[Closed] Airport "security" absolutely mental

Mental. My Suunto tells me the rate of descent. Plus- you can FEEL IT FFS.

Thank you both for your shared views on terrorism and attacks upon aircraft. I expect you have sent your findings to MI5?

TT - Explain to me how exactly either of those three measures would have stopped anything kicking off this time. I like security, what I don't like is knee-jerk reactions that stop nothing but give morons the belief that they are safe. If clearly wrong policies make you feel safer then great, they're doing a good job for you but personally I'd be happier knowing they'd done something right.

Oddly enough, MI5 are more interested in using brains rather than idiocy to protect the population.

There is a more extreme measure and it would crucially slash our carbon emissions dramatically..

This would have been avoided by using one of those scanners that sees through clothes - you know - they ones they're bringing in.

The not moving around the cabin for an hour before landing means that most UK internal flights will be done completely in you seat. No loo breaks for me today.

Gordon: "Och, another near miss, we've got to do something to show we're working hard on security, jack, you need to announce something tomorrow"

Straw: "Well, what do we do? other than strip search people from target groups, it was in his underwear FFS!"

Harperson: "jack, you cant suggest that, if we elect a minority group for special treatment, then we'll be accused of racism"

Gordon: "Look, Jack it doesn'ae matter [b]what[/b] we announce, as long as we announce [b]something[/b]!

[url= http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/87854-nude-airline-to-soar-nakedly ]Solution to bombs in underpants[/url]

Proper security checks on target groups would not go amiss, like it or not, all of the recent terrorists all seem to come form a similar background.

Anyone know what the logic is behind the no moving around in the last hour thing? Does it break some terrorist code of honour if you attempt to blow up an aircraft outside the last hour? Genuine question, well the first one is anyway.

Apparently the bomb material was inside the linging of his undercrackers, up around his groin where it would be possible for a body search to miss unless you get really personal. He was able to adjust the material shortly before landing by going to the toilet, where he also injected the igniting material via a syringe. The ability to take a syringe on board was allowed because airlines let diabetics self medicate during a flight.

The not moving around before landing is about preventing the methods this guy employed.

Yeah, but what I don't understand is why would someone only want to blow up an aircraft before landing? Why not after take off, or mid flight?

I guess it'd be "better" to do it just before landing as you'll kill people on the ground. That said, surely if you have no chance to do it before landing you'll either do it after take-off (i.e. get your business done in the toilets in the terminal) or mid-atlantic anyway.

Terrorism is rare, far rarer than many people think. It's rare because very few people want to commit acts of terrorism, and executing a terrorist plot is much harder than television makes it appear. The best defenses against terrorism are largely invisible: investigation, intelligence, and emergency response. But even these are less effective at keeping us safe than our social and political policies, both at home and abroad. However, our elected leaders don't think this way: they are far more likely to implement security theater against movie-plot threats.

A movie-plot threat is an overly specific attack scenario. Whether it's terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists contaminating the milk supply, or terrorists attacking the Olympics, specific stories affect our emotions more intensely than mere data does. Stories are what we fear. It's not just hypothetical stories: terrorists flying planes into buildings, terrorists with bombs in their shoes or in their water bottles, and terrorists with guns and bombs waging a co-ordinated attack against a city are even scarier movie-plot threats because they actually happened.

Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards. Airport-security examples include the National Guard troops stationed at US airports in the months after 9/11 -- their guns had no bullets. The US colour-coded system of threat levels, the pervasive harassment of photographers, and the metal detectors that are increasingly common in hotels and office buildings since the Mumbai terrorist attacks, are additional examples.

To be sure, reasonable arguments can be made that some terrorist targets are more attractive than others: aeroplanes because a small bomb can result in the death of everyone aboard, monuments because of their national significance, national events because of television coverage, and transportation because of the numbers of people who commute daily. But there are literally millions of potential targets in any large country (there are five million commercial buildings alone in the US), and hundreds of potential terrorist tactics; it's impossible to defend every place against everything, and it's impossible to predict which tactic and target terrorists will try next.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/beyond_security.html

They want to blow them up just before landing because that has the highest chance of being filmed/photographed.

Surely they want to blow them up just before landing for secondary collateral damage?
70 tonnes of airplane ( guesstimate ) falling out of sky onto infidels eating turkey.
Why not bring in Gas spectrometers and make everyone do a swab test, then wait in a holding area whilst the swabs are burnt and annalised.

Indeed, given a prefence then I can see that they would choose that, but I can't really see a terroist petulantly stamping their feet and going "dammit, i'm not going to bother blowing this plane up if I can't do it in the last hour" 🙂
And presumably as this is an emergency security measure, it seems to be made worthless by announcing it. Now everyone knows not to try and let their bomb off in the last hour.

