Shoes off, masks on. In perpetuity.
Mask up. Vax up. Shut up. This is what they want.
20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
331–340 of 969 posts
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
This actually isn’t the goal of terrorism. I’ve studied terrorism and the definition is essentially non-state actors using violence for political means. Now we can go in to various conspiracies from “Bush planned 9.11 as a false flag” to “Bush ignored intelligence reports so he could launch the war on terror,” but those are mostly just unproven conspiracies unrelated to what al-Qaeda wanted.
> non-state actors States can, have, and do engage in terrorism.
Not if the definition of terrorism I use is one of the 11 definitions that preclude that possibility.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct, but I think the general escalation of security in airports which caught Richard Reid, was a direct response to 9/11 . Either Way, it is still mainly security theater to make passengers less apprehensive about taking what is still the safest mode of travel per passenger mile( there might be other metrics, but this is the only one I've read recently).
> mainly security theater I have often noticed policies are different at each airport. Combined with the shoe/belt/imaging policies, I believe it's meant to be a form of confusion. As in, any given security policy/process can be studied for weaknesses. When the policies are differing/changing there is a component of surprise the attacker has to account for that can be difficult to game. However, this is all in my hea…
Ever since the pandemic I seem to have been shadow banned from PreCheck, and reading their FAQ the TSA is quite clear they deliberately randomize security, even to the point that getting a PreCheck on the boarding pass isn’t guaranteed.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#334The 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.
The belt thing is supposedly because metal buckles will trigger the metal detector... but they insist I take off mine even though I bought one with a plastic buckle on purpose. So yeah, it now became "a rule" which is followed without much reasoning.
Same reason we take our shoes off in Europe, plastic shoes? no problem, but god forbid boots with metallic straps for the laces.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#335So 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…
This is why I believe the TSA wasn’t made to protect citizens it was only made to prevent airplanes from being used as projectiles against the government/military.
just like the police doesn't exist to serve and protect the public. but to protect private property. it's all doublespeak as george orwell would've called it.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#336The 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…
What a fantastic example of a superiority complex.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#337The 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…
The nature of the informal implementation of this stuff renders it so toothless, enforcement in whatever form we may see will be pretty permeable. The current CDC cards are trivial to print out on basically any laser printer. ("I have a heart condition so I can't", "heres a picture on my phone"). If you don't have a vaccine you probably just will need to have a test and a temp. screening for the most part.
However the comparison to TSA is not apt. TSA threat model is: One "terrorist" (though I'd call them "premeditated mass murderers") executing its plan is the total failure. For the vaccine requirements, the threat model is much different. Even if you just don't bother with any of this stuff on %5 of flights, it will still have a great impact in reducing the frequency of aerospace super-spreader events.
Sars-CoV-2 infects a lot of people every day, whereas there are many, many days in a row where no terrorists bother to board a domestic flight.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#338This 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…
I'd be willing to wear see-through shoes at the airport, if that's what you're suggesting.
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
To quibble: terrorism is using dramatic violence to achieve political ends. It just so happens that the victimized society often wants to increase security. The US had at least 3 major responses to 9/11: 1) seek revenge (invade Afghanistan, kill Bin Laden), 2) armor up (Dept. of Homeland Security), and 3) unify under nationalism (flags everywhere). It's pretty easy to imagine a timeline where some or none of those ha…
In the case of 9/11 the most likely motive was retaliation. If you could ask the terrorists, they would tell you that America terrorized them first (I'm not saying that's accurate).
Re: 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
To quibble: terrorism is using dramatic violence to achieve political ends. It just so happens that the victimized society often wants to increase security. The US had at least 3 major responses to 9/11: 1) seek revenge (invade Afghanistan, kill Bin Laden), 2) armor up (Dept. of Homeland Security), and 3) unify under nationalism (flags everywhere). It's pretty easy to imagine a timeline where some or none of those ha…
> 3) unify under nationalism (flags everywhere)
People flying flags everywhere weren't a thing in the 80s or 90s?