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20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

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Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#221

Post by dsauerbrun »

angott wrote: post #100
stoolpigeon wrote: post #18

The US is the only place I think I've had to remove shoes for flight security in years. But in Europe taking off a belt is often required while in the US it is not. In Budapest they stopped having us remove laptops from bags a bit ago. My biggest challenge over the years was remembering what to do in each place as the security people at the airports had a tendency to get upset if you didn't do it their preferred way.

In Europe you're not required to take off your belt because of an arbitrary rule like shoes in the US. They just tell you to take it off because most belts have metal parts so they will likely trigger the metal detector.

I thought the shoes being taken off wasn't arbitrary. I thought it was because of the shoe bomber(Richard Reed)

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#222

Post by duxup »

So much security that not sense.

I attend college football games. Everyone goes through security. Outside security we pack up in masses of humanity outside the gates waiting to get through the inevitably slow security.

It would be far more effective to do something at the gates dude to the density of humanity there where there is no security ... than in the stadium where people are actually more spread out.

If someone did want to do something at such a sporting event, nothing is stopping them from doing it at the gates where there is a reliable and unsecured mass of humanity, and I don't think anyone is bothering with that ...

I used to wheel my grandfather into games on a wheelchair... they didn't check anything, just waved you through. A wheel chair sized bomb would be easy to bring in, but you don't even have to bring it in.

We have secure ID schemes that I believe most if not all of the 9/11 attackers would have qualified to get ...

In the US we don't have mass terrorist events that any of this would prevent.

Why do we keep subjecting non-terrorists to these systems?

What are we doing this for?

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#223

Post by JohnWhigham »

jpxw wrote: post #76
yalogin wrote: post #30

The TSA is just a huge scam to siphon money and they need to show they are providing value. Taking shoes off is that value, so yeah it’s never going away. We could get out of Afghanistan but will never get rid of the TSA.

Maybe. I think at least part of the reason is political though. Nobody wants to be the person who scraps a security policy and then has a terrorist attack happen as a result of their policy removal. Not politicians, not TSA higher-ups, nobody. That's a career-ending mistake, no matter how unlikely it may be. Not to mention that it's probably not a particularly popular decision amongst the public. Maybe it's security…

I think it'd be pretty easy politically, at least from a conservative (i.e. not Republican) standpoint. Argue that DHS is government waste and can't stop shit (point to the numerous studies done over the years of them being able to stop all kinds of shit from going through). Let things go back to the way they were: airports hiring private firms to do security.

This would never happen in today's climate though since both parties are pro-big government.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#224

Post by bedhead »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #142
ridaj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except many, many more deaths in the case of Covid, and we don't have, thankfully, a federal Covid Corps to enforce any of the related policies...

Many deaths in a certain age group above 65 y.o.. Most age groups had very few deaths.

You're wasting your time.

COVID deaths could be entirely amongst 97 year old obese smokers with stage 4 cancer and half the country would still give the same obtuse responses, call you granny-killer, tell you you're selfish for not wanting to wear a mask, say "pandemic" like it's a mic drop, etc etc etc. You'll be stuck in a COVID version of the "This amp goes to 11" conversation.

It turns out that shocking people with a million volts of raw terror does in fact blow a fuse in many people's brains (go figure) causing them to lose all cognitive abilities.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#225

Post by strogonoff »

h2odragon wrote: post #41
EMM_386 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't related to the Shoe Bomber plot, there was planning around something larger scale. To be honest I don't feel comfortable even linking to this stuff but it's Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot

> I don't feel comfortable even linking to this stuff Why not? "eww this is propaganda" or "talking about terrorist makes me one?"

The glimpse into the extent of mental corruption necessary to self-motivate oneself to spend so much time and effort, accumulate and apply expertise, all in the name of killing thousands of innocent people do make it difficult to read; even more so considering that the discovery of the plan did not help prevent its later evolution from causing the 9/11—that said, the article is enlightening and I cannot remember reading about this plot before (I guess it is too unsavoury even for unscrupulous mass media to dig up).

