A Lesson Never Learned

Time after time, Americans experience tragic shootings in which dozens of people are killed by gun violence.  Time after time, we have "memorial" services and "pray" for some intangible "peace."   Time after time, we are confronted with another shooting and we still do nothing to stop the madness.  

Cartoonist RJ Matson captures the process:

Murders In Arizona

The State that prides itself in having citizens routinely carrying loaded weapons around, experienced multiple murders today at a shopping center.  The target was Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford, who was critically injured, while several others, including a 9 year old girl and a Federal judge, were killed.   The NY Times, as well as every other newspaper in the country, has a detailed report.  It contains a rather remarkable comment by the Tucson Sheriff, on a possible cause for the shootings.  As reported by numerous outlets, including the Huffington Post, Sheriff Dupnik told reporters:

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," said the sheriff. "And unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry... All I can tell you is that there's reason to believe is that this individual may have a mental issue. And I think that people who are unbalanced are especially susceptible to vitriol."

Well said, Sheriff, well said.

Who's The Security Risk?-Part 3

Ah, the continuing saga of the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) inability to distinguish between al-Qaida operatives and 8 year old kids from New Jersey.  The NY Times article tells the story of Mikey Hicks, who has spent countless hours of his young life getting frisked at various airports, starting when he was about 2 years old.   Yes, two years old.

Why are our security systems so rigid?   Any system, security-related or other, that is so rigid that it does not allow for judgment and adjustment, is so brittle that it will break and fail when it's most needed.   

The underlying problem may be that the people implementing our security systems are unwilling to make risk assessments and make decisions accordingly.   That is, we should expect that someone at the airport can look at an 8 year old kid and make a judgment that this is not the same person whose name is on the watch list or whatever damn list TSA is using (after the near disaster in Detroit on Christmas Day, we learned that our government has a number of "lists," only one of which actually prohibits alleged "bad" people from getting on commercial airliners).   The multitude of such "lists" is also part of the problem with our security.

Someone at TSA ought to be able to take a chance on determining that an 8 year old kid from NJ, or an 80 year old grandmother from wherever, is not a security threat.  I doubt you'd see the Israelis spending so much time frisking Cub Scouts.

The FBI Sucks at Photoshop

There appears to be no end of the USA's inability to get security right. This incident would be funny, if it wasn't so lame.

The FBI decided to produce one of those age-progression photos of Osama bin Laden since he's aged over the years he's been hiding out in the mountains. Unfortunately, the FBI seems to have used Photoshop Lite (and perhaps a trainee photo analyst?) and essentially used Google to find a photo on the Internet; a photo from a Spanish politician's campaign poster. So this Spanish guy, Gaspar Llamazares, now finds himself on an FBI wanted poster and doesn't find it particularly humorous.

“Bin Laden’s safety is not threatened by this but mine certainly is”, Llamazares said.

Buried Under A Mountain Of Information

Our government's repeated efforts to accumulate information about us results in us being less secure rather than more. This article ("The backfiring of the surveillance state") is from Salon.com, and author Glenn Greenwald gives two main reasons why this is true:

(1) eliminating strict content limits on what can be surveilled (along with enforcement safeguards, such as judicial warrants) means that government agents spend substantial time scrutinizing and sorting through communications and other information that have nothing to do with terrorism; and (2) increasing the quantity of what is collected makes it more difficult to find information relevant to actual terrorism plots

The article provides a number of examples of how information overload is making us less secure. One of the major ones is the Christmas Day attempted bombing of the airliner in Detroit. As more and more information is revealed as to what the government knew about the bomber before the near disaster, it's clear that more than enough information was there to keep him off American planes. What the President has described as a "failure to connect the dots" is a direct result of information overload. Our intelligence agencies had lots of valid information about the plot and bomber, but they couldn't see the "trees for the forest," to torture an aphorism.

