Okay, who’s going to try it?
Nevermind.
I have personally seen all sorts of weapons, chemicals, drugs, and electronics make it past since 2001. They do not even attempt to find the ingredients for flash powder or thermite in powder or solid form. If they did find it, is it legal to carry on a plane? I regularly fly with the electronics needed to trigger ignition. I watched it on the Xray once, it even looked like a B to an untrained eye. More than once, while flying with it, I noticed the screener spent much less than 1 sec looking at the monitor while my item was displayed. After 10,000 passengers in a day, how can you do it in 1 second? I can see it is possible to do quickly when there is no metal to view. But mine should have deserved a physical search, or at least a second glance. This experiment is repeatable.
I agree with kombat, it’d be EVEN EASIER to trigger something outside of the checkpoint, where there are often 500+ people waiting.
I think that by allowing the TSA to harass people with airport security - we have in fact allowed the terrorists of Sept 11 to win. That is their legacy, at least until people realize the futility of seizing small knives and containers of shampoo.
A reality is that by dooming the flight list as soon as the plane takeover began, those terrorist messed it up for any other terrorist who would ever want to just take over a plane for hostages. People will now rise up, and coupled with the locked cabin doors I doubt we’ll be seeing airplane takeovers anytime soon unless the bad guys smuggle enough guns on board to pretty much kill everyone. If blowing up the plane is the goal there doesn’t seem to be much that can be done at the airport to prevent the professionals. As mentioned previous, the best prevention is gathering intelligence to stop that before they arrive at the airport.
So I would conclude airport security should be good enough to weed out the guns and obvious bombs as best they can. In other words, the same type of security prior to 2001 is good enough.
Not only did those people kill thousands that day, but they made a lasting negative impact on the lives of hundreds of millions who have flown on an airplane and been harassed unnecessarily. By allowing the security theater to continue, we are continuing to admit the terrorists won.
Security is very effective at taking unattended bags. I turned my back for a minute and mine was gone. I immediately ran to the security office as my plane was about to board. Already they had completely unpacked, itemized, and categorized everything in my suitcase, making it impossible to repack in under 10 minutes. This happened in less than 5 minutes including the time it took them to transport the bag across the small airport. Assuming I ran the same speed as the cart, they did it in under 2 minutes. Very efficient at delaying customers. Since everything was organized differently from the way it was originally packed, there was no way for me to know if anything was missing in time to catch my plane. I was forced to trust them. That’ll teach me to drink from the water fountain!
I worked a summer on a security checktop and realized that there are ways to get guns or knives through security and on to the plane.
This is another factor which points to the futility of the TSA, which is what cognitive psychology calls selective attention. If you’d like to experience the difficulty of being a TSA agent, see if you can count how many times the players in white pass the basketball in this video.
The fact is that the human mind isn’t constructed to sort through massive amounts of data for hours on end, so subverting a system based around pattern recognition is trivial. As it’s already been stated though, you don’t even need to play by the rules to win this particular game.