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Whatever are we to make of this:
It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.
To answer your first question: toxic dart guns.
EDITED TO ADD (12/5): Snopes, a reliable source in these matters, claims this to be a hoax.
My seventh Wired.com column is on line. Nothing you haven’t heard before, except for this part:
I know quite a lot about this. I was a member of the government’s Secure Flight Working Group on Privacy and Security. We looked at the TSA’s program for matching airplane passengers with the terrorist watch list, and found a complete mess: poorly defined goals, incoherent design criteria, no clear system architecture, inadequate testing. (Our report was on the TSA website, but has recently been removed—”refreshed” is the word the organization used—and replaced with an “executive summary” (.doc) that contains none of the report’s findings. The TSA did retain two (.doc) rebuttals (.doc), which read like products of the same outline and dismiss our findings by saying that we didn’t have access to the requisite information.) Our conclusions match those in two (.pdf) reports (.pdf) by the Government Accountability Office and one (.pdf) by the DHS inspector general.
That’s right; the TSA is disappearing our report.
I also wrote an op ed for the Sydney Morning Herald on “weapons”—like the metal knives distributed with in-flight meals—aboard aircraft, based on this blog post. Again, nothing you haven’t heard before. (And I stole some bits from your comments to the blog posting.)
There is new news, though. The TSA is relaxing the rules for bringing pointy things on aircraft:.
The summary document says the elimination of the ban on metal scissors with a blade of four inches or less and tools of seven inches or less – including screwdrivers, wrenches and pliers – is intended to give airport screeners more time to do new types of random searches.
Passengers are now typically subject to a more intensive, so-called secondary search only if their names match a listing of suspected terrorists or because of anomalies like a last-minute ticket purchase or a one-way trip with no baggage.
The new strategy, which has been tested in Pittsburgh, Indianapolis and Orange County, Calif., will mean that a certain number of passengers, even if they are not identified by these computerized checks, will be pulled aside and subject to an added search lasting about two minutes. Officials said passengers would be selected randomly, without regard to ethnicity or nationality.
What happens next will vary. One day at a certain airport, carry-on bags might be physically searched. On the same day at a different airport, those subject to the random search might have their shoes screened for explosives or be checked with a hand-held metal detector. “By design, a traveler will not experience the same search every time he or she flies,” the summary said. “The searches will add an element of unpredictability to the screening process that will be easy for passengers to navigate but difficult for terrorists to manipulate.”
The new policy will also change the way pat-down searches are done to check for explosive devices. Screeners will now search the upper and lower torso, the entire arm and legs from the mid-thigh down to the ankle and the back and abdomen, significantly expanding the area checked.
Currently, only the upper torso is checked. Under the revised policy, screeners will still have the option of skipping pat-downs in certain areas “if it is clear there is no threat,” like when a person is wearing tight clothing making it obvious that there is nothing hidden. But the default position will be to do the more comprehensive search, in part because of fear that a passenger could be carrying plastic explosives that might not set off a handheld metal detector.
I don’t know if they will still make people take laptops out of their cases, make people take off their shoes, or confiscate pocket knives. (Different articles have said different things about the last one.)
This is a good change, and it’s long overdue. Airplane terrorism hasn’t been the movie-plot threat that everyone worries about for a while.
The most amazing reaction to this is from Corey Caldwell, spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants:
When weapons are allowed back on board an aircraft, the pilots will be able to land the plane safety but the aisles will be running with blood.
How’s that for hyperbole?
In Beyond Fear and elsewhere, I’ve written about the notion of “agenda” and how it informs security trade-offs. From the perspective of the flight attendants, subjecting passengers to onerous screening requirements is a perfectly reasonable trade-off. They’re safer—albeit only slightly—because of it, and it doesn’t cost them anything. The cost is an externality to them: the passengers pay it. Passengers have a broader agenda: safety, but also cost, convenience, time, etc. So it makes perfect sense that the flight attendants object to a security change that the passengers are in favor of.
EDITED TO ADD (12/2): The SFWG report hasn’t been removed from the TSA website, just unlinked.
EDITED TO ADD (12/20): The report seems to be gone from the TSA website now, but it’s available here.
