Contrarian has produced dozens of posts about the stupidity of airport security as practiced by the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority and the Department of Homeland Security. How about some sensible security ideas? Pilot and author
Lane Wallace, guest-blogging for James Fallows, has
a few ideas. She begins by noting that airports aren't the only places vulnerable to attacks like the one that killed 34 people in Moscow Monday:
Russian President Dimitri A. Medvedev has said that airport officials at Domodedovo must be held accountable for failing to prevent the attacks. I feel for those officials. Because the ugly truth of the matter is unless we want to prohibit more than five people from gathering in any given place, targets will exist for people willing to sacrifice their lives to hurt others. And it is impossible to police or screen public gathering places well enough to keep any attempted attack from succeeding...
The bombing at Domodedovo happened to take place in a public area at an airport, so much of the alarm and reaction is (rightly or wrongly) going to focus on airport security. But really, the same bomb could have been detonated, and done just as much damage, raising the same issues of security and access, in any crowded, public area. Think, for a moment, how many people are in Grand Central Station at rush hour. It more than rivals any airport reception area. Or in Times Square on any given evening. Or in Macy's, the morning after Thanksgiving. Or at Rockefeller Center when the Christmas tree is lit. The list goes on and on. The point is, finding a place where a suicide bomb explosion will kill 30 or 50 people is just not that tough to do. And there is simply no way to eliminate that risk.
So what to do about it? Wallace offers three sensible suggestions after the jump:
27 January, 2011
