Salon: Ask the Pilot on "Security Theater"

[mcscajun]

On the ground and in the air, we're progressing rapidly from a state of acceptable anxiety to one of mass hysteria. Such reactionary and self-defeating behavior puts much at stake -- your time, your tax dollars, your liberties and your toothpaste -- but what's scariest of all is that the traveling public appears perfectly content. One major newspaper, reporting recently from an airport, spoke of passengers graciously acquiescing to the new carry-on prohibitions, as well as to their own silly behavior, in nonchalant deference to "this era of terrorism."

(snip)

...if anything is "extremist," it's the notion that confiscating coffee cups and hand lotion truly makes us safer, and that subjecting millions of fliers to security theater, rather than actual security, is in the airlines' best interest.

(snip)

It dawns on me that as I've spent thousands of words and, probably, too much of readers' time analyzing this stuff over the past few weeks, I've danced and dallied around the central point. Allow me to quote Bruce Schneier, the author and security guru, who in a recent blog entry more elegantly sums things up:

"The point of terrorism is to cause terror. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want."

http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/09/08/askthepilot200/index1.html

I like "security theater" better than the longer phrase I've been using for years "The illusion of security"; it really cuts to the chase. And Bruce Schneier's quote on the point of terrorism should be picked up and emblazoned far and wide.

[aquart]

1. Nah. It's the War on Toiletries.