Hacker News Reader

Comment by codex | Hacker News Reader

Since 9/11 there have been no highjacking attempts, true, but there have been multiple bombing attempts on aircraft by would be suicide bombers, and these bombers were able to evade the limited screening employed at the time. As bomb technology grows more sophisticated and easy to hide, screening has become more rigorous. That's what the TSA is focused on these days.

View on HN

This might be true... but if all they are trying to do is bomb the plane, what makes a plane bomb that much worse than, say, a bus bomb? You can ride greyhound without going through rigorous screening, and yet no one has planted a bomb on a bus.

The excuse for the airplane security has been that they can use the plane as a missile. If this is no longer the case, than planes lose their special status as something that needs to be extra protected. If we feel safe getting on a bus without going through a metal detector, a plane should be no different.

Yes, people can do us harm at any time. They could shoot us, bomb us, stab us, burn us with acid, etc. We accept those risks every day, and almost all of us get through life without those things happening to us. That is because the number of people who want to do bad things to us isn't nearly as great as some would have us believe. We don't need more screening to protect us from very unlikely threats.

Well, they can still shower shrapnel over a large area and crash into the ground, right? I'm not really sure what kind of bomb would actually explode a plane, or what kind of damage it could do on the ground as an undirected crash landing/explosion.

> no one has planted a bomb on a bus

What about the one that happened yesterday?

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/killed-blast-s...

Off topic but: This is what happens when you support a volatile and people (terrorists) they come back and bite you too.

Ok, I was clearly wrong about no one bombing a bus. However, my main point is still true; there are countless places where there are lots of people in confined spaces that are vulnerable to a bomb. We are always vulnerable to harm from someone who wants to hurt us, and there is very little we can do to make us invulnerable to random violence. Thankfully, the risk of dying from random violence is extremely low, near the bottom of the list of things that can kill us. We waste a lot of resources and time trying to prevent someone from harming us on an airplane when it is no more or less vulnerable than anywhere else.

Fair enough. But factual issues aside, stating that nobody attacks ground-based transit systems weakens that point rather than strengthening it.

If you want to argue that near-complete security is infeasible, you're probably better served by acknowledging that attacks on something as pervasive and porous as a bus system are a real possibility. So that's why I thought it was necessary to challenge you on that point.

It's worth noting that neither I nor anyone I know has heard of this bus bombing/mentioned it in conversation, and it's not on TV/frontpage of NYT, etc. But if we switch $Bus for $Plane, this becomes a major media event and everyone will know about it. What is it about aircraft that get the man and his propaganda machine so excited?

Five years ago I took a Greyhound from Portland to Eugene. They looked through my bag when boarding. I also reeked of booze and the security guy suggested I get some mints and try again. But they were checking everyone.

"here have been multiple bombing attempts on aircraft by would be suicide bombers"

Yes, and they've all failed. That means we have at least enough security, and we should start thinking about scaling it back.

I think it's pretty weak, both to politicians and to common sense, to use the fact that these bombers failed as an argument to reduce security. They were able to bring bombs on planes. Given enough opportunity, eventually an attempt would have succeeded.

A motivated individual will always be able to find a way. Thinking otherwise is what motivates the security theater we currently have.

It depends, I think. Human willpower and resources are a finite resource.

If a terrorist could bring down a plane by clicking a button on a website, we would see hundreds of planes downed every day.

If it takes a day of preparation, we'd see perhaps a dozen per day.

If it takes a week, we would see another order of magnitude fewer.

If it takes a year of training and preparation by one or more high IQ individuals with several hundred thousand dollars, we'd see almost none. This is why we haven't seen any more 9/11 style attacks even though they were so amazingly effective as a terrorist tool: it's become sufficiently difficult to pull them off after counterterrorism efforts were amped up.

In other words: criminals can still break into my car if they really tried, but I still lock my car doors.

> If it takes a year of training and preparation by one or more high IQ individuals with several hundred thousand dollars, we'd see almost none. This is why we haven't seen any more 9/11 style attacks even though they were so amazingly effective as a terrorist tool: it's become sufficiently difficult to pull them off after counterterrorism efforts were amped up.

