D.B.Cooper started the airline security mess, after his (fatal) skyjacking for cash, we stopped allowing handguns--which basically had no effect upon the number of planes taken.
Along comes 9/11. Hijackers using razor blades took 3 aircraft and, for the first time, used them as the flying bombs that they have always been.
Reaction?
More of the same security that failed before. And neither the then current nor the current system can prevent a 9/11-style take-over.
Frankly, unless you knock out the passengers and restrain them for the trip, there's no certain way to avoid these things...at best you can make them more difficult.
The 9/11 planes could have been taken bare-handed, since the basic threat was to a crew member, and nearly anyone can be trained to kill with their bare hands.
The thing which stops 9/11 style jackings is the 9/11 flights themselves--who, these days, would let someone take over a plane merely because they threatened a crew member--now that we're all aware that any take-over can end in a suicide crash?
I'm still waiting for the TSA checkpoint bombers to appear--we've now nicely contained huge numbers of passengers in the same location for them.
The fact is, terrorists are not a major problem in today's world.
Terrorists generally manage to kill around 2,000/yr world-wide, with most being in the Mid-East and Malaysia.
Malaria alone kills millions. As does starvation.
Heart disease is the number one killer of Americans by a huge margin, Heck, even car crashes in the US alone kill more people each year than terrorists do in 5 years.
These problems, unlike the security issues, are subject to actual solution and at a far lower cost than a single year of TSA's budget we could eliminate a handful of diseases which cause death or disablement to hundreds of millions world-wide.
We could even wipe out the most common STD's.
For US$10x10^9 I can moderate the climate change if not completely stabilize it.
Could the new crop of revealing body scanners detect an explosive discretely tucked into a ball point pen? Are randomly-used explosive scanners capable of sniffing out such a device?
A friend sent me the chilling video below which shows the power of explosives put inside an everyday pen - you know, a Bic or freebie hotel pen. Maybe, we should take comfort in the fact the two Youtube instances of the video has only garnered 11,000 views, but it’s a vivid depiction of the seemingly impossible challenge airport security people face in batting 1.000. Finding a needle in a haystack every time was never easy.
MIT researchers are experimenting with lasers that determine chemical compositions. credit: MIT
The pen explosive in the first video below purportedly vaporizes a watermelon with a blast powerful enough, I suspect, to bring down a jetliner. The second video here presents some pretty compelling evidence to show the pen did not vaporize the watermelon by itself.
In other words, the pen explosive is a fake. The credit on the video is Abum.com which describes itself as “…rising quickly to one of the more well known video sites.” It was posted on Youtube by “hoonsup” and described as a “New threat in the world of terror.”
Fake or not, the pen explosive serves as a reminder that the TSA, airport security personnel worldwide and police can never take cleverly hidden explosive devices seriously enough. Even if the video is a fake, determined terrorists will try to find cracks in the system.
The video doesn’t mention the chemicals used in the explosive except to call one of them a “binary.” A droplet of the explosive on a black powder fuse takes the place of the ink cartridge. That’s all it takes. Only the most vigilant and highly-trained TSA employee could tell the difference between a refill and the explosive.
I debated whether embedding the video only encourages bad actors, but overrode my objection because flyers should know what the other side is up to. I fly at least a dozen times a year, sometimes more. In fact, I went through Amsterdam last May on a Northwest Airbus A330 in Delta paint just like the one that dodged a horrific end in Detroit on Christmas. I also flew back from London to Boston on a PanAm 747 less than a week before PanAm 103 exploded and crashed in 1988. Flying may be safer than driving, but has more of a Russian Roulette flavor.
The good news is that work is being done to stay a step ahead of the terrorists. In early December, MIT researchers described a new laser operating in the terahertz spectrum that identifies chemical compositions.
“The result is an important step toward airport scanners that could tell whether a vial in a closed suitcase contains aspirin, methamphetamines or an explosive,” an MIT press release said about the laser.
Such a device can’t be put into practical use soon enough.
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