Exactly. That’s why I said “look the security guard in the eye… and many places accomplish this with an ID check”. My point is that it’s the look in the eye that’s important and the ID check is a contrivance to make that happen. People would be incredibly frustrated by a security guard who spent 30 seconds making smalltalk about your kids, but if they spend that time on some seemingly important task, we put up with it.
You’re right. But genius terrorist masterminds are pretty rare. The vast majority of threats are not very smart and likely to be quite nervous. Remember, we don’t have to catch them all to make any given layer of security valuable.
I agree. Note that I said the “look the security guard in the eye” part was low cost. I didn’t comment on the harm done by the ID check.
We must hang out in different places. The clubs I used to frequent routinely bounced people even if they appeared old enough. These clubs were fairly extreme and had some shady clientele, so they could count on getting a pass-through by the police almost every night. The police were looking for any chance to cite the club, so the club had to be diligent enough to deny them that opportunity. They had to screen more tightly than the police would do later.
They bounced a lot of people without ID regardless of how old they appeared, knowing those would be immediate cites later. They bounced a lot of people with what appeared to be valid ID if the person seemed at all questionable. In a lot of cases, the bouncer just had to call the bluff and the person would give it up. The bouncer would hold a seemingly valid ID up next to a person’s face and say “c’mon now”, and the person would get a sheepish look and stalk off. They probably rejected a few people with valid IDs, but they had to err on the side of caution to protect their club.
This situation is not the same as airport security checks, but my point is that an intelligent gatekeeper can do a lot of good by just doing a challenge-response on every entrant. The ID itself has very little to do with this, but as I said in another post, the ID check is a contrivance to make the interaction happen.
The question isn’t whether a security layer can conceivable have a benefit. It’s whether the benefit it worth the cost. Every security layer has costs – in salaries and equipment, in time and inconvenience, and in lost privacy and civil rights. And last time I checked, we didn’t have infinite money or time. So we need to make sure we’re spending our money and time on things that are going to do the most good.
And checking ID’s really doesn’t do much to catch or stop terrorists; we’d be a lot better off using that money to hire investigators to find real criminals, or many other things.
I’ll agree that running an ID against some sort of watchlist is pretty pointless, but the very act of checking the ID does have some value.
Since most of these ID checkpoints don’t even compare the ID to a list or database, it’s clear that checking the ID is not the point. The civil liberties guys (of which I’m one) complain that this is an invasion of privacy, but in reality the security guard may not even be reading the ID, must less recording or remembering it enough to invade your privacy. We could replace the ID check with psychic palm readers who looked at your hand for 12 seconds to read your intent, and the end result would be the same as the ID check. That end result is two-fold: (1) the act of challenge-response allows a trained officer to profile each person and subject some to greater scrutiny and (2) the face-to-face with an officer increases the general public perception that we are being monitored and “protected”, which does quite a bit to deter criminal acts (e.g. the benefit of surveillance cameras and “you’re being watched” signs in retail stores).
I’m not saying it’s a good thing (however you choose to define “good”). I’m just saying that the ID checks are done for a reason and have some benefit. They aren’t as pointless as many self-styled security experts would have you believe (and no, I’m not calling Schneier self-styled or denigrating him in any way…).
It’s hard to do a double-blind test on the effects on ID checks on homicidal terrrorists. So, we won’t be getting much hard data on this.
Imagine you were bent on harm. Even if at a logical level you were convinced you could make it through an ID check, it still would make you a little nervous, moreso than just a security person making small talk. People trained to spot this could take you aside for additional questioning.
This doesn’t seem to happen in the US, but I did hear a news program about the security agents assigned to admitting passengers onto Israeli airliners who are quite trained at this and who apparently have prevented any terrorist acts on airliners for many years.
So, I wouldn’t say it doesn’t do much to stop terrorists. The simplistic ID checks probably stops the amateurs and easily-phased. As part of a complete package it could stop all but the best-trained terrorists.
It’s sad that some, if not many, people think this way. If you believe that a well trained professional can spot most criminals(or any really) or potential criminals by looking at them, talking to them, etc. then why don’t we just replace juries with panels of such people. In fact, let’s just audit random people and put them in jail before they commit their heinous crimes.
If you think that there’s some sort of mysterious psychological analysis that can be used to identify FUTURE criminals, terrorists, etc. and that it’s in any way ethical or appropriate to use this analysis in a public place, you’re thinking of a police state.
