[Dave Heal's] Observations & Reports

And like a lot of people I went out later that night with a bunch of my buddies to a local bar with no sign, cheap drinks, and lots of TVs. Eventually the conversation turned away from the fact that our Christmas haul seems to be asymptotically heading towards a stocking full of Brazil nuts & wool socks. One of my friends had seen some mention of the attempted terrorist attack scroll along the bottom of the TV, and after uttering a bunch of expletives he managed to squeak out an indignant sentence or two about how let’s just get us a bunch of those damn full body scanners and plant them down in every major airport in the country and let’s get those TSA fuckers to pull on some rubber gloves and start flippin’ up some balls! I was going to check to make sure alien bodysnatchers hadn’t kidnapped my friend and replaced him with Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel before I realized that it’s not only the rah-rah America crowd that feels this way.

This kind of thinking also represents the consistent policy of band-aid security that the government employs every time the terrorists come up with a new way to sneak explosives onto airplanes. And while the measures that are passed in the wake of these attacks don’t represent the entirety of our security efforts, the resources that are devoted to preparing for tactics that have already been used would be much better spent on gathering & sharing real intelligence, the kind of intelligence that will stop more than just the next guy who thinks it’s a good idea to strap a bomb on or around an erogenous zone.

This isn’t to say that our emotional reactions to these attacks aren’t entirely valid. But we need to get better at separating out our immediate, visceral reactions to what amounts to a shocking but still rare event and base our security reaction on actual data. History shows that terrorists are really good at finding new and interesting ways to blow things up. Hell, I’m constantly surprised that a terrorist hasn’t targeted the already miserable security line itself or planted a bomb in some other large and mythically American institution like the mall or the Porn & Karate Supplies store on I-80. But at the rate that air travel is trending towards something out of Demolition Man (minus the omnipresent Taco Bell), if terrorists were to change their targets completely it would become patently obvious that our standard response is completely inadequate.

We have a cognitive bias that makes us fixate on the horrific event, no matter how rare, and we not only overestimate the risk of future events but frequently insist on preparing for something just like them. This is especially true when the events in question involve activities like flying that are not only outside of our control but are already really terrifying to a substantial portion of the population.

The American psyche has been bombarded with the images of terrorism, and our anxiety about bombs on planes is already at Kierkegaardian (!) levels. So the public is primed to not only abide but demand a bunch of showy stop-gap measures in the wake of every attempt, whether successful or not. And one of the unfortunate side effects of placing all this power in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security is that officials have the peculiar incentive to stoke fears of terrorism in the interest of appearing to do something. But actually, one of the under-mentioned aspects of the Christmas Day attack is that the “antiquated” pre -9 /11 security measures actually succeeded in forcing the bomber to make kind of a crappy bomb.

The solution is not to merely “do something” in the interest of appeasing people like Maureen Dowd, who wants Obama to pat our collective head and tell us it’s going to be OK, but to direct the majority of our efforts towards combating the general threat of terrorism and not trying to patch up tiny holes in our security infrastructure after the fact.