The Glade 4.0

The TSA themselves state exactly that (not about the wall specifically, but about confiscation of "weapons" in general).

As a side note, I'd say that putting up that "wall o' confiscation" is a vital aspect of the security theater, it's like a playbill listing the actors awards.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Leaving aside the fact that you need to go to a Simpson's episode, the two situations are, again, not analagous.

The "Tiger rock" example does not work, because it relies on selecting a perfectly arbitrary object (a rock) and claiming it keeps away a completely arbitrary threat (a tiger, an animal not indigenous to the suburban U.S. where "The Simpsons" is set). In fact, Lisa's argument really doesn't work for the bear patrol van because bears clearly are present in that area, both in real life and the author fiat of the episode. If the outcome weren't governed by author fiat, Lisa could not, in fact, legitimately say that the lack of additional bears wandering into town was unrelated to the presence of the Bear Patrol, just as Homer could not, in fact, say it was the Bear Patrol that definitively kept the bears away. The likelyhood of a bear wandering into town is miniscule in the first place, but it is not possible to say that the bear patrol does not reduce it even further.

The reasons this does not apply to the TSA or my argument are twofold: 1) I have not argued the TSA is perfect in keeping terrorists from attacking aircraft; indeed I have agreed that it could be better. 2) Terrorists are not bears. A bear wandering into town is a random event; it's a wild animal behaving in an out-of-the-norm fashion (aside from certain places in Alaska where it does happen on a regular basis, and with the polar bear, an animal that is dangerous to humans).

For one thing, if we were to transport your Simpsons episode to Alaska and the characters were to do something more practical such as building a wall to keep out polar bears, you would not be arguing that the wall does not keep bears out and using an analogy that relies on the fact that tigers do not live in Alaska to demonstrate it; you would need to demonstrate that the bears could climb the wall, break down the wall, or open the gate in the wall, and even then you would need to show that the reduction in bear intrusions was not commeasurate with the expense of the wall. You also would not be trying to argue that the wall is security theater because one bear every 5 years got through it, where before 10 bears a year wandered through town and occasionally mauled a resident.

Similarly, terrorists do not simply happen upon airplanes at random and decide to attack them for the sheer hell of it. They purposefully target aircraft for hijackings both because of the ready availability of hostages and since 9/11 potential use as a weapon in itself.

In order to make your Tiger analogy work you would need to demonstrate that terrorists either A) no longer exist, or no longer exist in meaningful numbers or B) no longer have any significant desire to target aircraft, and if the latter you would need to show that it was utterly, or at least very largely, unrelated to security precautions.

You have given no other logical explanation for the fact that terrorists seem to have moved on to other modus operandi, such as fighting as insurgents in Afghanistan or until recently Iraq, or making attacks on military installations such as Fort Dix. From all apearances, the TSA, problem-ridden as it may be, does seem to make the cost-benefit ratio of attempting airplane hijackings a lot lower than it previously was - especially given the propaganda value that Al Quaeda or another organization would realize if they could repeat 9-11, or even stage another major hijaking and thereby claim that the U.S. was "helpless" to prevent these attacks. Attempting to demonstrate apparent government "helplessness" is a basic major goal of all insurgent and terrorist groups because of its value in turning the target population against that government.

"Correlation does not demonstrate causation" is fine and dandy, but the fact is that a theoretical causal relationship can be shown here, and more importantly, I don't need to show that the TSA is the sole cause because I'm not arguing that. The fact is that if you want to take a bomb or a gun on a plane you must find a way to get it past the TSA organs that are looking for those objects. You can certainly argue that it is possible to do so, but you cannot argue that it is just as easy as it otherwise would be, any more than you can argue that locking your door does not reduce the likelyhood of burglary because the burglar might break a window.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Oh are you now? How convenient. If you are, then perhaps you could actually address some of the issues at hand, such as for example, the relative cost-benefit ratio of the Israeli method of conducting airport security versus the TSA, and how economy of scale might play into making such a reform in the U.S. rather than making amateur bullshit psychoanalysis trolling posts.

