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Poll: Nearly two-thirds of Americans support full-body scanners at airports

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Poll: Nearly two-thirds of Americans support full-body scanners at airports

#11

Post by Semiapies »

Going by the answers to other questions, roughly 2/3 of respondents are also not worried about terrorism.

Naturally, there's a huge number of permutations there, but this boils down to an awful lot of people perfectly willing to be looked at naked or felt up just because someone in charge says it needs to be done.

This is part of why I've gotten into arguments with other libertarians who want to rain abuse on TSA employees simply for working at the TSA. The truth is that the TSA simply isn't doing much that most Americans aren't perfectly happy to let them do.

Re: Poll: Nearly two-thirds of Americans support full-body scanners at airports

#12

Post by tptacek »

~20% is a significant drop (from the CBS poll earlier in November) in public support for scanners, but I don't think this issue is polled heavily enough to draw conclusive observations about trends.

Roughly half of Americans objecting to the "pat-downs" is heartening, though.

Re: Poll: Nearly two-thirds of Americans support full-body scanners at airports

#13

Post by yequalsx »

timepilot wrote: post #9
yequalsx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to know where you draw the safety vs. personal freedom line. How far is too far? For me we crossed the line a long time ago. It would be nice to hear a different perspective. As it stands now, a 13 year old boy or girl will be groped during an enhanced pat down. As I see it, 9/11 can't happen again. That is, an airplane will never again be hijacked and used as a missile. It's possible for someone to blow…

Actually, I think your reasoning is well "reasonable". :) I also agree with you that the hijack/missile scenario seems unlikely at this point (existing safety precautions seem appropriate). I remain surprised (but happy) that terrorists have not gone after softer targets (malls, etc). For some reason, they remain very focused on airplanes (maybe the shock and awe effect). As a result, taking steps to make air travel…

No, I would not have a different view.

It's not a goal to try to prevent someone from doing this again. That's simply not possible. The goal is to make its success as unlikely as possible without causing too great a burden. Groping and virtual strip searches go too far in my opinion. The so called underwear bomber was stopped because when people see a man trying to ignite his underwear they stop him. We're not that helpless.

Life is risky. Zero people have died in the U.S. from terrorism on airplanes since 9/11. It's extremely unlikely that a terrorist will blow up a plane with the security measures that were in place 1 year ago. No need to go further.

The next place to hide explosives are vaginas and anal regions. Do you think those should be probed as well? If a terrorist blows himself up at a TSA checkpoint should we have a checkpoint in order to get to the checkpoint?

At what point does the security become theater to you?

Re: Poll: Nearly two-thirds of Americans support full-body scanners at airports

#14

Post by steve19 »

If you mix with tech and/or libertarian-minded people, this may surprise you.

Discussing this with my educated, liberal (Democrat) and wealthy (travel a lot) family, they think this security theater is wonderful. They have been so well conditioned that they are really fearful of terrorists. They think I am naive.

Personally I am far more concerned about my safety when driving my car than I am in the air.

Re: Poll: Nearly two-thirds of Americans support full-body scanners at airports

#16

Post by Semiapies »

timepilot wrote: post #9
yequalsx wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to know where you draw the safety vs. personal freedom line. How far is too far? For me we crossed the line a long time ago. It would be nice to hear a different perspective. As it stands now, a 13 year old boy or girl will be groped during an enhanced pat down. As I see it, 9/11 can't happen again. That is, an airplane will never again be hijacked and used as a missile. It's possible for someone to blow…

Actually, I think your reasoning is well "reasonable". :) I also agree with you that the hijack/missile scenario seems unlikely at this point (existing safety precautions seem appropriate). I remain surprised (but happy) that terrorists have not gone after softer targets (malls, etc). For some reason, they remain very focused on airplanes (maybe the shock and awe effect). As a result, taking steps to make air travel…

"How do we prevent this from being attempted again?"

"We" won't, bluntly enough. Nor will hyperparanoia do anything about the next stunt. What do you do when a lunatic swallows or rectally inserts some explosives?