You’re joking, right? Because any trained cop can sense when something isn’t right. Then you follow up on it. So can any competent teacher. Is it fool-proof? No. Is it a valuable tool in preventing socially-unapproved behavior? You bet!
Yes, but that should never be a reason to detain someone, question them, or make them miss their flight. Your rights should not be infringed just because someone had a hunch.
Well sure it has some value, I suppose. No doubt somebody, somewhere, is disposed to harm and also stupid, ill-prepared and incompetent enough to be foiled by an ID check to get into town hall. But I don’t think there are enough of those people around to make ID checks worth the cost.
I mean, there’s some value in hiring enough cops to have one standing at every major intersection in every city 24-7-365. But I don’t think there’s anyone (OK, other than police unions) who claims that the benefit of that is worth the huge cost of all those salaries. There’s also a whole lot of security value in banning any vehicular traffic within one mile of any federal building or landmark (would have stopped Tim McVeigh). But again, I think most people would agree that the clear costs of that (mostly, in people’s time) are prohibitive.
So the question isn’t “Can checking ID possibly, ever, do something, however small, towards security?” the question is “Does checking ID offer enough benefit to be worth the cost, or should we be spending our security dollars on something better?”
And the only real benefit of ID checking seems to be that it makes innocent people feel a little better, and possibly discourages a few of the most amaturish and incompetent evildoers. It certainly wouldn’t have affected the WTC bombing, the WTC airplanes, Oklahoma City, the Madrid bombings or any instance of mass violence that I’m aware of (in the modern, developed world). Counterexamples welcomed.
And it has real costs: the salaries of guards (or, alternatively, the time of the guards who could be doing more useful things), the wasted time of people waiting in line (when they could be doing something productive that makes us all better off), and the loss of privacy (different people may value that differently, of course).
In an ideal world…maybe. But we exist in one that is less than ideal. Freedom + Security is a constant. Any increase of **F ** is matched by a decrease in S. And vice versa. I would much rather miss my flight because of mistaken suspicion than go down because some guard wasn’t suspicious enough.
No one but you has taken the extraordinary leap in logic to suggest that the fact that someone who checks IDs might spot criminal behavior should lead to the abolition of trial by jury and some kind of prescient criminal detection a la “Minority Report”. On the other hand, everyone else in this thread has pointed out that checking IDs has a cost in both manpower and freedom but it also has some (though it’s obviously debatable how much) security benefit. If you seriously believe that a face-to-face meeting with a law enforcement officer has no value whatsoever in detecting criminal behavior, I submit that you have very little contact with real-world law enforcement. Security is a balance between effectiveness and cost, and checking IDs (or, more accurately, the challenge-response that it entails) certainly belongs in the equation.
The OP asked how checking IDs affected security. I’ve tried to explain how. The OP didn’t ask whether it was worth the cost or whether it was good for society. We could go on at length about that and you and I would probably be on the same side. But your logical fallacies aren’t helping the cause.
A friend of mine recently found a Pennsylvania drivers license in her 17 year old daughter’s room which had a birthdate making the girl 21 (legal drinking age in PA). She showed it to me and I could not tell it was fake. We showed it to several bartenders (it was a good excuse to go out barhopping) and none of them could tell it was fake. Once they were told it was fake, they took it under better light and still could not tell.
That’s certainly not true. Shackling workers to their desks will certainly decrease freedom, but at the same time, make them much less secure, as they couldn’t escape in case of fire, flood, or even a madman shooting at them. Or, for another example, residents of Stalinist Soviet Union(/Nazi Germany/Pinochet Chile/etc) were not particularly free, but, given the millions of deaths, they pretty clearly weren’t very secure either.
So just because you’re less free, it doesn’t mean you’re more secure.
What is true that security doesn’t come at no cost, so we need to think carefully about whether any given security measure is worth the cost in freedom, dollars, time, and everything else.
On the whole I could agree with this statement… however, by and large we’re not being checked and prodded by law enforcement officers at all, but hastily-trained low wage average schmo types who just found the job in the want ads, and could pass the pee test for pot that week. I rather doubt a number of the folks I’ve seen doing this job have any relevant experience in law enforcement, transport (in many cases even as an airline passenger), or anything multicultural/international.
Sorry, that’s not what would happen at all. IN the Real World USA it would go like this:
“Well, yes I am, Sir. All three. I’m a Nazi Terrorist planning to overthrow the government. Heil Hitler!”
“You are under arrest for making threating statements. This is a federal crime. We are not obligated to allow you to see your relatives or a lawyer.”
They really don’t like jokes like that, even ones that are obviously untrue.