I’m the first to admit that I don’t know anything about Australian politics. I don’t know who Amanda Vanstone is, what she stands for, and what other things she’s said about any other topic.
But I happen to think she’s right about airline security:
In a wide-ranging speech to Adelaide Rotarians, Senator Vanstone dismissed many commonwealth security measures as essentially ineffective. “To be tactful about these things, a lot of what we do is to make people feel better as opposed to actually achieve an outcome,” Senator Vanstone said.
And:
During her Adelaide speech, Senator Vanstone implied the use of plastic cutlery on planes to thwart terrorism was foolhardy.
Implied? I’ll say it outright. It’s stupid. For all its faults, I’m always pleased when Northwest Airlines gives me a real metal knife, and I am always annoyed when American Airlines still gives me a plastic one.
“Has it ever occurred to you that you just smash your wine glass and jump at someone, grab the top of their head and put it in their carotid artery and ask anything?” Senator Vanstone told her audience of about 100 Rotarians. “And believe me, you will have their attention. I think of this every time I see more money for the security agencies.”
The Immigration Minister also told of a grisly conversation with Mr Howard during a discussion on increased spending on national security.
Senator Vanstone said: “I asked him if I was able to get on a plane with an HB pencil, which you are able to, and I further asked him if I went down and came and grabbed him by the front of the head and stabbed the HB pencil into your eyeball and wiggled it around down to your brain area, do you think you’d be focusing? He’s thinking, she’s gone mad again.”
Okay, so maybe that was a bit graphic for the Rotarians. But her comments are basically right, and don’t deserve this kind of response:
“(Her) extraordinary outburst that airport security was a sham to make the public feel good has made a mockery of the Howard Government’s credibility in this important area of counter-terrorism,” Mr Bevis said yesterday. “And for Amanda Vanstone to once again put her foot in her mouth while John Howard is overseas for serious talks on terrorism is appalling. She should apologise and quit, or if the Prime Minister can’t shut her up he should sack her.”
But Mr. Bevis, airport security is largely a sham to make the public feel better about flying. And if your Prime Minister doesn’t know that, then you should worry about how serious his talks will be.
Vanstone has been defending herself:
Vanstone rejected calls from the Labor Party opposition for her resignation over the comments they said trivialised an important issue, saying she was not ridiculing security measures.
“If the day has come when a minister can’t say what every other Australian says and that is that plastic knives drive us crazy, I think we’re in desperate straits,” the minister told commercial radio on Monday.
Vanstone said she did not believe the security measures should be scrapped.
“What I have said is that putting a plastic knife on a plane doesn’t necessarily make you very much safer. Bear in mind there are other things that are on planes,” she said.
“People should not feel that because plastic knives are there, the world has dramatically changed—because there are still HB pencils.”
Plastic knives on airplanes drive me crazy too, and they don’t do anything to improve our security against terrorism. I know nothing about Vanstone and her policies, but she has this one right.
Here’s an excellent use for cameras:
Now, to help better examine how Tasers are used, manufacturer Taser International Inc. has developed a Taser Cam, which company executives hope will illuminate why Tasers are needed—and add another layer of accountability for any officer who would abuse the weapon.
The Taser Cam is an audio and video recorder that attaches to the butt of the gun and starts taping when the weapon is turned on. It continues recording until the weapon is turned off. The Taser doesn’t have to be fired to use the camera.
It’s the same idea as having cameras record all police interrogations, or record all police-car stops. It helps protect the populace against police abuse, and helps protect the police of accusations of abuse.
This is where cameras do good: when they lessen a power imbalance. Imagine if they were continuously recording the actions of elected officials—when they were acting in their official capacity, that is.
Of course, cameras are only as useful as their data. If critical recordings are “lost,” then there’s no accountability. The system is pretty kludgy:
The Taser Cam records in black and white but is equipped with infrared technology to record images in very low light. The camera will have at least one hour of recording time, the company said, and the video can be downloaded to a computer over a USB cable.
How soon before the cameras simply upload their recordings, in real time, to some trusted vault somewhere?
EDITED TO ADD: CNN has a story.
