit doors contributed to the death of 150 people however: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

> Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, Lubitz locked the cockpit door and initiated a controlled descent that continued until the aircraft hit a mountainside.

Yes. Did they fix the doors/protocol in the meantime?

You aren’t supposed to let a pilot be alone in the cockpit and they violated protocol when this happened. 2 authorized personnel should be in the cockpit at all times but German airlines dropped the rule.

I'm not an expert, but the Wikipedia article sounds like this protocol was implemented after the Germanwings crash:

> In response to the incident and the circumstances of the co-pilot's involvement, aviation authorities in some countries implemented new regulations that require the presence of two authorised personnel in the cockpit at all times. Three days after the incident, the European Aviation Safety Agency issued a temporary recommendation for airlines to ensure that at least two crew members—including at least one pilot—were in the cockpit for the entire duration of the flight. Several airlines announced that they had already adopted similar policies voluntarily. But by 2016, the EASA stopped recommending the two-person rule, instead advising airlines to perform a risk assessment and decide for themselves whether to implement it. Germanwings and other German airlines dropped the procedure in 2017.

I guess the underlying assumption is that the regular medical tests that pilots are subjected to should keep pilots capable of mass murder-suicide out of a cockpit. Indeed, Lubitz had been declared "unfit for work" by a doctor, but apparently the doctor trusted Lubitz himself to pass this on to his employer, because "medical secrecy requirements prevented his physician from making this information available to Germanwings".

Securing the doors allowed the Germanwings flight 9525 massacre to be carried out and potentially Malaysian Airlines flight 370 too.

No, what allowed that was them not requiring two people to be on the flight deck. That’s insane to me (and doesn’t happen in the US which customarily has a two person rule, which I believe is defined in Part 121, but still trying to find it).

That wouldn’t matter at all if not for the locking down the cockpit.

That’s like saying seat belts wouldn’t be needed if the car didn’t move, no?

The end of 9/11 happening again occured right in the middle of 9/11, with UAL 93.

Passengers figure out it's not a hijacking they might survive, and that you're going to crash the plane into a valuable target. Then, having nothing to lose, they revolt and ruin your plan.

So that particular type of plan isn't going to work again. Passengers no longer assume "hijacking I might survive".

I am also not aware, in the history of aviation, of a terrorist attack that was stopped at an airport security check.

Here's one : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_affair

Though it was the airline's own additional airport security check rather than the security checkpoint.

Edit: <not worth engaging>

This is a meme that gets repeated often, always with no source. I bet you heard this from someone repeating it exactly in this same context too, complaining about security theater.

Not everything in life (in fact, almost nothing) can be “proved” by a “source”. Human emergent behavior can be observed and reported on in this way, perhaps.

But questions like “why aren’t more people sacrificing their lives to hijack or destroy airplanes for the last 20 years” are not answerable by “sources”.

Do you have some reason to think a different posture towards hijackers and better security around cockpits didn’t have a strong effect on would-be hijackers’ willingness to give their lives to a violent political statement?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com