The After Sandy

So it's been an interesting last ten days or so!

For the first ten years of JABberwocky, I worked alone in my apartment, it's never given me cabin fever the way being forced to stay in my apartment by weather does.  It's not just a recent thing with Irene last year or Sandy this year, I remember an MLK day many years ago when there was an ice storm sort of thing and the sidewalks were too dangerous.  But Sandy might have been the worst of it, in part because of the subway flooding.  All the years I was working alone, I would go to the Post Office because I had to do it, I could stop at the library to read the paper, I did my own messenger work for a good chunk of that time and could go out laden with manuscripts and enjoy some fresh air and exercise.  But with Sandy, the office was closed last Monday and Tuesday, the subways weren't running, it was hard to do much of anything social, and there wasn't any choice.  And I had power!  Many of my Scrabble friends especially live in the part of Manhattan that didn't have power for days.

I am so glad the NYC Marathon was cancelled.  Mayor Bloomberg has always had this weak spot for sports, for the football stadium on the west side of Manhattan, or his Olympics bid, now this, he's lost most of those battles.  Currently, there are plans to expand the Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Park, which have some community opposition, but which don't look to take too much more parkland, and also plans to build a soccer stadium in the park, which would take up lots of parkland. And would be in the "Fountain of the Planets" area, part of the grand design of the park for the 1964 Worlds Fair.  I'd rather the city find the money to restore that area of the park and to restore a little more of the public grandeur.  Sometimes people join me for the qualifying at the US Open, if they haven't been to Flushing Meadows before I'll take them around the park, and it's so much "that used to be, this used to be" and not near enough of what actually is.  One of the world's richest cities should do better.  I don't think it's just that I'm biased in favor of tennis.  Having spent a lot of time in the park before the expansion of the tennis center in the 1990s, I didn't perceive that the tennis was taking away a lot of high value area in the park, the soccer stadium would be.  When I walk people around the park, I've always pointed to where the soccer stadium would be as "shameful the way the city has let this fall to rot," deciding it can only be saved by covering it with a soccer stadium isn't right.

On tennis, Jerzy Janowicz continued his amazing run at the Paris ATP Masters, winning a semi-final match convincingly against Gilles Simon, currently ranked #20 and as high as #6.  Five wins in a week against top 20 players.  The run ended in the final against David Ferrer, top 5, who heretofore had the most victories in ATP Masters 1000 events without actually winning one.  Ferrer's a short player, it was funny watching the trophy presentation because Janowicz is tall, a foot higher at least, and he's quietly become one of the best players in the game outside the big 4 without getting much attention.  Janowicz moved up to #26 in the world, over 40 notches higher, going from nobody to somebody, from qualifying every week to making every tournament by direct draw and guaranteeing himself a seed in the Australian Open.

Comic books.  DC is filling "5th Wednesday" months with Annuals and other non New-52 books, it keeps the New 52 on schedule without leaving holes.  The last time we had a 5th Monday week the Annuals weren't very good.  This week I picked up a Batgirl Annual and a Swamp Thing Annual that were both quite good, and an Action Annual that was solid.  Steve Niles has a new horror story Lot 13 with a first issue out from DC that was a little like a Zebra genre horror novel from 25 or 30 years ago but with some nice art and on balance pleasant.  First of 5 issues, I look forward to the rest.  I didn't like the last in the 8-issue New Deadwardians Vertigo mini-series quite as much as the series as a whole, and I'm not liking the final issues of the current American Vampire arc as much as the first, but still, both were solid enough.

And now I want to get on my soapbox a bit.

I could talk a lot more about my personal experiences during Sandy Week, but I came off a lot better than most, JABberwocky didn't do so badly, for the most part I was just coming away with memories for the memory bank, of walking across the 59th St. Bridge with thousands of people instead of dozens, or watching dozens of cars lined up for gas.

Instead, I'm going to talk about human irrationality as viewed thru the prism of Sandy and 9/11.

The two events can't be directly compared, in part because you can't easily compare thousands of lives lost in 9/11 with the far-flung economic damages from Sandy and other weather events.  But we can safely say the events are in their different ways catastrophic.