The answer is that you accept that there are reasonable measures and unreasonable measures. Use only reasonable measures. Accept that there is a finite risk of someone getting past those measures. Recognize that you're more likely to die while driving to an airport than in flight from all causes, not merely the extreme outlier possibility of someone deliberately trying to kill people on your flight.

Re: Poll: Nearly two-thirds of Americans support full-body scanners at airports

#17

Post by Semiapies »

timepilot wrote: post #10
orangecat wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm suggesting that the risk of terrorists blowing up your flight using a method that backscatter machines would prevent, but that previous procedures would not prevent, is indistinguishable from zero. You're trading your civil liberties in exchange for nothing. And that would be fine, except you're also trading my civil liberties in the process.

I am well aware the scanners are flawed. However, I have not seen a study that shows the added benefit is "indistinguishable from zero." Please provide links, I may agree with you.

Alternately, will you provide evidence that the scanners have been beneficial in any remotely significant way?

Re: Poll: Nearly two-thirds of Americans support full-body scanners at airports

#18

Post by Semiapies »

tptacek wrote: post #12

~20% is a significant drop (from the CBS poll earlier in November) in public support for scanners, but I don't think this issue is polled heavily enough to draw conclusive observations about trends. Roughly half of Americans objecting to the "pat-downs" is heartening, though.

I don't know whether that last is significant if the pat-downs work as designed - to discourage people from opting out.

Re: Poll: Nearly two-thirds of Americans support full-body scanners at airports

#19

Post by timepilot »

timepilot wrote: post #10
orangecat wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm suggesting that the risk of terrorists blowing up your flight using a method that backscatter machines would prevent, but that previous procedures would not prevent, is indistinguishable from zero. You're trading your civil liberties in exchange for nothing. And that would be fine, except you're also trading my civil liberties in the process.

I am well aware the scanners are flawed. However, I have not seen a study that shows the added benefit is "indistinguishable from zero." Please provide links, I may agree with you.

The good and the bad:

“While officials said [the scanners] performed as well as physical pat downs in operational tests, it remains unclear whether the AIT would have detected the weapon used in the December 2009 incident,” the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s audit arm, said Wednesday in written testimony to the House Homeland Security Committee.

http://homelandsecuritynewswire.com/gao-raises-questions-abo...

Re: Poll: Nearly two-thirds of Americans support full-body scanners at airports

#20

Post by SkyMarshal »

steve19 wrote: post #14

If you mix with tech and/or libertarian-minded people, this may surprise you. Discussing this with my educated, liberal (Democrat) and wealthy (travel a lot) family, they think this security theater is wonderful. They have been so well conditioned that they are really fearful of terrorists. They think I am naive. Personally I am far more concerned about my safety when driving my car than I am in the air.

Bruce Schneier has some numbers worth remembering for those debates with your parents:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/11/tsa_backscatte...

There's talk about the health risks of the machines, but I can't believe you won't get more radiation on the flight. Here's some data:

A typical dental X-ray exposes the patient to about 2 millirems of radiation. According to one widely cited estimate, exposing each of 10,000 people to one rem (that is, 1,000 millirems) of radiation will likely lead to 8 excess cancer deaths. Using our assumption of linearity, that means that exposure to the 2 millirems of a typical dental X-ray would lead an individual to have an increased risk of dying from cancer of 16 hundred-thousandths of one percent. Given that very small risk, it is easy to see why most rational people would choose to undergo dental X-rays every few years to protect their teeth.

More importantly for our purposes, assuming that the radiation in a backscatter X-ray is about a hundredth the dose of a dental X-ray, we find that a backscatter X-ray increases the odds of dying from cancer by about 16 ten millionths of one percent. That suggests that for every billion passengers screened with backscatter radiation, about 16 will die from cancer as a result.

Given that there will be 600 million airplane passengers per year, that makes the machines deadlier than the terrorists.

Nate Silver on the hidden cost of these new airport security measures:

According to the Cornell study, roughly 130 inconvenienced travelers died every three months as a result of additional traffic fatalities brought on by substituting ground transit for air transit. That's the equivalent of four fully-loaded Boeing 737s crashing each year.

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