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Comment by closewith | Hacker News Reader

> You can't protect against an opponent who's motivated to learn the inherent vulnerabilities of our systems, many of which can't be protected against due to the laws of physics and practicality - short of forcing everyone to travel naked and strapped in like cattle, with no luggage. And even then, what about the extremist who works for the airline?

This is said as an axiom, but we have protected against the motivated terrorist, as shown by the safety record.

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Mitivated terrorists pivoted to driving cars into crowds and shootings.

Don't forget strapping knives to their hands and slashing into crowds.

As horrific as truck attacks, mass shootings, and suicide bombings have been, no-one have been on the same order of magnitude as airborne terrorism attacks.

The Bataclan, Las Vegas, Nice truck attack - all enormous tragedies. But compare to 9/11, Lockerbie, Flight 182, etc.

Bataclan = 132 deaths + ??? injuries

Nice Truck = 86 deaths, 458 injured

Lockerbie = 270 deaths (presumably 0 injuries)

Air India = 329 (also presumably no injuries)

Conveniently leaving out 9/11, was an attack on the scale of Bataclan, but due to the nature of air travel, had a much higher death toll.

So like, just one not on the same order of magnitude?

No, the vast majority of terrorist truck, car, bombing, shooting, stabbing attacks have single digit casualties due to the security measures in place and the level of difficulty (thankfully) in killing large numbers of people.

For a given number of people, money, resources, and risk, an attack against an airliner will have disproportionate casualties and effect. As above, a similar amount of co-ordination was required for Bataclan vs 9/11, with an order of magnitude fewer casualties.

Iunno, did the bataclan attackers learn to play the drums or guitar?

Have we protected against the motivated terrorist, or only the motivated terrorist on an airplane?

Is your contention that there haven't been any terrorist attacks, therefore airport security isn't effective?

Because over the last 25 years, there have been a _lot_ of "successful" terrorist attacks in the West, and none of them were on planes.

My point is that if improved airport security just shifts terrorist attacks to other places, the overall safety benefit is not as great as it may at first seem.

That's nonsense - if it was true, all anti-terrorism measures would be self-defeating, but they're not. Decades of aircraft-based terrorist attacks have been completely halted by airport security, and there's no been no correlated increase in other mass casualty events.

If those attack vectors are intrinsically less effective at causing mass destruction then that’s an improvement.

A plane hijacking can evidently cause enormous destruction with minimal equipment and personnel. Even just a bomb on a plane can easily kill 200-500 people depending on the plane’s capacity.

Ground-based attacks since 9/11 have been evidently less effective because a bunch of guys with guns attacking a train station or a rock concert can’t do as much damage as quickly as a hijacker essentially flying a cruise missile into a major office building.

Exactly, air security has actually done a really good job over the last 25 years. I hope they keep improving it.

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