No security
It's not hard to make a bomb. You can mix a couple of colorless liquids together or mold a grey pasty clay. You can hide it in a water bottle, or in a shoe or inside a teddy bear. It's not hard to make a bomb.
It's easy to kill a lot of people. You can make a good poison from castor beans or from common cleaners. You can scrape a sheep and create innocent-looking powders like anthrax. Poisons and diseases can be hiding in makeup, candy bars or as powder in an envelope. It's easy to kill a lot of people.
It's simple to make a weapon. All sorts of everyday things can be deadly if in the wrong hands and wielded maliciously. Boxcutters, pieces of broken glass, sharpenened belt buckles, knitting needles and pocket knives can all cut and unlike the song, the first cut isn't necessarily the deepest.
The news that the TSA is banning liquids and gels from airplanes is only surprising in that it has taken this long to enact. Our counterterrorism efforts have often been reactive, not anticipatory, and this prohibition on liquids is no exception to the rule.
Every normal item carried by an airline passenger could be hiding a deadly surprise. Bottles, shaving kits and shoes; chessboards, paperback books and ipods; even a ham sandwich could have a nasty surprise hidden in the Grey Poupon.
The only way to assure airline security is to ban almost all carry-on baggage, search everyone to the skin and exhaustively examine checked luggage. The best way to assure this would be to issue every passenger a disposable jumpsuit, force them to strip and shower and wear the special clothing at the gate. Even then, we'd have to be x-rayed and occasionally cavity searched (and not by dentists, either).
I'm not actually kidding about this. It would be a reasonable way to minimize risk, although of course, not foolproof.
At a minimum, I expect the liquid ban to become permanent and joined by a prohibition on electronic devices like phones, ipods and laptop computers.
There is no security in this world, but it's worth remembering that there never has been. We Westerners are now aware of this truth that people in the mideast have known for many years.
Posted on August 11, 2006