As for those two things being in conflict, Shneier is a computer security expert, not physical. I don't recall him ever being mentioned or cited in any Physical Security, Anti-Terrorism, or Force Protection manual I've ever read or any class I've gone to - and there have been quite a few. He may have some valuable insights, but the fact is that his "security theater" term is A) problematic, in that it can simply be applied to any publicly visible or deterrent measure, and has evidently been corrupted to refer to those things pejoratively and B) that there seems to be no way to show that any given measure is or isn't "security theater". At the very least it's being used here without consideration of its nuances because using the TSA as a whipping boy for the 50th time and (in your case) trying to score points with talk about other people's emotional states which you have neither the information nor ability to evaluate is for some reason more interesting than, say, looking at the cost-benefit ratio of switching to the Israeli method or something.

Maybe, since you're an expert, you could give us some insight on how much extra it would cost to use the Israeli method, whether its practical on the scale of the U.S. and if any economy of scale is to be had? I, in particular, would be inclined to listen to such an argument. Or would that be too much trouble for you?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

My reaction whenever anyone ever mentions him? That's very interesting, because I've never even heard of him before, and I don't recall anyone mentioning him around here at all. People have certainly brought upo "security theater" before, but no one has ever even bothered to define that term; rather just using it as a buzzword for any security arrangement they don't personally like, with no supporting argument other than "Israel does it better", which I ahve not contested. So far, it's been a circular assertion of "The TSA is security theater because it does nothing effective, which we know because it's security theater." Furthermore, I do not see anything in Mr. Schneier's history that indicates his expertise in computer security translates into an equivalent level of expertise in physical security, and despite his unflattering comments on the TSA, their sometimes absurd behavior regarding specific threats does not mean they provide no security whatsoever.

The fact that you seem to have invented some past history of me flipping out about a guy I've... never heard of before says some very unflattering things about the nature of the accusations that I can't carry on a rational discussion. For the moment I'll choose to assume you're confusing me with someone else, or otherwise are simply misremembering. I'm sure you wouldn't just make up a history of me flipping out about I guy I can't recall ever discussing before.

Furthermore, you all seem to be ignoring two important aspects of the definition of security theater":



and



It seems that security theater can be applied to any publicly visible security effort, regardless of actual effect, simply because it has a deterrent effect, and its' pejorative use is simply a way to discount both its deterrent and actual effects based on nothing more than an unstated implication that this somehow makes it worthless.

If you want to argue that A) this is the effect of the TSA and B) it is not worth the money, then by all means do so. At 1.2 billion a year that is likely a defensible position. I also might be more inclined to listen than when people simply want to call it "security theater", quote their favorite computer security expert, and declare any further discussion other than piously agreeing that the government is bad to be out-of-bounds.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Convenient or not, I am paid by a decent-sized corporation to apply my security expertise for their benefit. As to the cost-benefit analysis you're asking for, there's no way to determine the actual benefit of the TSA without much greater access to the TSA infrastructure than the general public possesses and thus no way to begin to formulate a comparison, nor are you paying me to do so. If you want to procure me the access and pay me, I'll be glad to do so.

I figured you would fixate on the fact that the bulk of Schneier's livelihood derives from his cryptography and computer security background and attempt to dismiss his wider expertise. Would it interest you to know that he was a member of the Secure Flight Working Group, an advisory committee of security experts put together by the TSA to assess the feasibility of the Secure Flight proposal? Or that he has authored a number of well-regarded books on the topic of general security?

As to what you may have learned in the manuals and classes you may have read or attended, would these be the same sort of manuals and classes that were calling all Muslims "proto-terrorists"? As recently as this past September?

As to your requests, they are too much trouble for me, short of a large amount of cash and access to sensitive and confidential information. I can't help but notice that one of your defenses, when challenged on a subject, is to make highly unreasonable demands in the hopes that nobody can see them for what they are. Maybe you would like to provide even a shred of evidence that your claims of TSA efficacy are legitimate?

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Effectively by definition means can do the job. I think what you mean to ask is if there are more efficient ways to do it.

You can point to the Israeli model sure. But in a multicultural society that produced the Unibomber and Timothy McVeigh it would not be effective. It is one thing to single out Arab flyers for additional screening in a country consistenting of Israeli's and Arabs; it is quite another in a country full of Asians, Hispanics, Arabs, Whites, Indians and every other ethnic group conceivable.

