Today’s act comes to us from Cory Doctorow’s commentary on this commentary from security expert Bruce Schneier. As usual, Mr. Schneier thwaps us with reality, and it stings. There’s a lot of good material, but if I had to distill it to one quote, it would be this:
The terrorists’ goals have nothing to do with airplanes; their goals are to cause terror.
Airplane passenger screening as done in the United States is a failure; test after test proves it. It fails because of human boredom. It fails because we are using humans to do the job of a computer. It fails because it assumes that what has gone before is what will come again. It fails because the system is easily gamed. It fails because the system is aimed too broadly in the wrong direction.
What he does not say is that the system appears to be deliberately mind-numbing for passengers as well as screeners, that passengers are being desensitized to taking off their jackets and shoes and lining up to present their papers, that actually thinking about the system and its effectiveness is discouraged, that all the plans for a supposed get-out-of-the-security-line-free card involve paying a private company to investigate us. At the risk of sounding a little alarmist, the companies doing these checks are not constrained by the 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution — even if they were, you signed up for them to find out everything they can about you — and all the information they find will be turned over to the TSA, an agency of the United States Government.
Mr. Doctorow points out that you almost need nine hands to juggle everything in the security line. Maybe Shiva could make do.
In closing: corporate homewreckers; ” Bad developers, who constitute the majority of all developers worldwide, can write bad code in any language you throw at them”; “We don’t need no steenkin warrant”; and bookends on health care.