In the Economist news, there is a forum called Economist Debates. It has a debate (archived on Mar 23) on the effectiveness of airline security and the effectiveness of the TSA (especially as it extends worldwide).
See:
In this debate, a former head of the TSA, Kip Hawley, refers to an Al Qaeda terrorist named:
Abdulrahman Hilal Hussein
and he “was technically gifted, spoke several languages with pitch-perfect street vocabulary, and in Pakistan camps trained dozens of western European and North American operatives who looked like main-street Westerners and were unknown to counter-terrorism authorities.”
impressive.
never heard of him. (not that surprising really).
I can’t find anything about this individual. I tried googling the name and several alternates, but I know nothing about arabic names except that they aren’t western and I shouldn’t follow western conventions. The only relevant hit I got from Google was Mr. Hawley’s article.
Can someone find out more about this person? I assume he exist(ed). Is Mr. Hawley’s description accurate and is it based on anything more than unnamed security security officials discussing possible threats and next years budget?
What is apparent is that even though none of these operatives, who were unknown to counter-terrorism authorities, ever accomplished anything against airplanes.
Mr. Hawley no longer has to worry about a budget which increases his credibility in my mind, but he makes some surprising statements and I would like to see some independent evidence for his claims.
The costs for me are easy for me to measure. Flying is now something I avoid rather than enjoy. I no longer enjoy the atmosphere at airports, the ridiculous screening procedures, and the inability to carry a coffee from one side of the airport to the other. My window for drive versus fly was 6 hours and now it is 12 hours. The benefits of this program are something I have no idea how to measure. I don’t feel any safer but my feelings are not often relied upon as a measuring device to make social decisions.
Well fairness to the money situation, we are spending a lot of money to pay the TSA employees, thus jobs, income, taxes, etc. You’re also not considering the economic loss from time lost due to people driving.
In deaths you have a point.
The thing that always bothered me the most is that whole 9/11 reaction was for showboating purposes only. To say “look at how tough I can be on terrorism”.
It is unbelievable the amount of security measures were then taken in all parts of the country.
If we had continued with the same level of security, nothing different would have happened. Except that we wouldn’t have the patriot act, and we would stop being harassed by TSA screening.
I hate analysis like this because it presumes every one’s time corresponds to a loss in income or income earning opportunity. It’s like saying a guy who sleeps 7 hours a night instead of 6 is losing x amount of money every year. It’s just lazy thinking. In this case, it’s particularly dumb because even with the wait time added by TSA procedures, you will still save a huge amount of time vs. driving in nearly every case. People don’t bother flying short distance (generally) if they can avoid it, so acting as though time is the important variable here is ignoring the fact that the vast majority of travelers already take that calculus into account.
Furthermore, this hand waving of 500 additional automobile deaths is pretty callous given that very few people would trade an increased chance of a loved one dying for 20 extra minutes they didn’t have to wait in line.
I’m trying to figure out where the hand waving is.
Schneier’s argument is actually that there’s an increased chance of a loved one dying AND 20 extra minutes waiting in line. He’s presenting it as a lose/lose scenario.
I suppose there could be a class of person who views waiting to do something as a benefit and not a cost, but generally we assume that people would rather be doing other things than standing in a line.
There are costs and benefits to every decision. Not all these are monetary. When we compare costs and benefits, we count all costs and all benefits, most of which are non-monetary, for the simple reason that money is a means of exchange to get the products, services, and leisure time we desire.
Time spent waiting in a line is time not spent doing other things. It’s not lazy thinking, it is accurate accounting.
This is the benefit of flying which is why people fly when they can afford it. This is not the benefit of standing in line at an airport instead of enjoying a beer, eating a dinner, playing a game on the computer, or going to the bathroom, among many of the other activities people engage in when they’re not standing in lines. Foregoing these opportunities is a cost. It’s easy to remember: it’s called opportunity cost.
What else? That Schneier is a nitwit.
