On Thu, Sep 20, 2001 at 03:44:49PM -0700, auto301094@hushmail.com wrote:

Good ideas about private sector security practices, but does anyone have any suggestions that particularly pertain to technology that might serve to slow up the biometrics bandwagon? Deperessingly enough, that's the way it seems to be going, and I reallly don't see a way out of it.

Well I guess a little rational thought might not hurt as the motivator of policy rather than public perception, and hidden agendas to increase state power and outlawing unrelated technologies they'd like to outlaw anyway (eg privacy and encryption software to increase the scope of open source signals intelligence.) Identification doesn't appear to be that relevant to hardening airports. I saw some inanely stupid arguments on news over the last week about policies and procedures along the lines of 'if our policy was different this wouldn't have happend', the perpetrators knew the policies in effect and planned their operation around them. The world can spend billions re-jigging policies and procedures, but few of them even seem like speed bumps, and most I've seen proposed look like they would have no effect at even complicating further attacks. If one presumes the motives of the politicians are sincere they are idiots -- as chess players go they aren't even able to think one move ahead -- aren't able to ask the question of themselves: "what would the opponent do if this candidate policy were in place?" It's pretty impossible to harden a country with such low population density and number of fat targets. The attacker will simply attack the target with the best trade-off of political value, destructive value and ease of attack. You can't pre-empt this stuff. Also as well as the obvious fact that people of arabic descent are rather a broad profile to single out for extra scrutiny, it seems on reading more of the background of the region that there are fundamentalist muslims in Afghanistan from different ethnic backgrounds: Egyptians, Chinese, Africans, and perhaps even the odd Russian. It's pretty much a "doh" that scrutinizing arabic looking people, will lead the would-be attacker to select suicide attackers with different ethnic appearance. A much better approach to aggresively and honestly persue would be to attempt to improve relations with the minorities who are feeling persecuted directly by previous US military and political actions and by indirect actions in sponsoring, funding, training: Iraq, Iran, Saudi Taleban, Israel etc, etc at various points in the past and currently. It seems that world stability is more likely to be achieved by diplomacy than by engaging in tit-for-tat escalations of violence. Guerilla tactics make it impossibly expensive to harden a country against such attacks. Whereas one might normally attribute actions with apparently the opposite effect of the claimed intent to stupidity ("never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity"), I suspect that the real reason for the disparity is that the stated intent is not the real intent. The real intents are probably economic, and the actions planned inline with economic analysis and forcasts, though not the interests of world stability. This can't be explained openly to the public as they would reject the strategies. Adam