So why did 9/11 inspire so much action, while a decade of ever-increasing natural threats like Sandy doesn't seem to get much to happen?

If you read my blog regularly, you know I've gone one at some of the things we tolerate in the name of stopping a terrorist event.  Enduring patdowns at baseball games, and rules that allow us to bring in factory-sealed water bottles but not an empty water bottle (i.e., a factory-sealed water bottle that we dump out the moment we pass thru the turnstile) to fill at a water fountain.  "Heightened security" at office buildings full of people that no terrorist cares about, showing photo IDs or even having drivers licenses scanned to gain admittance (what does building management do with your scanned license?), though happily very few of the buildings have magnetomers, so as long as we have photo ID we can go as postal as we want once inside.  All the BS at TSA checkpoints, the layers of reactive-to-the-last-threat security.  And the things I rant about are the tip of a vast and mostly hidden security apparatus (link goes to a major Washington Post series) that has huge costs, not just in actual money but in time and in loss of liberty. My point here isn't that all of these things are bad (random bag checks on subways, I think strike a good balance and are worthwhile), but to say that we definitely do a lot, and a lot of that not rationally.

As to extreme climate events?

Well, even if I limit myself only to things that deal solely with the extreme climate events themselves and not with underlying causes, we don't do very much.  Forget about if it's rational or irrational, it's not done.  It was often very easy for railroads and for highways to follow river valleys, so there are lots of railroad lines like the Metro North Hudson Line commuter rail here in New York, parts of the Amtrak line between St. Louis and Kansas City that are very close to water, all over, which are more and more likely to be damaged as sea level rises, which is currently happening.  We're not talking about that at all.  We've done very little in New York City to add "baby gates" in the subways that might keep the water from coming downstairs.  It would make lots of sense to bury power lines in DC which is getting walloped with lots of damaging stores, and fewer than 35% of the electric customers would want to see a dollar a month added to their bill to help pay for it.

What gives?

For one security silliness does gives an immediate sense of benefit, right or wrong but it does, so we don't ask what they actually protecting against, the odds of that bad thing happening, or multiply out the little costs to our time and to our wallet of all of these things. And we rarely pay directly.  It's buried in the rent or the price of a baseball ticket or a 9/11 security fee hidden in the fine print of the airline receipt.  Small but visible benefit, invisible damage to our wallet, often small time cost that we never think to multiply out.   Even small things to deal with climate events will have larger visible costs.  We don't actually know every dime our government spends on our homeland security apparatus which is hidden away in black areas of the budget, but if we spend money on sea walls in New York like those in the Thames which protect London or the tidal barriers which were built 50 years ago near Providence RI, those are large public expenses.  And after we spend that money, we don't visually see the result, people in Providence don't have a way to visualize the return on investment from spending a lot of money fifty years ago.  It's like this with a lot of infrastructure.

Second, we have a political system that reacts to money, and which is designed to protect streams of money more than one-time floods.  An example:  you give a private company a contract to run a prison, the private company makes a profit, it can use some of that profit to invest back into the political system via campaign contributions and ads in the right places to keep that profit.  It's the same with cable companies and health insurance companies and defense contractors and virtually any other business that relies on getting us or the government to give little bits of money on an ongoing basis (and just to mention, there are also people who get government benefits, but food stamps don't supply a lot of profit that you can invest back into the system in order to keep getting food stamps).  Some of our money, some of the government's money, goes to guarantee the need for us to keep paying that money.  The constructions trades and construction unions also lobby for infrastructure money, but there isn't quite as much spare cash splashing around because a lot of those things are one-time.  If you want to leverage the money the construction trades and construction unions have, it usually can't be for infrastructure being built as as long-term public good, but rather needs to be tied to something like the Keystone Pipeline.  There, the construction people get business, which leads to a steady flow of oil flowing through the pipeline, so the oil industry is happy to spend money to talk up the (likely inflated) number of construction jobs from the Pipeline, creating a nice resonant echo chamber.

And finally, human beings just aren't very good at evaluating risks.