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The Israeli model does not operate by ethnic profiling (hell - it can't. The Israeli and Palestinian people are both Semitic. You can't tell them apart easily if they don't want you to.) It does, however, do psychological profiling on an individual basis. This is likely a big part of the extra cost...the security checkpoint staff are trained behavioral experts. They are not $13/hour rent-a-cops, they're highly trained specialists and probably paid accordingly.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Oh there are most definitely more efficient ways to kill a tiger; what I'm saying is that there is only one way the scenario ends when you try to bash a tiger's head in with a rock and it's not effective - the tiger lives.


Let me be quite clear, I'm not equating the TSA to the tiger rock. I'm equating the statement that the only proof you need that the TSA works is that we do not have regular terrorist incidents aboard aircraft with someone saying that the only proof you need that this tiger rock works is that there are not regular tiger incidents in its vicinity. They are both statements that demand someone prove a negative in order to dispute them and are both examples of the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
As for the Israeli method not being effective here, the technique (as Taly pointed out) that is used in their method relies on psychological/behavioral profiling; not racial profiling.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

No, they freely admit it is racial profiling:

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middle ... _security/



http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/ne ... s-1.261075




As to your statement about more proof, I again present the photo of the 120+ weapons collected. You assert that the people carrying them had no ill-intentions but you have no evidence of that whereas the very attempt to bring dynamite onto a plane is pretty damning circumstancial evidence that intent was there.

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You still think using their system would be a good idea, despite what I showed was a 5-fold increase in costs? It can't be done. It's not just the cost, either. For example, one critical layer of El Al's program is the individual interview. Another is preventing "masses" of people, like long lines. Your first interview is when you pull up to the terminal in your car. In the US, even if you had all the highly trained interviewers you needed, there is not enough space for all of this. The traffic problems with each vehicle going through an interview is obvious, but the traffic inside the terminal is another problem.

It can't be done, not within anything approaching reason.

Your own numbers showed this would result in less than a $33 increase in cost per fare --quite affordable, even without factoring in the economy of scale, which could make it significantly cheaper.

As for the rest, I don't see that this is even an issue. They already have the space -- they're currently wasting more space than that with boarding security. The efficiencies gained by switching to such a system would offset the extra checkpoint required. It's just a matter of reorganizing. A small interview booth on the highway on the way into most airports is less of a hiccup than a toll booth.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

It still won't work without racial profiling which is worthless in a multi-ethnic culture.

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Fair enough, what I should have said was:

As for the Israeli method not being effective here, the technique (as Taly pointed out) that is used in their method, and would be effective here, relies on psychological/behavioral profiling; not racial profiling.



Making sure I am clear, I made no statement about more proof, I identified the statement containing the phrase "the only proof you need" as fallacious. I don't recall asserting anything about their intentions other than emphasizing that the TSA states most passengers said they forgot the items were in their baggage.
As for the dynamite, was it live (or inert like the "hand grenade"), was it real (or fake like the toy guns), was it a case like the C4 in that it was brought on the plane to bring it from place to place for perfectly benign reasons or was it brought on the plane with malicious intent? I have a guess about its efficacy judging from the other items highlighted on that board. As I can't read minds, I really don't have a clue about the carrier's intent, but I do know that is wasn't found due to some previously unknown method that only the TSA employs.

I've always been exasperated by the idea that there are hundreds of people waiting in these security lines, wouldn't a terrorist act have the same effect there as on a plane (if not more, "Your Western Security methods will doom you all! Hahahahahah")?

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Uh, that's a huge cost.



LMFAO - you're just handwaving this away? It is not a matter of reorganizing at all. We're talking about serious infrastructure improvements, and renovating the insides of nearly every airport.

This is absurd. Let's take your "small interview booth" example. How much time do you spend at a toll booth? 5 seconds? 15? And what's the AVERAGE time? Including EZPass, where they don't even stop, it's, maybe a 4 second slow down. My local airport, which is regional but not enormous, has four lanes of traffic heading into the airport. I think two of these go straight through the terminal without unloading and loading. So you have 2 heavily used lanes of traffic, moving at 10 MPH. That's more than 1 car per second, between both lanes. How long would the interview take? 20 seconds?

