Schneier on Security: Ass Bomber | Hacker News Reader

Schneier on Security: Ass Bomber

schneier.com

36 pointsbillpg24 comments

Amazing. A reddit commenter (pica, for those who were there from the beginning) once suggested doing exactly this as a way to mess with the TSA. He also suggested forcing the TSA to do racial profiling; if a shoe-bomber means everyone with shoes is a suspect, what does an Afro-bomber mean?

I wonder if there's any value in "lobbying" the TSA to implement rectal searches on the basis of this story. It's the reducito ad absurdum tactic: if the lobbying were successful, there's no way there wouldn't be backlash, right? As a result, we'd have people lobbying for sensible security, right? Please?

Of course, the worst case scenario is that the TSA caves in to the pressure, starts rectal searches, and keeps doing it... and then I get searched.

Or you stop flying and start taking the bus.

I drove to Australia, mainly to limit my carbon footprint but also to avoid the merciless torture that is in-flight entertainment. Delta runs the golden collection of Adam Sandler: Auteur.

Here comes millimeter-wave scanning (http://www.manolith.com/2009/05/18/whole-body-imaging-is-who...)

It is interesting that people are so upset about being "naked" on a screen somewhere. I find it much more troubling for someone to root through my consciously-collected possessions. That says a lot more about who I am than my standard-issue body that is pretty much the same as 3 billion other people's.

Yet nobody has any problems with that -- only being "naked".

That's the point: people got to pick their stuff, so they're generally proud to show it off. People didn't get to pick their bodies, so they're generally embarrassed by them.

only being "naked"

Only being naked while being judged by someone with power over you, armed, typically humourless and in control of whether you make your flight or get 'extra processing'.

Great, now I've gotta slim down before hitting the airport!

It's always a good idea, specially if you want to join the MHC, for N > 2.

I wonder what TSA is going to do now. The public won't stand for anal-searches each time they are going to fly, but on the other hand they would have to appear to be doing something.

"The public won't stand for anal-searches ..."

Well, you certainly can't expect to do them sitting down!

"Now slide your pants down and sit on that gloved hand."

Well yes, you can.

They don't because this was not done on an aircraft. If this had occurred on an aircraft then they might have tried to do something about it, but I doubt there'll be any response.

In addition this was not done against a US target.

True, for now. I can't stand security theater but basically we're quite well off insofar as we have the luxury to complain about it with a relatively low expectation of anything bad happening (as in being blown up, rather than annoyed by officious and undereducated security staff). As a sometime screenwriter I often come up with ideas which seem so obvious that I wonder why terrorists don't employ them, but I'd rather not repeat them here.

I prefer Una Bomber.

People will always figure ways out to harm the guys opressing them. The best way to avoid that is not to give them a reason.

I admid that millimeter-wave scanning is really useful but not in the field of preventing terrorism.

That's terribly naive.

I challenge you to find one person in the world that there isn't at least one other person who wants to kill them. You can't. No matter who you pick, someone wants to kill them for their race, or because they are mixed race and therefore traitors. In fact, you can find someone for each component race. Someone wants to kill them for their religion, regardless of what it is. Someone wants to kill them for their economic system, regardless of what it is. Someone wants to kill them for their position on abortion, regardless of what it is.

And don't forget the crazies, because some of them are actually capable of pulling stuff off, despite their crazy.

How much more so for entire countries.

I only need to find someone that wants to kill everybody including himself for your thesis to come through. But what do we learn of it?

Nobody's going to attack the Swiss.

>That's terribly naive.

I don't think you understood what I meant.

There are plenty of reason for certain people to get rid of other people. Yes, the crazies exist. The key is to have a balance between making it for them really difficult (stop selling firearms at walmart) without making a 1984esque surveillance society.

With giving someone a reason, I meant bombing helpless civilans with ultra-modern bombs or supporting injustice. Why aren't these crazies you're talking about not exploding themselves everywhere in the US? And speaking of challenge, I challenge to find someone willing to stuff a bomb up his rectum to kill someone for his position on abortion..

"The best way to avoid that is not to give them a reason."

I agree in principle, but realistically, I doubt it is possible to satisfy everybody's wishes. Also, how to deal with the people who are already "fanaticised"? I guess one problem is that terrorism is also a system - the organizations behind it tend to have a system for growing, that will take on a life of it's own. It's not just disgruntled people looking for terror organizations to join, it is also terror organizations making people join.

Exactly. In the real world you're always going to have disgruntled people, no matter how reasonable and fair you may be towards them. It's probably true that you could prevent some terrorism by changing your actions to stop doing whatever's causing some subset of the population to become upset, but there will always be some person or group whose demands are so crazy and far-out that no country could reasonable accede to them. Against the irrational even appeasement is an imperfect deterrent.

I don't think, for example, that it would have been realistically possible to have avoided giving Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh or even Osama Bin Laden a reason to attack their respective targets.

Well, for McVeigh, apparently a large sign saying "Day Care Inside" would have worked for that particular target, but not targets in general.

Nothing can justify what these people have done. But to be fair, neither McVeigh nor bin Laden would have reasons to commit acts of terrorism if the federal government wasn't doing things it wasn't supposed to be doing. McVeigh was motivated by Ruby Ridge and Waco (both of which were debacles the feds completely mishandled, to speak charitably), and bin Laden was motivated primarily by American intervention in the Middle East.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com