It's not all that surprising that the proposed moves are about confidence not actual safety. But look, this guy got on board with what seems to be a very tiny bomb, which didn't even manage to blow off his hands never mind bring down the plane. I'm not clear whether that's because it failed to go off or because it was just not capable of doing so, the press seem to be running with "terrorist attack foiled" but that doesn't really seem to be the case, it seems more like "another crap terrorist attack fails all by itself"

Markenduro wrote,

"Proper security checks on target groups would not go amiss, like it or not, all of the recent terrorists all seem to come form a similar background."

I wrote about this last night, but in a different thread. This sounds like a nice idea but it simply isn't workable, it's not a question of racism or fairness, just signal-to-noise. The likelihood of an arab on a plane being a bomber is to all extents and purposes the same as the likelihood of a wasp being a bomber, approximately zero. 1.09 billion people (estimated) fly every year, how many turn out to be terrorists? Any profiling method with such a ludicriously low signal/noise ratio is worthless.

I'm not sure terrorism merits any response at all really, compared to the mayhem inflicted on people by business, governments and armies it's an insignificant pinprick, though anything making air travel more uncomfortable than it already is probably benefits us all long term, so perhaps terrorism is actually altruistic ?

[i]Last but not least, they won't tell people how close they are to the end of the flight (despite the above and the fact people have watches)[/i]

This is the most bonkers one ever. Everyone can feel the plane descending and every plane I've been on has these holes in the side covered in glass called 'windows' through which people can see outside.

Lockerbie wasn't within last hour of a flight.

Why the funk can't these total nutjobs grow the **** up, calm down and leave us alone? Their religion is not better than anyone else's, they are not right, we've done nothing to them (well, we hadn't...) and they should just leave it out. Somehow I doubt their "god" would agree that mindlessly killing people is a one way ticket to heavan.

Stoopid middle eastern/african muslim crackpots.

Oh, and similarly, can we just stop being overreactive sensationalists and go back to a world where during air travel you're not guilty til proved otherwise?

"We shall not allow terrorists to diminish our freedom and our way of life" [i]said by countless politicians who would rather do that themselves.[/i]

hora - Member
Mental. My Suunto tells me the rate of descent. Plus- you can FEEL IT FFS.

Do you often travel in unpressurised 'planes Mark?

hora - Member

There is a more extreme measure and it would crucially slash our carbon emissions dramatically..

here here!

whatever rules are put in place, people can still get around them.
even with naked airlines, and the bombs will be up arses.

<edit- removed post as it was only going to derail things>

[i]Lockerbie wasn't within last hour of a flight. [/i]

Lockerbie was supposed to be over the mid-Atlantic to make it much more difficult to ever find out what went wrong but the plane was delayed on take-off so it was running about 2hrs behind hence the bomb going off while still over land.
Caused collateral damage on the ground but it also made it a whole lot easier for recovery of bodies/wreckage/flight data etc and ultimately led to a fairly quick trace on the explosives used.

Thank you both for your shared views on terrorism and attacks upon aircraft. I expect you have sent your findings to MI5?

I am sure they are watching him unless he remembered to put on his tin-foil hat 🙂

SSP

Stoopid middle eastern/african muslim crackpots.

don't you think centuries of colonialism and current exploitation and interference might occasion homicidal resentment in some people ? In order to be a successful terrorist one requires more motivation than mere crackpotism...

I'm not saying it's justified, merely understandable, and pretending there are not credible reasons is part of the problem

In this case, the witness reports say that throughout activating his firework and being subdued he went on about Afghanistan, so that alone suggests it wasn't just about "his religion being better than ours".

simonfbarnes - Premier Member
don't you think centuries of colonialism and current exploitation and interference might occasion homicidal resentment in some people ?

How about some profiling in terrorist checks? I don't think any white haired Anglican grannies have blown up a plane yet, why waste time checking on them purely for PC?

Did you read my post? Profiling is ineffectual in this situation, the signal/noise ratio is so poor as to be meaningless. Number of asian terrorists on planes in the last year? Vs number of asian people on planes. No idea myself but it's going to be 10s if not 100s of millions to 1. The odds of that granny being a terrorist are to all extents and purposes the same as that beige feller in the queue in front of you. Both astronomically long.

why waste time checking on them purely for PC?

If you excluded all the white haired Anglican grannies on each flight from security checks, how much time do you think it would save ?

My elderly grey haired mother takes a plane every year to Madrid to visit my sister. Because of her frailty and age, she has "assistance" at the airport - which means that she goes through in a wheelchair. And yes they check her, but for obvious reasons it's all fairly relaxed and over in seconds, rather than minutes. They also check the airport employee who pushes her wheelchair. Excluding them from any checks would not imo, make any significant difference to the time taken to board a plane.

Furthermore, if it was absolutely certain that my mother would not undergo any security checks because of her age, then there is the possibility that she would be seen as a security loophole by any potential terrorists. She's practically blind and very hard of hearing, so interfering with her hand luggage and placing a small explosive device, or slipping a knife into her coat pocket, would be a relatively easy exercise.