That means you'd need 10 lanes to maintain the flow rate.

How you think an interview is less of a hiccup than a toll booth is beyond me. I don't think you know what you're talking about.

I can't tell you how many times I've thought the exact same thing standing in those lines. CLE is relatively small but there are easily 200 people waiting in major airports such as McCarran. That said, if we ignore the racial profiling and instead switch to asking every flier a series of questions you'd have the same net result. Lots of people waiting around to talk to someone about your childhood, favorite foods, reason for travelling, whatever other screening they put in place.

I said it in a previous post about this but I still think dogs are the most effective screening method out there with a pat-down of the same ilk as attending a football game. You could cut out the pat-down if you put an air marshall on every flight though as the dogs would find any explosives/firearms and if you smuggled a pair of nunchuks on board it wouldn't mean jack in the face of an armed officer.

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I pulled some numbers for you and came up with a ballpark estimate for the costs of this, like you requested. You never responded. Are the costs acceptable to you?

I thought that was included in the $30-40 per ticket, as that's part of the Israeli security method at Ben Gurion. Yes, it's more than acceptable, it's preferable.

Hop, yeah, I've always thought dogs were a good idea too, in conjunction with X-ray and air marshals.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Sorry, didn't think you wanted an answer lol. $33 per flight works for me on an average commercial flight that'd work out to what $0.33 per ticket? I am assuming swapping out the existing workers, scanners, etc, for trained LEOs with appropriately trained dogs would be an equivalent cost though.

/edit saw Vindi's post above. Assuming it is per ticket instead of flight I would still be good with it under the constraint that I no longer need to show up to flights 1.5 hours earlier (my time is more valuable than that).

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It's not $33 per flight. It's a LOT more than that, it's $33 per passenger. I still think that's preferable.

I have no issues with the X-ray machines people complain about, really. It's the inefficient "Take off your shoes, open your laptop bag, place your keys in the bin, you can't bring that handcream unless you check it in your luggage, oh, hold on, you're our random screwed passenger, hold on while we feel you up" bullshit. It's not targeted at all, it's completely random, with security staff not using training or intuition - just following procedures by rote - which is utterly pointless.

In parlance related to my employment area, it's like the difference between calling a script-monkey helpdesk with call-takers following rigid guidelines and scripts, and getting a trained IT professional being paid well to actually take a look at your problem. Yeah, one is more expensive. Its also the one that works.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

No - Israel's methods would be roughly $40 more per passenger, excluding the myriad of infrastructure improvements necessary, which would be what, a billion per airport? Would depend on the size of the airport.

I was talking specifically about the air marshall cost which I think I ball-parked at 1.2 billion. Yeah, if you passed on Israel's methodology (which does not scale and is completely unworkable in the US) and cut out 1.2 billion of waste in TSA's current 6 billion or so budget, and put a marshall on each flight, I'd be on board I think.

edit: you'd still have to screen for explosives, like you said. an air marshall wouldn't be effective against a suicide bomber. dogs? digital sniffers? you'd need something.

I said dogs. Lots and lots of dogs. Armies of canines tearing limbs off terrorists and ripping IEDs out of suicide bombers anuses.

At an extra $40 per ticket my time is still more valuable so I'd be on board.

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I apologize. Apparently this is the case. I would have sworn you were involved in some big stink about him in the last thread about the TSA where he was mentioned; I thought it was either the backscatter thread or the one about NJ resisting the TSA. But apparently I just dreamed that, or something. I honestly can't explain why I thought that was the case, because I'm not finding anything like that, even by some other poster.



