Since 9/11 we've spent a trillion dollars on homeland security. We make everyone take off their shoes and buy special three ounce bottles of shampoo to get through airport security, where people wait hours at the checkpoints. Yet a Somali teenager can just hop a fence, hide in the wheel well of a jet plane and fly to Hawaii.
Apparently, it is trivial to walk on to the tarmac and plant a bomb on a plane's landing gear. Apparently, anyone can walk up to a chemical tank, punch a whole in it and poison a river (check it out on Google Earth). Apparently, anyone can put an obstacle on a train track, cause a derailment and a major fire. Apparently, anyone can walk into a fertilizer plant, start a fire and destroy several city blocks. Apparently, anyone can buy a gun, go to a school and shoot dozens of kids. Apparently, anyone can intentionally wipe out on a freeway during a snowstorm and hurt dozens of people.
These incidents weren't acts of terrorism, per se. But all of them could be. There's an infinite number of ways to cause deadly mayhem. We spend billions trying to prevent terrorists from repeating the same old tricks on airplanes, while totally ignoring equally deadly threats that we know exist but have completely ignored because terrorists haven't tried them yet.
Is all this homeland security stuff just a CYA exercise for government officials and a trillion dollar payout to the security industrial complex for a false sense of safety? Are we just pasting a happy face over an insoluble, intractable problem and pretending we're actually able to do something about it?
Or is the threat of terrorism really that much less than the security industrial complex wants us to think?
2 comments:
People in my circles don't call it security theater for nothing. You're actually starting to sound sort of libertarian there...
This post actually made sense and didn't fly off into the weeds. Amazing. Of course, I was saying this back when they were first talking about adding the big honking layer of bureaucracy that is DHS in general, and TSA in particular. It's a huge porkfest of very limited utility.
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