10 Aug Snow globe plot – foiled

The US Transportation Safety Administration now keeps airspace safe from attack by snow globes, as well as toothpaste, mouthwash, and hair gel.

A blog post by Patrick Smith, the airline pilot who posted this photo to his Flickr account, bores into the core irrationality of the phoney security restrictions citizens have acquiesced to since 9/11. Money quote:

Conventional wisdom says the [9/11] terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard boxcutters. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings. In years past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of “passive resistance.” What weapons the 19 men possessed mattered little; had boxcutters been on the contraband list, the men would have smuggled something else or fashioned their weapons from items on board. It didn’t matter. The success of their plan relied not on weaponry but on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.

For a number of reasons, most notably the awareness of passengers and crew, just the opposite is now true. Before the first of the Twin Towers had fallen to the ground, that element of surprise, and the boxcutters that went with it, were no longer a useful tool. Paradigm over. Hijackers today would face a planeload of frightened people ready to fight back, and thus an unaffordable probability of failure. The September 11th scheme is kaput.

Surprise has vanished by the time hijackers took over the fourth plane. Its passengers understood they had to take action, and did so, foiling the plot to use their plane as a weapon, albeit at the cost of their own lives.

Hat tip: Andrew Douglas