11.16.10
Terrorists Win
The “don’t touch my junk” story catalyzes a noticeable measure of public dissatisfaction with the national security apparatus in the US. And the buzzing technology and frequently mediocre people, often afflicted with normal human bad judgment, required to run it.
Most people who know anything about security saw this coming years ago.
American leadership believes there is a technological answer for everything. And it has led to the permeation of increasingly prying and degrading machinery throughout society. When you couple that with average workers, often plagued by bad thinking and judgment but trained to strictly enforce senseless rules, you have what you do now.
All things considered equal, enduring vile mechanisms and/or frisking your johnson is now made permanent.
The assumption that terrorists have become increasingly ingenious has also been pernicious.
Reality shows that isn’t the picture.
The reality is that not only have terrorists been forced into building more unreliable devices to get past security but that they’ve also been compelled to rely on average to bad or even totally incapable human resources.
And there simply are not enough of them to pose the national threat pundits normally assign. Although in the future, if they try enough, they certainly have their chances of being infrequently successful.
This has all been said, in various forms, in this blog before.
And the latest failed plot has nothing to do with onerous whole body scanning. But everything to do with the stupid practice and business procedures of UPS and Fed-Ex in the crap country of known terrorists, Yemen.
In essence, any random nuisance could walk into an UPS store and send a small IED in a cardboard box into the air.
This was satirically told in the simple video for “That’s Logistics.”
Those are just facts, and not proper justification for antagonizing passengers on American flights more and more until they totally detest going up in the air.
However, I’d be lying if I thought anything would change. Instead, like everything else it will only get worse. And people will just learn to stomach it, the businesses involved in making widgets for searching people perfectly happy with the state of affairs, one in which they can sell more and more odious mechanisms into the queues.
The battle is over here. The underwear bomber and the national security business won, even though the former is in jail.