All security decisions are trade-offs, and smart security trade-offs are ones where the security you get is worth what you have to give up. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. There are differences between perceived risk and actual risk, differences between perceived security and actual security, and differences between perceived cost and actual cost. And beyond that, there are legitimate differences in trade-off analysis. Any complicated security decision affects multiple players, and each player evaluates the trade-off from his or her own perspective.
I call this “agenda,” and it is one of the central themes of Beyond Fear. It is clearly illustrated in the current debate about rescinding the prohibition against small pointy things on airplanes. The flight attendants are against the change. Reading their comments, you can clearly see their subjective agenda:
“As the front-line personnel with little or no effective security training or means of self defense, such weapons could prove fatal to our members,” Patricia A. Friend, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, said in a letter to Edmund S. “Kip” Hawley, the new leader of the Transportation Security Administration. “They may not assist in breaking through a flightdeck door, but they could definitely lead to the deaths of flight attendants and passengers”….
The flight attendants, whose union represents 46,000 members, said that easing the ban on some prohibited items could pose a safety risk on board the aircraft and lead to incidents that terrorize passengers even if they do not involve a hijacking.
“Even a plane that is attacked and results in only a few deaths would seriously jeopardize the progress we have all made in restoring confidence of the flying public,” Friend said in her letter. “We urge you to reconsider allowing such dangerous items—which have no place in the cabin of an aircraft in the first place—to be introduced into our workplace.”
The flight attendants are not evaluating the security countermeasure from a global perspective. They’re not trying to figure out what the optimal level of risk is, what sort of trade-offs are acceptable, and what security countermeasures most efficiently achieve that trade-off. They’re looking at the trade-off from their perspective: they get more benefit from the countermeasure than the average flier because it’s their workplace, and the cost of the countermeasure is borne largely by the passengers.
There is nothing wrong with flight attendants evaluating airline security from their own agenda. I’d be surprised if they didn’t. But understanding agenda is essential to understanding how security decisions are made.
Looks like the DHS and TSA are finally beginning to realize that small pointy things are not a terrorist threat to aviation.
They never were.
In yet another “movie-plot threat” defense, the U.S. government is starting to test anti-missile lasers on commercial aircraft.
It could take years before passenger planes carry protection against missiles, a weapon terrorists might use to shoot down jets and cause economic havoc in the airline industry. The tests will help the nation’s leaders decide if they should install laser systems on all 6,800 aircraft in the U.S. airline fleet at a cost of at least $6 billion.
“Yes, it will cost money, but it’s the same cost as an aircraft entertainment system,” Kubricky says.
I think the airline industry is missing something here. If they linked the anti-missile lasers with the in-seat entertainment systems, cross-country flights would be much more exciting.
Airplane security is getting surreal:
…FAA regulation that requires soldiers—all of whom were armed with an arsenal of assault rifles, shotguns and pistols—to surrender pocket knives, nose hair scissors and cigarette lighters.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
An article in the British Medical Journal recommends that long pointy knives be banned because they’re a stabbing risk.
Of course it’s ridiculous. (I wrote about this kind of thing two days ago, in the context of cell phones on airplanes. Banning something with good uses just because there are also bad uses is rarely a good security trade-off.)
But the researchers actually have a point—so to speak—when they say that there’s no good reason for long knives to be pointy. From the BBC:
The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.
They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.
None of the chefs felt such knives were essential, since the point of a short blade was just as useful when a sharp end was needed.
I do a lot of cooking, and have all my life. I never use a long knife to stab. I never use the point of a chef’s knife, or the point of any other long knife. I rarely stab at all, and when I do, I’m using a small utility knife or a petty knife.
Okay, then. Why are so many large knives pointy? Carving knives aren’t pointy. Bread knives aren’t pointy. I can rock my chef’s knife just as easily on a rounded end.
Anyone know?
Woman accidentally leaves a knife in her carry-on luggage, where it’s discovered by screeners.
She says screeners refused to give her paperwork or documentation of her violation, documentation of the pending fine, or a copy of the photograph of the knife.
“They said ‘no’ and they said it’s a national security issue. And I said what about my constitutional rights? And they said ‘not at this point … you don’t have any’.”
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.