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I completely agree with your first two paragraphs, but you lost me on the second half of your comment.

The TSA's response to attempted attacks has been to clamp down on the rest of us after the fact: shoes off, no liquids. This tells us that the intelligence gathering effort was not reflected in the airport security measures. They lock down those attack vectors to prevent "me too" attacks, but there haven't been any. Yet, the security gymnastics routine has not gotten lighter for the average traveler.

Where I disagree:

> no normal person would ever have occasion to set foot in

You just dismissed a chunk of humanity as non-"normal" along with their homeland. Yes, Westerners have rare occasion to visit some of the places where terrorists breed and train. But the world contains more than Westerners, doesn't it?

> If I was a black man in the US I'd be much more afraid of looking at a cop the wrong way than being caught up in a terrorist outrage.

You are making the same mistake we're talking about with airport security: you are blowing a few highly-publicized events way out of proportion.

Here[1] is some 2011 data from the FBI highlighting homicide victim/offender race & sex. Compare that to this report[2] from the Bureau of Justice Statistics showing arrest-related deaths from 2003-2009. (I know different years, etc, sorry) From that data, it looks like blacks kill way more blacks (and whites kill more whites) than cops killing either race.

[1]: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/c...

[2]: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ard0309st.pdf

Blacks, whites or cops killing blacks - whatever it is, it's more than terrorists killing blacks.

I could have worded my other paragraph slightly better - what I meant was no western person (since we're talking about potential for terrorist attacks on westerners) would normally find themselves in the mountains of bora bora or the war zones of syria/iraq. The only western people outside of UN, military or diplomatic personnel you are likely to find in these parts are radical young men from home who are living out a jihad fantasy.

Unfortunately, studies have found that police homicides are under-reported to the FBI's national database.

http://www.npr.org/2014/08/21/342228794/ferguson-turns-lens-...

> As this hasn't been happening

I believe this is incorrect. In Russia, two terrorists set off a bomb outside the secure area in the arrival hall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domodedovo_International_Airpor...

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. I think my point still stands though. I'd be more inclined to believe there's a serious terrorist problem if something like that was happening once or twice a year.

As it stands, if you live in the US at least, it seems your child has a greater chance of being gunned down by a classmate at school than blown up by a terrorist.

If you're anyone in the US, be more worried about heart disease and driving defensively.

Yet the TSA manages to find weapons all the time. On their blog [0], over the last 4 weeks, they claim to have confiscated 156 firearms from security checks. Even if 99% forgot they were carrying a weapon and accidentally brought it on the plane that's still 1-2 planes with a malicious guy carrying a gun every month.

[0] http://blog.tsa.gov/

And that's the danger of 2 9s thinking. It's really probably 99.999% are forgotten and the TSA hasn't found one malicious one.

Schneier makes some good points with regards to why there aren't more terrorist attacks:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/why_arent_the...

Correction: You can estimate the number of truly dangerous terrorists targeting the US easily. Israel and Russia seem to attract more and they tend to hit easy targets that are more difficult to secure than airports.

My conclusion: providing you don't share a land border with the area you are upsetting (Chechnya, Palestine), most 'would be' terrorists lack the means/skill/desire to make a trip to your homeland to perform an atrocity.