A Dose of Healthy Realism

Let me start out this post by stating what should be the obvious: We are not going to be able to stop every single terrorist attack.

It's funny, isn't it? That should be a simple truth, given sheer probability. I'm not just talking about bombing airlines, but much simpler attacks like running into a mall and gunning down a dozen people or so, though it seems the only form of terrorism we think about is WMDs and airplanes. Whatever combination of bomb Timothy McVeigh built, I'm sure it could be done again.

Let me go a step further and propose this idea: It is not feasible, nor practical, to attempt to stop every terrorism attack. Anyone who has taken basic economics knows there's something called diminishing returns. In my class on Urban Economics, we talked about how this applies to crime, and obviously it is, there is a socially acceptable amount of crime where marginal benefit of preventing crime meets the societal marginal cost of crime. Simplified, it's this- we could have a 1:1 cop:civilian ratio, and sure, crime would be darn low, but it certainly wouldn't be worth it. This idea, that society puts an "acceptable level of risk" on human life is not easily digestible for a lot of people, and in my Urban Economics class, a lot of Sociology students took offense to the idea. But it's so stupidly obvious, right? We could set the speed limit to 30mph and save a lot of lives, but we value the benefits of a 65mph speed limit over those lives.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to stop terrorism, but it does mean our anti-terrorism plans should have a limit, and this isn't even considering the civil liberty issues at stake. When it comes to airplanes, let's figure this- in today's social climate, it is very unlikely that a terrorist crew will gain control of a large passenger jet. This isn't due to security restrictions, watch lists, airport screening, or anything like that as much as passengers will not allow it. Bolting the cockpit door helps too, a simple measure that could have saved a lot of lives on 9/11. So what we're looking at right now, as far as airplanes go, is probably bombing. Al-Qaeda has realized that hijacking is improbable and extremely difficult, and it's obvious in their plots since. We've had the shoe bomber, and now the underwear bomber. In both cases, passengers were able to foil them, but it shows that the priority is back to simply blowing the plane up.

A brief aside- If I was a non-Al-Qaeda terrorist, I'd be pretty pissed at them. Hijacking used to be a very popular and effective measure of getting things done, look at all the plane hijackings in the 1970s and 1980s for various political causes, few that ended with fatalities. Now passengers will not allow any hijacking because we assume they are going to use the plane as a giant guided missile, and thus, ruined the hijacking method for all the non-suicidal terrorists.

Anyways, they are trying to blow planes up. Let's assume a terrorist is successful, and he blows up a plane and kills 125 people. Nasty, but there have been 2-3x that amount killed since 9/11 in regular civilian plane crashes in the US alone. Now we're talking about full body scan machines in every airport, which is not only a huge privacy violation, but in general, pretty stupid. One of the manufacturers of these machines came out after the incident and said that his machines would not have detected the PETN in the guys underwear. In another brilliant Hooray-America-PR moment, a Republican South Carolina representative is proposing banning nationals of certain countries from entering the US, period, and perhaps deporting those already here. Principally, it affects Syria, Iran, Cuba, and a few others. The dirty bomber was American. The shoe bomber was English. The underwear bomber, Nigerian. 9/11 hijackers were overwhelmingly Saudi, yet this country is not on the list. Iranians and Cubans in general have done absolutely nothing to hurt this country, yet for some reason are on his McCarthy-list. It is a good demonstration at how fear-based the security policies in this country are becoming.

We're talking full-body scan machines, but how about other ways terrorists could bomb a plane by bypassing them? How about all the airport employees, who are not screened at entry? Surely a low-paid disgruntled McDonalds worker could be paid enough to smuggle in a bomb? And then there's the airlines- grounds crew, all the way up to the pilots. There's tons of security flaws in the system, and increasing the amount of security theater is unlikely to do anything other than harass an already harassed traveling public.