a libertarian approach to airport security: suggestions

Adam Back adam at cypherspace.org
Thu Sep 20 16:56:29 PDT 2001


On Thu, Sep 20, 2001 at 03:44:49PM -0700, auto301094 at 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





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