Well, "security theater" definitely isn't a rigorously defined term, so I'm not sure you can really call that an aspect of its definition. But that's a mostly irrelevant aside. What you've quoted was based on an editorial by Peter Glaskowsky, based on a lecture by Schneier, based on The Psychology of Security, an essay that he wrote a few years ago. I actually more or less agree with what Glaskowsky is saying, but the wiki blurb is not a very good reflection of what either Glaskowsky or Schneier were trying to say to about the possible merits of security theater. To add my own emphasis, this is the issue with the wiki summary:


Nothing the summary is saying is wrong, it just fails to explain exactly what those "localised situations" "may" "sometimes" be. And in the case of the long sentence I've underlined, completely omits any mention of context, as though encouraging people not to avoid activities is just universally beneficially. That's not a nitpick -- the issue of context is a large and essential elemental of the essay.

To be more specific, what Schneier was trying to say (and Glaskowsky was "seconding"), is that there are many situations where people are actually quite secure but feel that they are not. Defining exactly what is meant by being "actually secure" is a little tricky, but mathematically you can look at it simply as the product of risk (probability of harm) and the cost/magnitude of that harm. An example that Schneier gave in the lecture that Glaskowsky attended was the "Tylenol crisis" in 1982. Not to make light of 7 people being murdered, but people developed an irrational fear of OTC medication as a result. And by that, I mean a change in their behavior that was far out of proportion to the actual security (as defined above) of the situation. In these kinds of situations (and only in those situations), a bit of inexpensive security theater is theoretically beneficial. The wiki summary does a poor job of conveying that context.

Secondly, there is a less contextual argument to make regarding security theater: that it might be psychologically deterring (under any circumstances) to the low-hanging fruit. And, therefore, it might have a slightly larger effect on real security than a direct analysis would suggest. Fair enough. However, such as this may be the case (that depends on the specifics), it's important to appreciate that this argument is only saying that security theater would be more effective than nothing at all, not that it would be more effective than real security. And it's equally important to understand what the argument isn't saying. It's not saying that security theater is necessarily even worthwhile over nothing at all -- just that it might provide more real security.



It may not have been communicated very well, but I don't think this is really what anyone here is intending to say. And I'm quite sure it's not what Schneier thinks, either. One of his recurrent themes is trade-offs: that every increase in real security has an associated real cost. You can't get something for nothing, as they say. "Cost", in this context is deliberately vague. It may a direct economic cost of implementing the measures that increase real security, cost in terms of lost freedom, cost in terms of lost convenience, etc. Whether something is worthless or worthwhile is simply a question of whether you think the trade-off is a good one.

So you're quite right that being security theater doesn't automatically make something worthless. If we value whatever little effect it might have on real security more than we value what we gave up to obtain it, then it has worth at least in a literal sense. But as Schneier emphasizes in the essay, the core problem is that humans are really bad at making modern day security trade-offs. Or to be more accurate, we're really good at understanding costs -- which is half of the trade-off equation, and one of the two key components of security (cost of failure) -- but horrendously bad at estimating odds.



Here's my point: I think that for the most part, the specific Gladers that are criticizing TSA procedures for being "security theater" are familiar with all this. The criticism isn't intended to be: "This is security theater, and therefore bad, and we should just get rid of it entirely". Rather...

I think it's a pretty universally accepted truth that the cost of the TSA procedures (i.e., the procedural changes since 9/11) is high. That's cost in dollars, time, convenience, freedoms, dignity, etc. There might be (even considerable) disagreement about the individual components or how much we value them, but I don't think very many people would disagree that the sum of all of them is considerably large. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that. It's a good trade-off if these changes produce an equivalently large increase in our real security. But if not -- if the changes are an example of security theater -- then this a poor trade-off indeed. When people criticize the procedures for being "security theater", this is what they're trying to point out, not that security theater is automatically bad.


In other words, basically this. It's not just that it's theater, but that it's theater with a very high cost of admission. It may not be "worthless", but it's not worthwhile. We're caught up in exactly the kind of psychological trap that Schneier was describing above: spectacular, abnormal, uncontrollable risks that receive huge amounts of attention. And it's making us accept increasingly stupid counter-measures because we believe that we're getting more out of them than we really are.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Very well said, Stathol.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

So basically we've come full circle to the argument of effectiveness versus efficiency.

By the way I think the person you were thinking of who questioned the "expert" was me. IIRC the guy has two degrees in Computer Science and I personally don't feel that qualifies him to speak as an authority on the subject.

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Here's Bruce Schneier on airport security.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/297357-5

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