Re: More Light, Less Touchy-Feely
Posted by
Pamela McCorduck on
Nov 21, 2010; 9:09pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/More-Light-Less-Touchy-Feely-tp5760933p5760990.html
As a New Yorker, this has been an interesting thread to read. A well-timed subway bomb--conventional, firebomb, or poison bomb, as in Tokyo a decade or so ago--could wreak much more damage in terms of people it affects, than anything that you can do with a single plane. I do not notice anyone standing up for backscatter scanners (or any other kind) at every subway entrance.
This could imply that (a) no one cares how many New Yorkers go down in an attack; they're all left-leaning loudmouths anyway, or (b) it would be difficult to persuade New Yorkers that this was for their own safety, and anyway, the costs would be prohibitive, or (c) this is all about protecting airplanes, not the lives of human passengers, or (d) the airport stuff is the theater we all suspected and plays better for most of the country than a genuine program of protection in the subways, or (e) New York authorities, recognizing how lame HSA was from the beginning, put together their own intelligence unit (this is true) and we *are* being as well-protected as is reasonably possible without the theater.
I honestly don't know.
That we follow El Al's procedures seems to be a problem of scaling up--it works for a small country like Israel, not so well for a large, heterogeneous country like ours.
I have followed the correspondence on enhanced scanning with usual mixture of shock and incredulity. Do people object because it’s offensive or because it’s ineffective? It would be unpleasant but, for me, unpleasanter to be blown up by a device that had avoided the enhanced scanner. But I haven’t enough info to make any definitive judgment. In particular on two matters. It seems that new bomb compounds can be concealed by flesh masses in exotic parts of the body without detection by the old scanners. I thought that the Xmas underwear bomber had proved this. It seems that old folk, handicapped people, children and infants are ideal subjects for planted bombs, with no adverse fall-out for the Bad Hats if detected. In this wicked world the innocent are always punished.
If correct this is pretty awful news.
The strategy is for a bomber to finesse that he’d be directed through the old system, pass and end up undetected on his planned flight. If an enhanced scan is required, then he should avoid this by all means while offering to take the old, ineffectual scan, and withdraw, undetected, unidentified and with his powder dry, to try again another day.
In such circumstances he should behave like a gullible but superior person (e.g. a Friamer) and behave with all the histrionics necessary for the exasperated TSA to simply tell him to get lost. So this dramatic response, that some objectors seem to have chosen, and others to approve of, would make the objector highly suspect, and rightly so.
Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures
Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for.
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"And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there....Squares after squares flame, set up and cut into the ether: Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will."
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org