So the next time someone tries to frame the debate over government surveillance powers as one of "security v. privacy and civil liberties" you might suggest that increasing the government's surveillance abilities will make us less, not more, safe. Glenn Greenwald quotes former FBI agent and 9/11 whistleblower Coleen Rowley:

Extraneous, irrelevant data clutter the system, making it even harder for analysts to make meaningful future connections. A needle is hard enough to find in the proverbial haystack, without adding still more hay. . . . Quantity cannot substitute for quality.

The 'Israelification' of Airport Security

This article is about the difference between what we in the U.S. and the Israeli's call airport security. It's about actually addressing the problem (keeping bad people out of airports and off flights) instead of inconveniencing everyone except the bad people. You can find the Toronto Star article here. The word of the day is "Israelification."

While North America's airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification.

That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience.

Where the US/Canadian approach to airport security is reactive and focused on however the last bad guy attempt was carried out, the Israeli method is to keep people behaving (or potentially behaving) badly out of the airport. That's why we're still removing our shoes to get through the security line, and why we're now facing limits on having things in our laps during the last hour of a flight. Because the American security approach assumes that the bad guy has gotten on the plane. The result is escalating inconvenience for travelers and little or no real obstacles for bad guys. The Israeli's don't care if you're black, white, Arab, Jew; they care how you're behaving and whether that behavior is suspicious.

The Israeli security expert in the article outlines three "security perimeters" travelers must get through before they even get to the airport terminal. Checkpoints on the entrance road, parking lot, and terminal entrance are staffed by trained personnel who are looking for odd behaviors. One word repeated throughout the article is "trained." The Israelis spend the money on training personnel to look passengers in the eyes to detect nervous, potentially dangerous behavior. Identification of suspicious behaviors requires lots of training. Americans avoid looking each other in the eyes in the grocery store, no less at the airport.

You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

"The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds," said Sela.

There's that word again: trained. The questions asked at various points aren't terribly important; what's important is the traveler's reaction and behavior when asked. If you act suspicious, you'll get searched. And even then, the Israeli approach is preventative, not reactive. For example, if a possible bomb is found inside the terminal in the inspection area, that small area is all that has to be "evacuated." It's bomb-proof and can withstand the detonation of 100 kilos of plastic explosives. There's no need to try to evacuate an entire airport terminal. Every time some idiot in the US wanders in through an exit, our response is to try to evacuate the terminal and find said idiot. Most often, the evacuation takes hours and the idiot has left the building along with Elvis. If the intruder was planning to detonate something he has more than enough time to do so.

Why do Americans "settle" for such lousy security? The Israeli security expert says it's because we're "nice:"

"But, what can you do? Americans and Canadians are nice people and they will do anything because they were told to do so and because they don't know any different."

I think it's more because we collectively have the attention span of a gnat and we've been trained by our so-called leaders to go for the cheap, shallow, and largely ineffective approach to solving problems so we can refocus our attention on the latest celebrity gaffe. We should be demanding better from our leaders and our government. Much better.

On a lighter, related note, humorist Andy Borowitz has a plan, merging airport security with American health care reform: Full Body Scans to Double as Annual Checkups.

Who's The Security Risk?

So another dim bulb supposedly sent by al Qaeda has tried to blow up an American jet preparing to land in Detroit. Predictably, Homeland Security has "tightened" security rules in the aftermath. So far, we don't know much beyond the flight started in Nigeria, flew to Amsterdam, and then to Detroit. How this mope managed to get explosive materials on the flight remains to be seen, but the new rules we're likely to see will mostly make travel for the rest of us more difficult.

Am I missing something, or should we be doing things to make life difficult for al Qaeda and its hangers-on, rather than the vast majority of travelers? Some reports indicate this guy smuggled his explosives in his underwear from Nigeria. Now, everyone flying is going to be restricted to their seats for the last hour of their flight and won't be allowed to have anything on their laps during that time (including laptops and pillows). Presumably this would be to prevent the rest of us from setting fire to our pants (as this clown apparently did) while hidden by a blanket (or a laptop?). Wouldn't it make more sense to ensure that these jerks can't carry on explosives in their pants while the rest of us are carrying on laptops?

