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Comment by briandoll | Hacker News Reader

Bruce Schneier said recently that he's been "recognized" by TSA service members when flying in recent months, and that they have been complimentary and not confrontational. It certainly _is_ security theater, so it's nice to see someone on the inside call it like it is.

It will be interesting to see what action the TSA takes regarding this pilot. If they really force the issue, it may actually start a legitimate dialogue on actual security vs. what the TSA has been doing for the last many years.

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It's actually time pilots + crew, security community experts, the airline industry, passengers and even the TSA themselves called out the current security procedures for the ineffective theater that they are.

Aside from the missrepresentation of how effective they are and the cost to resource, the current system is preventing real and meaningful security procedures to be adopted (things like behavior screening, etc).

To show how much of a 'theater' it all is, take some of these examples:

TSA have never noticed/asked me about the Swiss Tech Utili Key swiss-army knife type thing I carry on my key-chain.

I can take an Epipen on board a flight because I have a prescription (I have severe allergies but I'm sure it's easy for anyone to get one) - but if you inject it into the blood stream, esp at the neck, it will kill you (or someone else).

Print-at-home boarding passes mean that people who are on watch-lists can buy tickets in a false name and then edit the HTML of the ticket before they print it out to match their state ID. When you enter security the TSA agent never validates your paper-based tickets and ID with the passenger records database so security is by-passed.

If bottles of water can't be taken on board because they might be liquid explosive, then why are they tossed into the trash next to the scanner? If they show you on board the plane how to put on a life-vest in the safety demo because they have to assume the worst, then by the same logic they should assume the worst for each bottle and dispose of it accordingly.

The very security measures in place create massively dense lines of people at security check-points. These become greater vectors for suicide bombers then the planes themselves.

And even these new body scanners create new vectors. People are scanned with them instead of the metal detector which means a terrorist can hold a metal item inside an orifice or body cavity and it not be detected.

I support the pilot because I support the need for security at airports and borders - it just needs to be meaningful security that actually catches, and more importantly prevents/discourages, the bad guys.

All good points. During an interview for a newspaper, Schneier also exposed another method of boarding a plane without a ticket or ID, just by saying he lost his wallet and supplying a name and flight destination/time. He got his ticket with a mark on it waiving the need to match his ID.

With all these vulnerabilities, and with all the new attack vectors that exist _because_ of these fake security measures as dotBen points out, I can't imagine a reasoned defense of the security theater in place. Anyone?

But security theater actually does solve a real problem.

I read many times that one of the goals of terrorists is to panic and freeze the citizens out of fear of an attack. And this fear is worse than an attack itself.

The security theater solves this problem - people are no longer afraid.

BTW: I am not advocating theater instead of security, I'm just saying it does have some value.

All it takes is for one attack to succeed for people to be very, very afraid again.

People weren't afraid before 9/11 either.

Maybe. There have been attacks after 9/11 in other countries and I see no signs of great fear in those countries.

Real security solves that problem. Security theater only works until everyone realizes that it's fake and isn't working. We've seen for years now, journalists writing about how easy it is to get on planes with supposedly banned materials.

I don't know about other folks, but I'm more disturbed by the number of resources devoted to this security theater, than comforted by it. I'd much rather see a focus on better inter-bureau communication and intelligence gathering.

Raising the "threat level" to "Orange" for political purposes, as we saw during the last presidential term can't possibly solve any real problems.

And yet, for all that they've been writing for years most people still don't realize it's theater.

Real security is not really possible anyway - not without profiling, which people won't accept and not without spending far more resources on security - and if you are disturbed now, imagine if spending goes up tenfold.

I agree the "threat level" is a joke though.

You have a point in some ways, but I think that there are many counterpoints to this as well. Ever sit in an airport terminal and hear over the PA that todays threat level is orange? Some people might also question the necessity of such devices, which instead of alleviating fears, creates them. A lot of these types of measures only solidify some peoples irrational fears as being legitimate.

people are no longer afraid

Of terrorists? Perhaps. Of being strip-searched for no good reason? Not so much.

True, but people are flying, so they can't be that worried of being strip-searched.

I am reading more pushback on the X-ray devices so that may be the point where people draw the line.

And - there's your proof. People want the appearance of security, but when you give them a real security improvement it's too much.

I'm not sure; I think it actually lowers security in two ways. One is that people just don't take it seriously any more (eg http://www.geekandproud.net/terror/images/terror-all.jpg) and teh second one is by constant reminders of being in a defensive position. For example, most BART (subway) stations in San Francisco still have their restrooms locked 'for security reasons following the September 11 attacks,' which is rather pathetic. Of course, this saves on staffing costs, and it's probably a net positive for public health considering how poorly maintained some of them were, but it's a case of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

When I lived in London in the early-mid 90s the threat of terrorist bombing by the IRA and their offshoots was a constant problem - you could figure on a significant commuter train delay at least once every two weeks. Mostly they were false alarms, but real bombings were just frequent enough to make caution a necessity even though casualties were low - arguably the most effective result for the terrorists was to disrupt with a bomb but phone in a warning ahead so that there would not be any casualties, or detonate one where there were not many people. But although it was a constant problem and there were lots of warning signs of the 'be alert!' variety, I didn't feel the sort of theatrical approach I do here. That changed later, after a variety of both terrorist and ordinary criminal incidents were solved with the aid of CCTV video, and the UK went insane for CCTV, putting up so many cameras that (to me, at least) London started to feel like a prison camp. I think over-reliance on technology is part of the problem here. I don't mind seeing a lot of uniformed police or security personnel about, even though many of them may be more for display than anything else. But what I see in the US right now is lots of security devices like magnetic gates and so on, plus the same number of (usually bored) uniformed personnel to man them. These have become so ubiquitous that in Washington DC people can no longer walk up the steps into the Supreme Court, they have to enter via a side entrance where the magnetometer gates (or whatever they're called) are installed. At least one justice has complained about the small but symbolically significant failure implied when people can't walk into the nation's highest court (the rather lame response has been that people can still exit via the famed steps, so justice is seen to be be in the building that way...whoopee). What we have here is a case of 'nondurable precautions' - putting a machine in there to avert liability, because while machines may be no more reliable than humans, if a failure occurs it's much easier to blame the machine and diffuse the liability than to scapegoat someone for being closest point of failure, even if they were truly at fault.

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