He seems to be assuming that terrorist attacks are random events. If you assume that a terrorist attack has a, say, one in a million chance of happening on any flight, and that the cost of the attack is some randomly distributed figure, then you can calculate if TSA is worth it. However they are not random, and pulling security will lead to a large increase in attacks directly. What was the economic cost of 9/11? I bet a lot more than 10 billion in direct dollars, not counting the cost of all those people not working and watching it on TV.
Security did not start with 9/11. When I was in college you flew with no security at all. Then people starting hijacking planes to Cuba. When they put in the first security checks, which were a pain and which contribute most of the delay, the hijackings mostly went away.
There are a lot cheaper forms of entertainment, and most of them I can choose to avoid if I’d like. Paying tax money to people to entertain folks with no choice in the matter is ridiculous.
Yes, I consider the TSA to be entertainers. Their job is to make people feel better. We call people who do that job entertainers.
Pulling all security, maybe. I would wager a rather large sum of money that pulling some of the more ridiculous security-theater policies of recent years (like the 3-oz liquid rule, or the no-shoes thing) will absolutely not lead to an increase in attacks.
Regarding the OP’s question, I found this in an report:
He is in Wikipedia under the name Abu Zubair al-Masri. I’m not sure what they mean by “might have been Abu Jihad al-Masri’s replacement as head of the External Operations Unit in late 2008,” since he was killed only three weeks after Abu Jihad al-Masri, but maybe they just mean “at the time,” implying that by late 2008 Abu Jihad al-Masri was no longer head of the unit.
As for the ongoing debate, I can only say that I believe that many of the more picayune and inconsistent requirements of flying under TSA are pointless time-wasters. The business with the shoes, for instance, was introduced in response to a failed attempt that I do not think would have been repeated, and might not ever have been successful – more importantly, the scanners won’t pick up the explosive used, so what’s the point?
I wonder whether we’re going to be stuck with this charade permanently, or whether some government is finally going to grow a dick and clamp down on this stupidity. The limitations on liquids make absolutely zero sense. You can take 100ml max per container through security, anything over that is tossed, but there’s no limit on the number of containers used (at least in Europe) meaning it’s perfectly legal to pass 500ml of the same liquid through security, as long as it is split into 5x100ml containers. There’s not even any consistency in what they are looking for: some airports make you open your laptop and show the guards the screen and keyboard, others do not. Others force you to remove Kindles from bags and put them through the scanner separately, others do not. Others are more zealous in making people remove shoes, etc. etc.
He only talks about the extra security since 9/11, and the extra number of people driving themselves to death to avoid the hassle.
More people have died in unnecessary car accidents since 9/11 than died in the twin towers that day. Do you think this is a meaningless statistic?
Security precautions should regularly be judged on cost/benefit by a disinterested part. I have not seen any interest in cooperating with such an analysis, and that puts the whole system in doubt.
I am not saying anyone views waiting in line as a benefit. I am saying that the cost is not equal to the amount of time multiplied by the average hourly wage. That’s usually the way these things are calculated, and I disagree with that completely.
It’s lazy thinking to assume that the ALL time has a direct monetary cost. As if everyone would be far more productive if the TSA wasn’t wasting their time. Most people would just waste their time doing something else. That doesn’t represent a net monetary loss usually, just an inconvenience.
I am not saying it’s not a real cost, I saying people’s collective time spent waiting in line a the airport does not have a real monetary cost anywhere near what some of these articles claim.
For all the business people flying, this is the actual cost. For all flying in their spare time, the cost is equal to what they are willing to pay for that extra time.
Since a lot of flying is for business, and the average wage among flyers (per flight) is probably higher than the average wage for the whole population (and they probably value their free time higher), it seems quite reasonable to me, and may even understate the value.
Any such metric is of course not perfect, and should never be regarded as so.
I think you are making an incorrect assumption that ALL business travel is necessary. More importantly, if they were truly losing money flying during business hours, why wouldn’t don’t you see more business people flying during non-business hours? Either way, I suppose it’s not worth getting worked up over, so feel free to ignore the complaint.