There's already been a report that U.S. officials were aware for two years that this particular Nigerian "could have terrorist ties." Despite that, he wasn't on any lists preventing him from taking commercial flights into the U.S. What's the point in knowing of potential terrorists if you don't think it's worth keeping them out of the U.S.?

What's wrong with this picture? If the Nigerian airport is unable or unwilling to adequately screen passengers leaving the country, wouldn't it make sense to prohibit flights originating there to land here? And if the passengers on this flight were also screened at the Amsterdam airport (which supposedly has a "good reputation for security"), what on earth happened?

In the meantime, the rest of the traveling public will be subject to more ineffective inconvenience and discomfort while flying. Bring on high speed rail service.

EDIT (12/29/09): As usual, Andy Borowitz gets to the heart of the matter with his "Department of Homeland Security Issues Terrorist ID Cards" article.

Feeling Safer In PA?

Back in August I posted twice about gun control (once about gun nuts protesting President Obama in Arizona and a follow-up about Travel Guru Arthur Frommer recommending tourists avoid Arizona because of their lack of gun control). There was no actual violence mentioned in either post, just the potential.

Unfortunately, this article is all about violence. It seems that Melanie Hain was a major gun proponent, and once made her point by carrying a loaded gun to her daughter's soccer game. And Melanie Hain is now dead, apparently at her husband's hand.

A soccer mom who gained national attention when she openly carried a loaded gun to her 5-year-old daughter's game was shot dead Wednesday along with her husband in what appeared to be a murder-suicide, police said.

So this 31 year old mother of three was having "marital trouble" for about a week and things spiraled out of control. It seems to me that a week or two of marital problems shouldn't end up with two coffins and three orphaned children.

Oh right, except for those guns the couple loudly insisted on having in their lives. They proved to be a convenient and effective way to end the "marital trouble." Permanently.

Footnote: Feeling Safer?

Just days after I wrote about the Phoenix, AZ "protest" involving people carrying firearms, including an assault rifle, outside a visit by President Obama, a prominent travel advisor noticed it as well. It seems that the author of numerous travel guides, Arthur Frommer, has announced he won't be spending any travel money or time in Arizona, since that State's "laws allow people he described as "thugs" and "extremists" to openly carry firearms."

I'm sure that everyone carrying firearms in Arizona under this law is not a "thug" or "extremist." That said, it seems that any "thugs" or "extremists" who choose to carry guns around in Arizona apparently are free to do so. And that doesn't sound particularly safe or reassuring to me. A friend recently told me that "gun nuts" and "nuts with guns" are not the same, but I'm still waiting for him to explain the difference.

I'm with you Arthur.

Feeling Safer?

Well, it's legal to carry around loaded guns, including assault rifles, in Arizona, even at an appearance of President Obama. Sigh. I don't get how more people carrying firearms makes us safer. The main problem for me is that I think that as our population has risen, so too has the number of mentally unbalanced and irrational among us. Even in states that don't allow "concealed carry," the number of people whipping out guns to "settle" disputes is staggering. There was a recent news article in which a few guys got into a fight over cutting in line at a roadside food cart in Tampa, FL. After one punch was thrown, one pulled out a gun, shot the other guy in the dispute, and also shot a bystander, who later died.

I just don't get how adding more guns, and concealed ones at that, makes any of us safer. It sure doesn't feel safer. Doesn't the Secret Service have enough to do without also having to watch people marching around the perimeter of a Presidential rally with firearms? How many more school kids in Chicago are going to die in gun violence before Americans get fed up with the National Rifle Association and its unbridled and well-funded campaign to put guns in everyone's hand?

The reality in which we live in 2009 is vastly different than the America of the late 18th century when the Constitution (including the Second Amendment) was adopted. Even if the Founding Fathers really believed everyone should have the right to own a firearm back then, I sincerely doubt they anticipated the largely non-agricultural and densely populated nation we've become. Furthermore, they certainly wouldn't have anticipated the changes in the weapons themselves. I might not object to everyone having a musket to carry around, as opposed to an AK47 assault rifle. The musket took a long time to load, long enough for the others in line for the food cart to get out of the way. Or to beat the crap out of the musket carrier as he was reloading...