It was sufficiently difficult even before security theater and airline liability reduction measures were ramped up, which is why we didn't see 9/11 style attacks before 9/11.

The point is that planes are only a high value target when they can be used as a missile. If the cockpit is locked from the inside then this possibility goes away. Even with a bomb on board no one will give control to someone who may use the plane as a missile.

There is no more incentive for someone looking to cause mayhem to blow up a plane than there is to blow up a shopping mall or any other building with more than ~180 people inside (the approximate number of seats in a 747).

I believe it's a lot easier to down a plane than to kill 180 people in a shopping mall. The latter would require much more explosive given the wide open spaces. You can bring down a plane much more easily.

Mainly, though, people feel more vulnerable in a plane, so an aircraft bombing is higher impact.

Maybe not malls, what about music events, sold out 300 cap venues like every week in every decently sized city. Hotels with 1000 rooms or office buildings like with the Oklahoma City bombing.

Look at it from the other side. Even with the lax security before, about 999,999,999,999 per billion people were deterred. That is a stupendously high success rate. We cannot make spacecraft with that high a quality level.

> If it takes a day of preparation, we'd see perhaps a dozen per day.

Nope. People are deterred by socialization and innate biology. I could take a gasoline bomb to a nearby school or church and kill hundreds of people within the week, for little expense and a good chance of getting off scot free. So could most people. It is not difficulty or risk that prevent mass killings.

I think there are two variables here:

A: the number of people radicalized into anti-American terrorists

B: the opportunity that As have to cause damage

I suspect A went up in the late nineties and continues to be high-ish today. B went up with OBL and the Saudis funding the game, but has gone down post-9/11 for a variety of reasons, including decreased Saudi bankrolls, increased airport and aircraft security, tighter restrictions on student visas, and a weakened Al Qaeda.

I think the change was that people gradually forgot Pearl Harbor or were never educated about it in the first place. Bin Laden had many virtues as a tactician but was poor at strategy and historical perspective. Now that the lesson has been relearned, we are mostly safe from large-scale sneak attacks for another 50 years.

I have to play devil's advocate here: I finally have enough bandwidth for my server, so now that it's working I should reduce it. This makes sense? You've said that now it's working we should start to take it away?

I for one kind of like the fact they have all failed. I would like to keep this track record up since I spend a lot of time on planes. Just my 2c.

To devil's advocate your devil's advocate with a similar analogy: Ok so I've deployed an app to heroku. I'm using 2 dynos, but suddenly my app becomes fairly popular and a bunch of people start getting timeouts. Oh no, better up the dynos to 20. Now no more timeouts but pretty expensive. Seems like now is the time to start benchmarking and figuring out what the right balance is.

I think we're starting to see some of that sort of benchmarking taking place with the TSA, so that's good, but the incentives don't seem like they're lined up properly for the bureaucracy to shrink significantly, regardless of the true level of risk.

This is essentially the problem with all government agencies. They're never motivated by efficiency, but rather by justifying as large a budget as possible.

If your hypothetical heroku scenario were a government project, they'd be proposing a "conservative" increase to 23 dynos for next year.

This is a reasonable argument, but we should pay attention to both the good and bad effects when tallying the value produced by the TSA. After adding up all of the terrorist attacks prevented by enhanced screening (zero?), we should be sure to subtract the wasted hours of people waiting at airports and the deaths caused by increased use of cars for moderate to long distance travel.[0] In the unlikely event that our analysis finds that the TSA saves lives, we should then compare it to other methods of saving lives and be sure to implement only the most cost-effective ones, potentially shutting down programs that are not as cost-effective.

[0]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/excess_automo...

These failed attempt's failures had nothing to do with TSA and security.

Huh? Much more rigorous? Other than using these stupid full body scanners, nothing much has changed since 9/11. Before 9/11 I walked through a metal detector, and occasionally got pulled aside for a frisking and a hand held metal detector waved over me... Today I bypass the full body scanner and get a frisking. The frisking is a bit more hands on, but thats about it. They use a sniffing machine to see if there is bomb residue on my clothes. But I don't see anything more sophisticated than that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com