Having said all that, I believe that British airport security is well over the top and goes beyond what should be sensible precautions. I suspect that 'politics' and cranking up the public's fear of terrorists attacks, figures very large in any decisions concerning security levels.

As grumm's quote points out terrorist attacks are, "[i]rare because very few people want to commit acts of terrorism[/i]". The 'Green Zone' in Baghdad was supposed to be the most secure place on Earth, but it didn't stop it being the scene of repeated terrorist attacks - if the will is there, no level of security will ever stop a terrorist attack. And if the target proves a little too troublesome, then would-be terrorists can simply change the targets - trains, buses, boats, car bombs in crowded shopping centres, etc. etc.

The stuff about extra checks for ON the plane is totally pointless. I agree that the explosion and resulting crash of a 747 is quite a terrorist spectacular but it's a whole lot easier/cheaper to send half a dozen suicide bombers into Heathrow terminals at the start of summer holidays.
Not as spectacular media wise but it has the potential to cause MASSIVE fallout, casualties, disruption, knee jerk reactions etc, it'd make air travel almost unworkable if every single person entering an airport had to be checked and searched. Concentrating on the actual plane is working at the wrong end of the scale IMHO.

No moving around the cabin for an hour before landing (he did it in his seat)

I will be doing it in my seat if I have to use the toilet at the end of a long flight!

I do like Christopher Hitchens - http://www.slate.com/id/2239935/?from=rss

"My Suunto tells me the rate of descent. Plus- you can FEEL IT FFS."
Do you often travel in unpressurised 'planes Mark?

Does anyone know if his device failed, or was this all it was capable of? it was designed as an easily concealed, compact device, presumably to get through searches (nothing but a strip search would have found it apparently) so did that force him to use a bomb so small it was ineffective? If so, then it's a win for the current search protocols.

Profiling is ineffectual in this situation, the signal/noise ratio is so poor as to be meaningless. Number of asian terrorists on planes in the last year? Vs number of asian people on planes. No idea myself but it's going to be 10s if not 100s of millions to 1. The odds of that granny being a terrorist are to all extents and purposes the same as that beige feller in the queue in front of you. Both astronomically long.

Obviously you don't have a very good grasp of [i]reading[/i], since I did say "to all extents and purposes". The odds are not mathematically identical but they are practically identical, as both are well below any level of statistical significance, hence meaningless. Profiling simply doesn't work with such tiny samples.

Ironically, currently people are calling for young asian men to be targeted, which wouldn't have caught this particular bomber. And also, people are calling for them to be targeted for searches, but again, that wouldn't have caught this particular bomber either, since his device was well enough concealed that only a full strip search would have found it. So, what will your profile be? How will you act upon it?

Obviously you don't have a very good grasp of reading, since I did say "to all extents and purposes".

OK, so explain "statistical significance" to me - I don't think it means quite what you think it does. I'm also intrigued by the difference between "mathematically identical" and "practically identical" - you're telling me that one in 10 million and one in 1000 million are practically identical?

The other question of course being that if only a full strip search would have found this (I'm less than convinced that really is the case, but carry on), and they're not proposing full strip searches for everybody, then if we're ruling out any sort of profiling and strip searches for some, then what is the point of any of the "increased" security?

To answer a previous question about the actual bomb, it was a two-part devise, consisting of a container of PETN, with an exothermic igniter which required the addition of an acid to create the heat required to trigger the main component. He was sat next to the fusilage skin, with the leg with the bomb against the skin, directly above the wing and fuel tanks. There was an episode of CSI where someone used an exothermic reaction to make a fuseless molotov cocktail, where the bottle
was full of a petrol/sulfuric acid mix, with the label stuck on with a liquid sugar/trigger mix. When the bottle broke, the acid mixing with the trigger created enough heat to ignite the petrol. PETN is related to nitroglycerin. It was the action of one man ripping the igniter off the perp stopped the main explosion.

I covered this one up the page too- the new proposals may well be pointless, personally I think they are. But, the existing ones [i]may[/i] to have forced him into using a tiny, complex and in the end ineffectual device, much like the shoebomber.

This is a bit like being back at uni... Statistical significance is clasically described as the likelihood that your results were unlikely to be caused by chance, or alternatively as the faith you have that your result is correct and that the factors that you're analysing were the cause of the results you're seeing.

The immensely poor signal to noise ratios here alone has to lead us to low confidence in the result of any statistical analysis. The weak common factors across the sample of "modern islamic terrorists" lead you to a vast number of false positives, and also to a high risk of false negatives. And the sample itself will also most likely contain false positives. So you have a very small number of results from a very large pool of potentials.

I should have said that as well as being statistically insignificant, they're also practically insignificant, but most people don't know the difference so I didn't bother. The danger of false negatives is obvious, the danger of false positives is that you end up (as the US has) with a watch list so big you can't watch it. But maybe the wider danger is that you end up giving more justification to the people actually causing these things.