Which makes it very difficult to do things the way Dr. Spock might logically have us do them.  There are way too many areas where we evaluate risk feebly.  And since government is us, all joined together...

So what do we have?

The NY Times reports there are many prominent office buildings that are closed for weeks or months in lower Manhattan as a result of flooding.  I'm sure over the past ten years that these buildings have, as a rule, spent very generously on lobby security, which has kept all of them safe from terrorist plots.  And all that money might better have been spent on something else.

I'm not all that optimistic that Sandy will change very much.  The buildings will reopen, and every day the people in them will feel very secure because they have a turnstile in the lobby, and each one of those days Sandy will fall a little further into the past.  And we don't have politicians these days of any stripe that want to fiercely advocate for the idea of government as a public good that sometimes needs to step in and do things -- great things, sometimes -- that we can't do ourselves.

9/11 plus 10

There is an adage that says "just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should.". For most of the past ten years my general belief is that this is something that Osama bin Laden should have heeded.

I think Al Qaeda could've done serious damage to the US military and to US interests, the death of a thousand cuts with dozens of operations like the USS Cole or the Dar es Salaam embassy bombing, and people in the US just wouldn't have cared very much or for very long.  Militarily, 9/11 was a mistake. Bin Laden became a marked man. His organization was tossed from it's safe haven in Afghanistan. Countless leaders of the organization have been killed. Neither 9/11 nor 7/7 nor 3/11 have led to the death of NYC or London or Madrid. People still work in tall buildings and ride the Tube and commute to work.

However, part of bin Laden's calculus was different, and while I believe 9/11 was a military mistake NY Al Qaeda, the organization has had immense success.

Many of you may not believe this, but there was a time not too long ago when you could just walk into an office building without having to wait on line, show ID, pose for a picture, wait for your visitor pass to print out. There was a time when you could comfortably get to the airport 45 minutes or even a half hour before your flight. There was a time when you could breeze in to a baseball game without wondering why the Mets allow an iPad but the Yankees do not, why the Yankees allow a factory sealed one liter water bottle but the Mets only 20 oz, and why some teams won't allow your completely empty bottle in for filling at a water fountain when it is exactly the same as the 20 oz factory sealed bottle that is emptied out just the other side of the turnstile.  And in all of those instances we are giving up our liberty and hours of our lives, little bits and little infringements at a time.

There was a time when torture was torture.

And all of these things cost not only time but money. The TSA costs money, the guards that check your bags at the ballpark and your IDs in the office lobby cost money.

And that is just in the private sector. The government has spent a huge amount of money building a counterterrorism security infrastructure.

And getting us to do all of this was part of the bin Laden calculus.

So in one sense, the terrorists have won, they've gotten us to spend so much of our treasure taxing ourselves in time and dollars to attempt to win a war that can never entirely be run.

And still, 9/11 was a mistake.

If the western world collapses as a result of the erosion of our values and bank accounts since 9/11, it isn't a caliphate that will come next to pick up the pieces.  China, maybe; caliphate, no.

And a lot of what's happened might have happened with a stream of Dar es Salaams. US embassies would have become fortified and closed to the world, and other damage done to our standing and reputation. Was the extra damage from the sheer enormity of 9/11 worth that so few of its planners might be around to enjoy when the Chinese can finally conquer a depleted and degraded American empire?

Oh -- we manage to be so resilient in the face of every gun massacre of which the US had many. Why have we been so unresilient to the Richard Reids of the world?

And a confession -- deep down I am kind of happy circumstances have me away from NYC for most of 9-11-11.

taking it personally

Oh, the nuclear power industry. We tried scrubbing, we tried soaking, and still we have ring around the collar. The interesting thing from a risk management standpoint is that the old-fangled coal and gas plants kill people bit by bit from their emissions and the costs of getting the coal or the gas out of the ground. Over the course of 20 years, do we lose more people 22 in this coal mine disaster and another 6 there vs. how many might die from radiation exposure as a result of the Japanese disasters? It's impossible to tally all that up, especially when you add in the externalities of emissions, etc. But we do know that these occasional nuclear power disasters are very big and very noticeable and very disastrous. Hence, there is a perfectly good argument to make that nuclear is still an important and necessary part of our energy portfolio moving forward. I don't want to be the person who tries to make that argument with a straight face, even though it is there and legitimately made.

