The latest security crackdown has some airlines telling us to get to the airport three hours in advance. As many here have observed, we're living in "liquid terror" of mouthwash and diaper creme.
It's hard to understand why it's considered acceptable to rob millions of their lives one hour at a time in response to the threat to a few hundred. That may sound harsh, but consider this: last year, there were 660 million passengers on domestic flights. If those passengers were delayed an extra 30 minutes due to increased security, that equates to 967 lives lost waiting in line (I'll show my math below).
Anybody who has flown since 9/11 has had to get to the airport at least 30 minutes earlier than they used to. Thanks to
this idiot, we have to routinely take off our shoes now. It wasn't long ago I saw some poor 80-year-old woman going through the indignity of a pat-down search, minutes after I myself had to (hence the demeaning nature of it was still fresh in my mind). This in the terrorist hotbed that is Kansas City.
It seems there's an opportunity to talk about "smart security"...that is, things that make us safer that don't make us poorer in other significant ways. Some have already been done, some could be better. For example:
- More secure cockpit doors (done) - this was an obvious lesson of 9/11. It's much more difficult for a would-be terrorist to gain access to an airline cockpit than before 9/11. We're safer, and there wasn't a cost.
- Beefed up U.S. Air Marshall program (partly done) - we now have more air marshals patrolling the skies. The decision to beef up this program further is almost purely a budgetary decision...the social costs for something like this are minimal.
- Air Marshal Deputy program - off-duty officers and qualified military personnel flying on airlines are a great potential untapped resource. We could conceivably have a small training program for these people to act as supplemental security staff in exchange for subsidized airline discounts.
- Talk to people next to you - Our leaders could use their bully pulpits to convince us to do what we arguably should just do anyway...talk to one another. If you are sitting next to a angry, dangerous-looking person who looks like they might blow something up, then talk to them. You may find out any number of things. The least likely thing would be "holy crap, this is a terrorist, I'd better tell someone", but more likely, you'll find out that "oh, he's just pissed off because he missed his connection to Chicago, and he's being routed through Dallas".
- Automatic security checks for people who pay cash minutes before a flight boards (done) - ok, so this may cramp some people's style, but it was a smart thing to do.
- More bomb sniffing dogs at security checkpoints and elsewhere in airports - we'll learn more about the explosives plot in the coming days. However, it seems as though it'd be hard to come up with a bomb-making substance that couldn't also be detected by a trained animal.
Nothing in the list above makes life much more difficult for the average traveller, yet would have thwarted the 9/11 terrorists. We don't know yet if it would have been enough to thwart the latest plan, but we also don't know if it wouldn't.
Let's stop trading liberty for a false sense of safety. Instead of freaking out about every tube of toothpaste that a hapless traveller hopes to sneak past security, let's calculate the costs of our solutions. If we all agree that life is precious, then let's also agree that every minute of it is valuable, and come up with the right tradeoffs.
Republicans seem perfectly content turning our airports into mini police states with the slightest whiff of trouble (remember, today's plot was U.K. to U.S. flights...presumably, there wasn't anything planned in the opposite direction or for U.S. domestic flights). It would be nice to see Democrats offering an alternative to the cowardly, nanny-state solutions offered by the Republicans.
Postscript: here's my math: average U.S life expectancy: 77.9 years, or 682,852.7 hours. A "life lost" is chopping that number in half (341426.3), which is roughly the equivalent of killing a random person off the street (or airplane), who presumably will be, on average, 39 years old. 30 extra minutes for each of 660,000,000 passengers is the equivalent of 330,000,000 hours. 330,000,000 divided by 341,426.3 is 967. There are many holes in this calculation, but it's safe to say "a few hundred lives" are lost in our current security regime every year.