Schneier on Security

As Washington, D.C., gears up for the inauguration, there’s one thing that you’re not seeing around town. Shoe-checking stations. While one attempted shoe bombing was enough to make all of us wander unshod through the airports of this great nation for years—there will be security check points all over Capitol Hill—shoe checking will not be part of the action.

Why? It’s not that the chance of a shoe bombing has somehow been definitively eliminated. It’s because the costs (frostbitten toes and long delays) have been weighed against the (low) possible risk of Richard Reid II. We probably should have reached the same conclusion about airports long ago. But this particular brand of cost-benefit analysis often eludes security officials, especially in the public sector…