Libya. Idealistically yes please let's get rid of Qadaffi. However, the US doesn't have a good national security interest to make that happen. He does a perfectly good job of pumping the oil. In recent years (recent, we can't forget things like Lockerbie which are hardly ancient history but also not yesterday) he hasn't been an active exporter of violence that we know of. One of the only nuclear-trending regimes to give it up, in fact. No guarantee that the people who replace him will be better than he is, we've seen that tribal enmities in Africa don't die easily and that yesterday's savior (Mugabe) is tomorrow's disaster. It may not seem like the right thing to do, but as much as the US can sit this one right out we're likely better off to do so. Situation in Egypt was very different, in no small part because Egypt is essentially a 51st state, hugely dependent on the billions of dollars we give in aid. And it was also a little more abundantly clear there that Mubarak was going to go one way or the other in the near future, so getting it done better was in many more ways than in Libya a genuine need for American policy makers. It's very nice that the Arab League would support us in getting rid of Qadaffi, and I'm still not convinced we should rush to take them up on that invitation.

China. They're keeping the lid on the unrest, but they still run the risk of repeating the Soviet path. Why? Because they have to spend so much time, money, energy on protecting the regime that can be used for other things, and over time it gets to be very difficult to absorb those costs.

TSA. Which we don't seem to learn in the United States. We happily spend countless millions of dollars and lose enormous amounts of human time and energy and effort in order to fight -- well, who? what? Yes, the US will be victimized by another successful terrorist attack, sure as the sun will rise. But how many lives have been lost in the US due to terrorist attacks in the past nine years now and counting? Yet we give up our rights and our privacy and our freedom to guard against, and if the TSA has its way as it almost certainly will they want to make it less enjoyable to travel by train or by highway as well in the name of fighting this threat. On my most recent flight, I had a suspicious banana in my backpack, so I had to stand around for a few minutes and watch while my tax dollars paid for man to delicately paw through all the pockets on my backpack to retrieve a banana and then put the bag back thru the magnetometer. It's almost funny, except that it's really very very sad.

Liberty. But the right wing libertarians are more concerned about the government encroaching on their right to burn wasteful incandescent light bulbs. Why can't more of these people join me in the fight against unreasonable search and seizure, making the US more like the communist states we spent 50 years necessarily fighting where you had to have your papers to move about the country? Please. The incandescent light bulb is an ancient technology that turns electricity into more heat than light. Try and feel up one of those bulbs with your bare hands. There should be reasonable limits to the kind of nannying the state will indulge on our behalf, I think the argument that the health care mandate will lead to mandatory consumption of broccoli is, as straw man slippery slope arguments go, one of the more intriguing ones to puzzle over as a thought exercise. But I cannot see the defense of the incandescent light bulb as the last bastion of liberty. This is the exact kind of area where government regulation serves a powerful public good, keeping us from doing something that is cheaper to the individual and costlier to society. We are surrounded by examples of such. Flammable PJs might be cheaper to manufacture, but we aren't given that option. We survived the banning of CFCs in refrigerators. Please, pretty please, will you attack the TSA monstrosity instead of the compact fluorescent light bulb?

Building Codes. In fact these are a very good example of an area where good government regulation keeps us from things we might like to do or would find cheaper to do but which in the long term aren't such a good idea. Just like banning incandescent light bulbs!

Links, no sausage

Updated twice, final 4:07 EST.

The New York Times Week in Review section reprinted this Pat Bagley cartoon from the Salt Lake Tribune, which is one of the few comparisons in the TSA debate that I don't find utterly false. In fact, I find it rather funny.

In the midst of all of its columnists telling us to take our pats and shut up, their Sunday Outlook section has a column by Jeffrey Rosen that dares to flat-out call the current regime unconstitutional. And Rosen is not a hypocritical Republican, he's not some immature person for Ruth Marcus to yell at, he's a long-time legal affairs writer, a professor at George Washington School of Law, legal affairs editor for The New Republic, often published in the Times as well, check out his GW bio here.

