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Comment by dfc | Hacker News Reader

I think heavy weapons is a relative term, I think he probably meant assault rifles not M240 Bravos.

Any and all passenger screening would be worthless if you could just walk on the tarmac and have access to the planes fuselage and or fuel tankers.

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Any and all passenger screening would be worthless

It already is, because the system leaks information that would make it trivial to find a way to sneak guns/bombs/etc. onto a plane. All you need is a sufficient number of people willing to go to jail (and actual terrorists are willing to die for their cause). You just keep throwing different approaches to packaging/disguising your bomb/gun/whatever at the TSA checkpoints until you find a reliably repeatable mechanism. Game over.

It gets better though... you could cut down on your search costs by taking advantage of the fact that - at some airports -the screens the X-Ray machine techs are reading, are sometimes (such as O'Hare, Terminal 3, last Friday night) aimed so that anybody inside the secure area can see them. So, just send somebody through, and have them film a chunk of TSA screening with a cellphone camera, and send it back. Once you know what the TSA goons are seeing, it should help you figure out how to craft a package that won't attract their attention.

Never mind that there are about a zillion other ways to get a package into the secure area of an airport, which don't involve going through security screening. Like, pay off a TSA agent (how much do they make, again?), or an airplane mechanic, or somebody else who has access to the inner workings of the airport.

Actually, I'm just as concerned about standing amongst masses of other people waiting to go through security screening, as I am about a ninja baine character. There have been occasions where there have been more than a planes worth of passengers massed together pre security check. You can't catch every scenario.

You are "just as concerned"? If we learned anything from 9/11 isn't it that control of a plane is a significant force multiplier?

PS I did not get lucky with google and ninja baine. Is that some new hipster meme?

Well, the ninja baine reference was an admittedly weak attempt at alliteration. Due in the main to having recently seen the last Batman film.

The mention of my concern refers to the subjective feeling I have about personal safety only. That is simply because risk has in fact been greatly reduced beyond the gate, but in many airports around the world, not before that point.

As to not catching all scenarios, I know a spook who trains in the fight against bad guys, and he got through a number of security checks before being pulled up in transit at a US airport with something standard issue. He forgot he had it in his carry on.

I'm aware of the potential of breaches. However, terrorist acts are often designed with a view to terrorising. This leads me to a different calculation of probabilities.

Events like this one are problematic because they can have an affect on public confidence. I may be wrong, but I think that might be just as much a consideration as failure of purpose in this situation.

    > the ninja baine reference was an admittedly
    > weak attempt at alliteration

I think you might mean "Bane" [1] and "allusion".

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bane_(comics)

Thanks. The spelling I never knew, and I often get confused on the other two.

> If we learned anything from 9/11 isn't it that control of a plane is a significant force multiplier?

If we learned anything from 9/11 it's "they're going to crash this into a building, might as well take them on - there's 100 of us, they can't shoot us all before we get to them.

Sure, but you do you need assault rifles and armored cars to stop one man that is trespassing on the tarmac?

Imagine for a moment that instead of this gentleman, a terrorist with a RPG came ashore instead with the intention of shooting down a large jetliner (or two or three). I think that's the real horror of this situation. A man who did not have any ill-will and -every- intention of being caught so he could find help, was not seen until he approached a worker on the tarmac.

Imagine a terrorist with an RPG walking into the front door of an airport and firing upon the security checkpoint. Or shooting down a large jetliner from the side of the highway next to the airport.

You can't make security policy decisions based on hypothetical horror stories alone. If you don't balance fear with reason you end up with ridiculously expensive policies that do absolutely nothing to increase safety.

> Imagine a terrorist with an RPG walking into the front door of an airport and firing upon the security checkpoint.

Exactly! I've seen 500+ people at security checkpoints at Chicago O'Hare. A couple people with AK-47s could likely kill far more people than a shoe bomb on a plane.

That this sort of thing hasn't happened seems an indication of just how impotent Al Qaeda is these days.

How impotent it always was.

As soon as any airport is attacked like that imagine the new security fun we'll get.

Responses like car searches coming into the airport with guns pointed at you and other things that will make our current wait on getting to an airplane look like a distant dream. And picking people up at the airport will become more painful than a dentist visit.

You're watching too many movies. As long as we are imagining, why not imagine a team of terrorists paratrooping on to the tarmac armed with nuclear bombs, and a vial of smallpox virus genetically modified to be exceptionally virulent? Or that the president is secretly controlled by aliens and has introduced an agent into the water supply that will sterilize all humans, allowing a non-violent takeover of the planet by 'them'.

Well RPGs are cheap and easy to get, the stuff you mentioned isn't.

This just demonstrated a proof of concept that 26/11 mumbai style attack is possible on U.S soil. That is a very,very dangerous thing.

Coordinated attacks have always been possible on US soil and have been made even more so by the response to 9/11 (e.g. big group of people piled together in front of every security line). It's not a "very, very dangerous thing". There is always something that is vulnerable, and yet no one has exploited this yet. Has this world-wide cabal of highly advanced terrorists someone missed this vulnerability that I noticed the first time I flew after 9/11?

India has a history of terrorist attacks from islamic extremists (largely originating in pakistan). The US has no such history.

A Mumbai-style attack will always be possible, on any soil. It's not possible to secure entire cities of millions of people against a handful of people with rifles and grenades.

No, the real horror of this situation is thinking like yours in positions of responsibility. For what reason would we expect a terrorist to swim up on the beach with an RPG (James Bond style) and start blasting planes? Is this a scenario worth considering? Is it worth spending money on?

It's already worthless. People who handle baggage sometimes steal luggage. This implies the screening is lax enough that they can get good out. How likely is it that there's no way for them to get something in if they wanted to?

That hardly follows. They don't care all that much about what you take out, as it has theoretically already been screened and generally isn't a security threat if you're removing it from at-risk facility.

* This implies the screening is lax enough that they can get good out.*

It also implies that these people are dishonest and could probably be bought for a not-overly-large investment. Why even try to smuggle your bomb through the TSA checkpoint when you can have a TSA agent hand deliver it to you?

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