And yet this combination was effective in limiting the number of casualties in the recent Volgograd train station bombing. I suspect the amount of Russian editorializing over these security procedures will soon decrease.
Fortunately, while civilian memory is short, government institutional memory is long.
It just shifted the site of the attack to a new bottleneck: where everyone is in line to go through the metal detector (which many people also have pointed out is a ripe target for an attack in the post-TSA US).
Suicide bombings in the middle east over the last 10 years, in comparison, have about a 1:3 ratio of bomber to victims. That's a mean, but the outliers tend to barely break 20. So it's difficult to believe that number was reduced by a large amount.
Yes they did, but according to this article they claim all sorts of things, much of which is not true:
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/30/powerlessness-a...
Such as the identity of the bomber (she later posted on her FB page, "Nope, I'm still alive!").
Not that I'm trying to imply that Russian officials are particularly different in this regard!
http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-reasons-tsa-sucks-a-security-e...
(yeah I know it is a cracked article, but this time it is different)
Not all "security measures" are created equal. Reinforced cockpit doors and curb-stomping want-to-be hijackers are both effective security measures, as were metal detectors.
Those are not the security measures that critics of the TSA are criticizing.