Click here to find the 2nd quarter earnings release from Barnes & Noble. Same store sales were down a relatively modest 3.3%, loss was $12.6M, with the expectation that the lion and lamb will lie next to one another and sing songs together and join a book group together and make a perfect world as the company starts to realize sales first of the Nook Color itself and then from all of the ebooks that people will buy for their Nook Color. As initial evidence that this will indeed come to pass, they say after-quarter-end sales for the Fri/Sat/Sun after Thanksgiving doubled at bn.com and increased by an impressive 17.2% at stores.

Two articles I really enjoyed in the weekend newspapers.

The first is an article from the Sunday NY Times Business section about an etailer who thinks the more you can get your customers to complain about you, the more you can attract the love of the Google search algorithms.

And the second is from the A section of Sunday's Washington Post, which describes the efforts made to treat patients wounded in Afghanistan as they are moved from the front to Germany.

And also in the Sunday Times, Ariel Kaminer subjected herself to multiple patdowns over the course of her day. Her conclusion: "It’s amazing how quickly the pat-down evolves from shocking indignity to banal hassle, just like padding around barefoot while your pants fall down and your toothpaste tube gets the third degree, something airline travelers have been experiencing for years now. The inconvenience is worth it, of course, if it works — if it uncovers potential dangers before they board a plane. That’s what a spokesman for the T.S.A. informed me, afterward, the officers’ job was: to assess whether I posed a threat to aviation. He would not comment on whether that should have included checking out the objects hidden in my pocket. All I know is I went through the line eight times, and not a single inspector noticed them."

And last but certainly not least, The Washington Post has an ode to The Settlers of Catan, which is one of those board games I really would like to have somebody to play with someday. Boskone? Next Balticon??

my favorite rant, for after the holidays

My client Jim C. Hines has a new post on TSA policies and procedures here

http://www.jimchines.com/2010/11/responding-to-the-tsa/

which I highly recommend.

It has links to an ACLU petition, to the e-mail address to contact the TSA with your thoughts, links to a round-up of approving "shut up and take your body scan" editorials, and much, much more.

I'm getting more involved with this than with just about anything else. I've dashed off letters to the NY Times, which suggested in an editorial last week that profiling was a civil liberties issue that was to be avoided by subjecting all of us to full body screening. Um, isn't that a civil liberties issue as well? I've been very clear that I don't consider profiling to be a solution because terrorists are adaptive. Please see the film The Battle for Algiers, if you want to advocate profiling.

I've dashed off an e-mail to Ruth Marcus, who suggested in a Washington Post op-ed column that it was immature of people to not just happily get patted down. I pointed out one clear factual error, that she seems to think if you agree to the full-body scanner you can't also get a patdown, while in fact the TSA can still select you randomly or on account of an anomaly. More important, I thought I was immature when I was two years old or six years old and had to do things my parents wanted to "because I said so." I think there's nothing at all immature about saying that the 4th amendment entitles us to be secure both in our homes and against unreasonable search and seizure.

And an e-mail to Dana Milbank at the Post, who suggests that Republicans are now making noises about TSA procedures out of the same general obstructionism that motives their anti-START message. I usually like Republicans much less than Dana Milbank, but not here. Libertarianism has deep roots in the Republican party. Full body scans of everyone buying an airplane ticket are not so deeply rooted in American history, while Republican presidents and cabinet secretaries have supported treaties with Russia for several decades.

I find myself contemplating civil disobedience more strongly than ever before in my life.

I lived through 9/11. I woke up on the morning of 9/11 with plans to cut out of work maybe an hour early and stroll down over the Williamsburg Bridge to visit the Borders at the World Trade Center. I am more frightened by what the government and private sector ask me to do now, on a day-in day-out basis to protect my security, than I was taking the subway back on the 12th from a memorial service at my synagogue. I was antsy, I'm human after all. I was antsy for three or four weeks to the point where the puckish side of my sense of humor was nowhere to be found. But now I get to spend the rest of my life being antsy about patdowns at the airport, patdowns at the ballgame, Rudin Management scanning my drivers license entering an office building (what is a real estate company doing with thousands of scanned photo IDs?).

