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

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

#291

Post by tyingq » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

titzer wrote: post #133

tyingq wrote: post #8

The interesting part to me is that the mode of attack for 9/11 can't easily be repeated. It depended on passengers assuming the plane was being hijacked, and that they would eventually be released. That stopped working on the 3rd (edit: 4th) plane. I don't see how it would work again. Passengers now default to assuming there's no path to live other than fighting back. Meaning many of the measures we still take aren't…

> That stopped working on the 3rd plane. 4th plane. The third plane hit the Pentagon.

It does seem like that's the right numbering, thanks. I said "3rd" because the flight was hijacked around 9:30am EST. And I assume what they heard was news of the first two planes, rather than the one that hit the Pentagon.

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

#292

Post by varnaud » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

GDC7 wrote: post #60

And of course everybody ignores trains, they don't even look at you...like the 300 souls aboard a train don't matter. Also the 10000+ souls at the departing and arrival train station also don't matter. Not to mention the 4000 souls aboard cruise ships. It ain't about safety from ill-intentioned people...it's about protecting the POTUS from having to give the order to open fire on an hijacked civilian plane. That's th…

Thank god.

If I can get a train to go from A to B, I usually take the train. You can arrive at the train station 5 minutes before departure and make it to the train. It's just an overall more comfy experience, mostly thanks to the seamless process of getting on it, not having to worry about the water bottle in your backpack and arriving almost directly in the city center with just a few minutes to get off the train and train station.

You can't hijack a train or a boat and make it crash wherever you want. I also assume it's much easier to respond to a train or cruise ship hijack and avoid having to kill everyone on board.

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

#293

Post by Grazester » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #246

spoonjim wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That security isn’t necessarily to stop terrorism. It’s also to stop people from bringing in weapons and then using them in drunken brawls.

That is amazing reasoning. Assuming drunken brawls were a problem, instead of banning alcohol, the solution was the current TSA protocol.

Too much money in alcohol to ban it. Due to the behaviour of people on planes now, some airline have temporarily stopped serving it but passengers could still get it at a bar at the airport or buy a bottle of alcohol at a duty free store and drink themselves stupid before boarding the plane.

I dont think they can easily ban that.

edit:// OP clarified this was meant for sports games.

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

#294

Post by duxup » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

aspaviento wrote: post #275

duxup wrote: post #222

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 someon…

Maybe it's just for discouraging people from any attempt.

But in the college football game example, there's no discouragement right at the gates, no security, and they don't even bother with hitting an unsecured target at the same venue.

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

#295

Post by CountDrewku » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

newswasboring wrote: post #268

CountDrewku wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok then what's the target? Eradication of the virus is not achievable and neither is full vaccination of the entire population. I have yet to hear any hard numbers for removal of "safety" measures from any politician when enacting lockdowns/mandates. I think you're fooling yourself if you believe there's some hard target.

The target is to save lives. If the threat is still there, we need to keep the safety measures. And covid measures have always been dynamic. Safety measures have been removed or reintroduced based up on very hard statistics man. I don't know how you don't see that. edit: My first sentence was a bit garbage. The target is to save lives from covid and avoid its spread. Hospital utilization and mortality rate from the d…

>The target is to save lives. If the threat is still there, we need to keep the safety measures.

Ok your argument just fell apart. Do we not always have the "need" to save lives? The "threat" is never going away.

That's ambigous and completely subjective. What is is not is an objective measure of any sort. Which means it continues indefinitely until our leaders decide otherwise.

The fact you cannot give me a set time when it will end, or what status we need to meet for all of the safety measures to end is pretty telling.

>I don't know how you don't see that.

Because you have no data or facts to back up your claim. You can't even explain it yourself.

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

#296

Post by peakaboo » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

bserge wrote: post #248

duxup wrote: post #222

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 someon…

The goal of terrorism is to scare people into restricting their own freedoms. It has worked amazingly well so far. To any motivated anti-society organization or person, this is huge leverage. A few deaths leading to a noticeably more authoritarian state? What's not to love? It doesn't even matter if the authorities do their job and punish those responsible, the people will still choose to restrict their own freedoms…

This is exactly what it's about. Humans constantly trading away more and more of their freedoms until we live inside a prison.

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

#297

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

I haven't had to remove my shoes in airports for a decade or so, I suspect this is mostly a US thing at this point.

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

#298

Post by orwin » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

COGlory wrote: post #105

wycy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Perhaps people are less truly radicalized, and substantially more negotiable, than we've been lead to believe. It certainly benefits both the media and politicians to sell us a story that there are an extreme number of radicalized people out there. I've certainly never met any neo-Nazis. Not to say they don't exist, but if they are truly as common as I've been told, I think I'd have encountered some.

I happen have a fascist (not neo-fascist, not nazi nor neo-nazi) friend. We do have some common points of view. We both don't believe in meritocrazy. And part of success is cultural and predeterminated (i think 90% is cultural, he think 40% of it is, although this percentage rises after each of our discussions. My communism seems to wear him down /s).

I also happen to know a lot people who have the same ideology that he have, on some discord servers, probably less sharpened and less cultivated (i mean, you've got to read a bit of Nietzsche if you want to argue in good faith with this ideology). I'd say they are proto-fascist, or proto-nazi. And actually, a lot of people i see on the internet called neo-nazi are in fact proto-nazi. It's interesting, because i've seen old TV interviews of 60s and 70s philosophical debate, i've read old books, and they were much, much more philosophically advanced than the current debates are.

By the way, i use nazism to make a small distinction with "usual" fascism. To me, nazis empathize more on personnal success than "regular" fascists, who are more deterministic (genes, culture makes more difference than effort and good will). I worked that out with my self-proclaimed fascist friend, if you disagree i'd like a criticism of the idea.

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

#299

Post by lexapro » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

bserge wrote: post #248

duxup wrote: post #222

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 someon…

The goal of terrorism is to scare people into restricting their own freedoms. It has worked amazingly well so far. To any motivated anti-society organization or person, this is huge leverage. A few deaths leading to a noticeably more authoritarian state? What's not to love? It doesn't even matter if the authorities do their job and punish those responsible, the people will still choose to restrict their own freedoms…

>The goal of terrorism is to scare people into restricting their own freedoms.

There are many possible motives for terrorism but I highly doubt this is one of them, even though people love to repeat it for some reason.

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

#300

Post by itchyjunk » Wed, Sep 08, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

cujo wrote: post #274

ctrlp wrote: post #230

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 prote…

> Now, we will likely add further controls on travel in the form of digital health passports with infinitely more possibility for government mischief. How do you see digital health passports as having infinitely more possibility for govt mischief? Right now TSA has the ability to treat you like a criminal if they think you looked at them funny. The health passport "mischief" seems more along the lines of "you don't h…

Is it under your control? Say you do have the vaccines but get to the airport and find out you are on a no fly list. Is that issue trivially easy to fix? From some of the post I've read here, it's a black box system with very little standard process to help you get out of it. Filing law suite isn't easy[0].

[0] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/michigan-father-wrongly-...