Addendum: as much as it pains me to admit, if I were some official feeling responsible for the lives of air travellers in %country% and having a say in the policy, after studying the details of this plot I can imagine myself going “yup, I guess we are banning all liquid then”.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#226

Post by BurningFrog »

wycy wrote: post #89
the_snooze wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. It's not a 9/11-style attack we need to be worried about. No one will let a plane get commandeered ever again. The 9/11 terrorists took advantage of the "comply with the hijackers" policy in place at the time. That opportunity ended the moment the second plane hit the towers. The real threat is lone wolf random attacks on the general public like the DC sniper. That's a very low-cost high-impact attack tha…

> The real threat is lone wolf random attacks on the general public like the DC sniper. That's a very low-cost high-impact attack that paralyzed an entire metro region for nearly a month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks Considering how many crazy, extremely radicalized people are out there, I'm surprised attacks like this aren't much more common.

The DC sniper were two people, with a specially built murder car.

So neither lone wolf or low effort.

My guess is that crazy, extremely radicalized people are not competent at carrying out high impact attacks. Also, very few of them actually want to do such things.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#227

Post by michaelfeathers »

This is a lesson in incentives. The reason any of these procedures are not eradicated is that no one wants to be the person who does that and then have the next terrorist attack use a technique that would've been caught.

It's interesting to note that we have had this in software development too. Prior to CI/CD, organizations that had QA departments (responsible for testing) had a lot of incentive to hold up releases because they were blamed if a bug escaped into production. When developers test, they are responsible for both delivery and defects so there is balance.

It's hard to see how something like this could be applied for security. Making the TSA responsible for wait times seems like a good idea but there's always going to be an asymmetry when life hangs in the balance.

After the IRA bombings, train platforms didn't have trash bins for decades. Eventually some showed up with transparent bags so that the contents could be seen. The half-life of fear is long.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#228

Post by MrGilbert »

Totally unrelated, but I still remember what I did on 9/11. I was in my teens. I know the date, I know the weekday, I know everything I did in the 24 hours it happened.

However, despite being the much "fresher" events, I don't know the weekday my grandparents and parents passed away, let alone what I did back then.

My memory is... interesting.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#229

Post by jdavis703 »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #201
jdavis703 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You basically just need to make the odds of encountering a trained responder higher than a lone wolf. FWIW, this would be a much better approach to the “well regulated militia” part of the second amendment than what the US has today. Edit to fix bad quote of “well regulated militia.”

Isn't it actually "well regulated"?

Indeed it is, thanks. But there’s still no reason training can’t be part of the regulations.

Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?

#230

Post by ctrlp »

The obvious purpose of removing shoes at airports has long been more about security theater than safety. The authorities must be seen to be doing something to protect travelers or the industry might not survive the customer's perception of danger.

But, the less obvious reasons surely include maintaining the function of the huge TSA security apparatus put in place after 9/11. The stated function of the TSA is to protect passengers from attack. The unstated (and unacknowledged function) that has perpetuated the practice despite every traveler hating it (and its obvious futility), is to intimidate travelers and provide a convenient mechanism of crowd-control. Step out of line (literally) and you will be treated as a potential criminal. There needn't be an official policy to do so, the benefits of the system ensure its continuance via other (stated) motives, not least the profit motive of the supporting economic interests. The upshot is that travelling via plane in the past 20 years is one of the many small lessons for living in the security/surveillance state. You must obey. Moreover, we see the logic of the security/surveillance state incorporating this convenient control mechanism by now restricting (or implicitly threatening to restrict, which is even better) the travel of domestic antagonists of power. If we had discontinued taking off our shoes, the symbolic effect of dispiriting and weakening the public (literally making us vulnerable in our unshod feet) would be unavailable now. Why would the administration willingly relinquish such a useful tool for managing the population? Of course it wouldn't. It would we more amazing if it had.

Now, we will likely add further controls on travel in the form of digital health passports with infinitely more possibility for government mischief. When/if the pandemic ends, do you believe the passports will be discontinued?

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