Youthful exuberance

OK, so to set the record on this straight, the TSA Director said at a senate hearing on Wednesday 17 November that they haven't done a good job of communicating that children under 12 are exempt from the "enhanced patdown."

So aren't we all happy and comfortable now. To know that our young children can only be subjected to the regular patdown! And, really, who doesn't mind having their 14 year old daughter felt up the thighs and buttocks.

If this is the security regime we have, then we do have to give people of all ages an equal opportunity to be subjected to it.

The problem is that we have a security regime that routinely subjects people of any age to this.

Benjamin Franklin may not actually have said “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security” but whomever said it, says it right.

homeland humor

So there's this ad by Lindor, the people that make those wonderful little truffle balls that you can buy at the Borders checkouts, or with a $2.50 coupon in the latest Costco coupon book. You've got that Roger Federer guy going through airport security, and the people at the x-ray machine see that his carry-on is full of balls. "Hey, look at this, he's a tennis player" says blue-uniformed TSA person #1 to TSA person #2. Then they open the bag and see that it isn't tennis balls, but rather a big full of those delightful little Lindor truffle balls, while Roger Federer says "Swiss tennis player." Because it's swiss chocolate, get it. And then the TSA people say they're going to have to confiscate the bag, and Roger says "you've got to be kidding me," and the commercial ends with a freeze frame shot of the two TSA people looking very very serious about needing to confiscate that bag.

I find this funny. I don't find much to laugh about at airport security, but I find this funny.

And then tonight I audited the first 15 or 20 minutes of Due Date. Where Robert Downey Jr. has his carry-on switched with one of Zach Galifianakis' that has marijuana paraphernalia and such, and Downey has a dialogue with the TSA guard that's full of the two talking past one another. And then he's on the plane and he starts lecturing Galifianakis on how he shouldn't use words like terrorist and bomb and ends up being shot at by an air marshal with a rubber bullet, tossed off the plane, put on the no fly list. And after not really laughing once, or smiling, or even grinning even the teeny-tiniest bit, even beseeching the gods of comedy to explain why anyone thinks the "driver pulling away when someone tries to open door of car" gag is supposed to be remotely funny, I decided I'd rather get to Whole Foods and buy some dinner before they closed and get home than stay around in the theatre to midnight or so watching a not very funny movie.

So why is this? Why am I willing to enjoy one comic look at the insanity we call airport security while the other leaves me absolutely cold? Is it because I like Lindor truffle balls more than Zach Galifianakis? Because the one is so clearly unreal and exaggerated that I can view it from a distance while the other seems all too real? Because Roger Federer is a better comic actor than Zach Galifianakis?

My favorite rant

one man's adventures with TSA...

http://johnnyedge.blogspot.com/2010/11/these-events-took-place-roughly-between.html

here the NY Times travel writer Joe Sharkey talks about his fun-filled pat-down experience...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/business/02road.html?

and the Washington Post tells us there is starting to be some backlash against the patdown regime...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/12/AR2010111206580.html

I'm getting genuinely frightened about this. I'm not sure I want to fly anywhere any more. I got a token patdown coming back through SFO in September for no particular reason, it looked like they were just having some fun where every second or third passenger at this checkpoint was getting one for one or another reason, in my case it was because I had cargo pants with extra pockets. It's a demeaning and degrading thing. The TSA isn't the SS, but it's still worrisome that the US is now proving that you can pay people to spend their day patting down and frisking people and having them touch their private and personal parts.

And it's wrong.

We will never have absolute security flying on an airplane, no more than we do driving a car or walking down the street or riding an escalator. Our cargo can never be entirely secure. The fact that we now can't ship toner cartridges in airplanes points to the ludicrousness of our approach to security, because tomorrow terrorists can put bombs into teddy bears and the day after that into hollowed out books and the day after that into power adapters.

What will it take for this to stop? Do we need to find some way that every Senator and Representative heading to DC for the lame duck session can be given a nice brisk patdown?

