Patrick Smith is one of my favorite writers. I highly recommend his “Ask the Pilot” column at Salon. He tells stories about his history as an airline pilot, weighs in on crashes and incidents, talks about the Simpsons. I think I like it because I loved planes as a kid — the technology, the romance, all that. Also because he’s got a good voice and I’m interested in professionals describing their craft.

Anyway, this article regarding the inanity of TSA screening procedures caught my eye this last week. It came out before all the Christmas excitement, which only helps to underline its message. I think Patrick is spot on that we’re pointlessly obsessed with the tactics that worked in September 2001, which were never going to work again after that morning and are generally showing little common sense in our quest for airline security.

Some jackasses hijack three planes with box cutters and now we’re not allowed to have butter knives on planes. Some jackass lights his explosive filled shoe during a flight and now we all have to take our shoes off. Some jackass lights his leg on fire and now what do we get?  Under clothes body scanning (Click through to the picture, the machines now are higher resolution than that). Thanks to what happened over the holidays we’re going to start seeing these machines in a lot more airports. My expectation is that there’s going to be very little fuss about it either. People give up their privacy so easily. Who gets to man the underclothes scanning machine? What kind of qualifications is that job going to entail? And what’s next? I think I’ll just take the train.

To my software engineer way of seeing the world,  it feels like we’re just putting patch after patch on symptoms without making much of an effort to address root causes. We’re taking aspirin to treat a brain tumor. The Christmas bombers dad was alarmed enough by his behavior that he notified US officials, and he was already in a federal terrorist suspect database, and yet this guy managed to get on a plane with a bomb strapped to his leg flying under his own name. And the problem here is that we’re not strip searching every passenger?

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have airport security. What I’m saying is that we should have meaningful airport security.

Here’s another great article by Christopher Hitchens in this same vein.

Update: I just found another good article on this subject from Bruce Schneier who is a heavy hitter in the computer security realm.  As Mr Schneier writes, “Our current response to terrorism is a form of “magical thinking.” It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.”