autocratic for the people.

Treating the Symptoms.

"A terrorist group will almost certainly try to blow up a plane with a bomb assembled on board unless security measures improve fundamentally. (...) 'In mid-flight you could go into the toilet, attach the mobile phone to the explosives and, as the plane makes a final approach over a densely populated urban area, you detonate it.'" - CNN.com

The above article goes on to relate (with face-clawing hysteria) that the new threat to airline passengers are individually harmless electronics and liquids, combined in an aircraft lavatory in order to create a weapon. "Bomb experts" are quoted as suggesting that "mobile phones, computers, wrist watches or anything else with a battery should be prohibited from flights." Even if we ignore the knee-jerk move to ban liquids from carryon luggage as just a temporary delusion, the recent past suggests a very real possibility that shrieking idiots will ban even more arbitrary items from airlines in the interests of safety.

These people, I think, are treating the symptom instead of the disease. If the problem is that innocuous materials can be combined to create a weapon mid-flight, wouldn't it make much more sense to limit access to the private areas? "No weird stuff in the lavatories." Done. Let's move on.

posted by avixe @ 1:53 PM