Collective Punishment

Wikipedia defines collective punishment as "the punishment of a group of people as a result of the behaviour of one or more other individuals or groups." Which is the easy part.

Because in some circumstances, collective punishment is a routine part of life. In football practice or boot camp, when everyone has to run suicides or do push-ups because another member of the group screwed up.

And in other circumstances, it's a crime. Like if Israel demolishes a home because one member of the family committed a suicide bombing.

And so where do we put the recent United States TSA directive that "every individual flying into the U.S. from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening."

To me, it's another tragic and bad example of a security system that's rotten to the core, which I've been big on ranting about the past ten days (follow the TSA tags...).

Yes, not all countries are created equal. Some fund and breed terrorism and suicide bombers more than others, some breed crazed courthouse gunmen more than others, some have nice beaches and others good skiing. But nonetheless, this latest TSA directive serves to collectively punish many people from some countries because of the actions of a very few. Will the people who have to endure the extra screening blame the extremist elements in their own society and engage in introspection, or will they focus their anger on the US? It closes the world a little bit by discouraging casual travelers (which suicide bombers are not). Yes, we can all now see ourselves as Doing Something, too bad it's just not something very good or helpful.

And as I discussed before, we continue to layer our security in the worst possible way.

Once the full body scanner proves to be fallable or to be circumventable -- and it will; there will be another Qaeda Underpants or Shoe Bomber and maybe the next will succeed -- there aren't too many more layers of security to go before we all start removing all of our layers in order to get on a plane. Off goes the underwear, one TSA agent carefully checks that by hand, another carefully sticks his hand up the rear while another has us say "aaah. Or maybe we can get to the airport a day early, have awful blue liquid, not eat for ten hours, and then board the plane after the colonoscopy's done. Can I have my prostate checked at the same time and have the insurance co-pay billed to the credit card used for my plane ticket? And when that time comes, will we all happily accept it because we've become bit by bit by bit more and more inured to more and more outrages in the name of safety and security, like the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm who bit by bit discover that all are created equal but some more equal than others?

Another Link for Breakfast

David Brooks in the NY Times had a column on Friday about reactions to Qaeda Underpants that I also think is worth reading.

And another thought on what he calls (as have others) "Security Theatre." As best as I know, we don't have a good track record for unraveling plots against air transportation by catching bad guys going thru security checkpoints. I say "best as I know" because I want to recognize the possibility that we've done so but that it's been put under lock and key and kept under wraps to protect intelligence sources or an ongoing investigation or something like that. I kind of doubt it; it's hard to keep that kind of thing wrapped up, and too tempting to leak for political points, but it's possible. But 9/11, the shoe bomber, Qaeda Underpants, let's forget about Lockerbie because that was so long ago when the Theatre was much shorter than it is today, it seems like the bad guys have a good track record for getting on board the planes. So why are we all going this ever more layered security checkpoint? Can we say we haven't caught the bad guys because they don't bother trying because our security is so good?

It's Just SO five years ago

A Layered Security System.

No single security measure is foolproof. Accordingly, the TSA must have multiple layers of security in place to defeat the more plausible and dangerous forms of attack against public transportation.

Recommendation: Improved use of "no-fly" and "automatic selectee" lists should not be delayed while the argument about a successor to CAPPS continues.

Recommendation: The TSA and the Congress must give priority attention to improving the ability of screening checkpoints to detect explosives on passengers.

Those are quotes from the 2004 report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

And as a quick alternative reading recommendation... Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post isn't one of my must-read columnist but her column's (you may need to register at the site) about as good as any I've read in discussing last week's airplane incident.

Now, security and I have a kind of ambiguous relationship. I've ranted about the idiocy of requiring photo IDs when you check into a hotel. I'd really like to see a grass roots movement formed to protest that. Waiting on line to show a photo ID to get a visitor badge to enter any run of the mill NYC office building is a ridiculous stupid time tax that should be obliterated off the face of the earth.

But I'm also not a privacy purist. NYC has random bag checks on the subway system that do something to harden a very soft target without being silly or imposing an unacceptable time tax on three million people a day. And don't get me started again about the baseball teams that let you bring in a factory-sealed water bottle, but not an empty water bottle.

The main problem with the whole airplane thing is that there's a huge time tax imposed on lots of people that wastes goodness knows how many billions of person hours every year, and it still doesn't work. The system is so inefficient and awful that I'm tempted to say we should just do away with the whole thing entirely. But then sanity rears its ugly head. The system is an outgrowth of a bona fide problem with hijacking planes, and if we could all just cart a fire arm on to a plane... I don't want to make it so easy for people to pop on to airplanes with explosives, either.

But yet, the system we have is layered in the worst possible way. It's layered like my office IT had been two years ago. I had a system that barely worked when I started it, then kept adding on to it to do no things and more things, and bit by bit I had a system so bad that I don't think my business would have survived 2009 if the IT hadn't been un-layered in 2008.

Once upon a time we had a system that just scanned everyone very quickly for metal, so we couldn't keep on with open season for hijackers. And you know what, that actually mostly worked, there were way fewer hijackings, and if the system even then wasn't perfect (plastic guns, hijacking without guns, etc.) it worked well enough. Then we started with checking the boarding passes so that only people actually getting on flights were allowed in. Then we started with checking the photo IDs. Well, OK. Photo IDs can be counterfeited, and so can boarding passes, but OK. 9/11 happens, and we start to add more layers at the security checkpoints because we realize we need to worry about things other than just guns. Like knitting needles and nail clippers. Well, OK, some of the most vibrant idiocies of this era were eventually dialed back. But then we get the shoe bomber. Now we all need to take off our shoes, and we have the liquid rules. For a time, I couldn't even bring an empty bottle past security and then fill it up from a water fountain, and again some of the most vibrant idiocies were eventually curtailed, but the end result was still yet another layer. Now we have the Qaeda Underpants Bomber, and I'm sure some of the most vibrant idiocies of the past week will eventually be rolled back but we'll still have another layer.

Well, this isn't going to work.

The enemies of western civilization have already achieved a victory in adding all of these new layers to the process, increasing the friction and time tax to airline travel with each new layer. The ability to move from place to place on an airplane instead of being limited to the horseback riding of the typical fantasy novel is a big part of contemporary western civilization. Even high-speed train travel has its limits, and if we had only that I'm sure the bad guys would try and make that untenable as well (recent bomb on Moscow/St. Petersburg train in Russia). We can't make flying so miserable that nobody wants to do it at all.

But at bottom, I think we need to start over from the beginning, ask what we're really trying to do, and find some way that doesn't require everyone to wait on line, take off their shoes, take off their jacket, take off their belt, put the laptop in a separate tray, but the 100ml bottle of Prell into a little plastic baggie, put all of this thru a metal detector, wait around to go thru the explosives detector.

Clearly, there always has to be a chance that some people will need to do something like this, because an element of random security isn't such a bad idea. But maybe one hour it just needs to be everyone on some flights, and some other hour some people on every flight. Maybe today you get screened at the entry to the gates and tomorrow you get screened at the gate and the day after that at the bottom of the jetway and occasionally no place at all. And maybe it's a hand pat one day, a full screening of everything the next, and an interrogation about your travel plans the day after that. And you know what, Granny Wither Walker and Artie Fish Alney will need to be screened every so often, because if the bad guys know neither of them are ever going to be screened, they'll find themselves a Granny or an Artie.

But what we have now is a farce.

I know a lot of people right now who are flying less or not flying at all because they're just not comfortable with the process. I fly because I like going places, but I like the screening routine less and less with each passing flight (I did go thru a next-gen body scanner flying back from Miami in August). Now, happily, we did away with the policy where everyone who was on a one way flight, and everyone who paid cash, and everyone who didn't check baggage, was going to get the once-over. But somebody who does all three, who's on the radar of intelligence and security forces in multiple countries, and we're all being good boys and girls taking off our shoes and our belts and our jackets, and this still happens?

We've got to do better, and when the experts talk about layered security, the layers we've got going now just can't be what they have in mind. I think we'd probably be safer and more secure with less security than we have now.