Airline Security Solution: Ban the Passengers

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 17 Oct 2002 12:00:00 GMT
From Quotes of the Day:
"The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it." -- Abbie Hoffman

I updated Rules That Guys Wish That Girls Knew from a list I received in email. Hehe.

The Onion - FAA Considering Passenger Ban - hehe. The photo caption is especially amusing. [trt-ny]

"In every single breach of security in recent years, whether it was an act of terrorism or some other form of crime, it was a passenger who subverted the safety systems on board the aircraft or in the terminal," FAA administrator Marion Blakey said. "Even threats that came in the form of explosives inside baggage were eventually traced back to a ticketed individual. As great a revenue source as they have been, passengers simply represent too great a risk to the airline industry."

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"We realize that these new regulations would, for many air travelers, be a major inconvenience," Blakey said. "But we feel strongly that it's a small price to pay to ensure the safety of our skies."

Tammy Bruce at FrontPage Magazine - Snuffy and Me - the Beltway sniper attacks should make it crystal clear to anyone with a brain that America needs more guns in the hands of its law-abiding citizens. [firearmnews]

As of this writing, the last victim of the sniper was a woman who, with her husband, was putting merchandise into her car at a Home Depot. Her husband witnessed the shooting and could not respond. Several other bystanders witnessed the shooting and could not respond. If one of them, just one, had been armed, odds are the sniper's murderous rampage would have ended right there.

It is time to reject the vacuous arguments of the Left that we Americans need to be protected from ourselves and cannot be trusted to implement self- defense. Europe's history has shown us that a defenseless citizenry invites nothing less than criminal anarchy and tyrannical dictatorships.

J.J. Johnson at Sierra Times - DC Sniper: Real Americans Weigh In - some ideas for catching the killer. [sierra]

Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram Newsletter - October 15, 2002 - calls for laws instead of suggestions about national cyber-security, AES is not cracked yet, The Doghouse: GreatEncryption, the myth of cyberterrorism, Dewie the Turtle, problems with one-time pads

On 18 September, the White House officially released its National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. Well, it didn't really release it on that date; versions had been leaking here and there for a while. And it really isn't a national strategy; it's just a draft for comment. But still, it's something.

No, it isn't. The week it was released I got all sorts of calls from reporters asking me what I thought of the report, whether the recommendations made sense, and why certain things were omitted. My primary reaction was: "Who cares? It doesn't matter what the report says."

For some reason, Richard Clarke continues to believe that he can increase cybersecurity in this country by asking nicely. This government has tried this sort of thing again and again, and it never works. This National Strategy document isn't law, and it doesn't contain any mandates to government agencies. It has lots of recommendations. It has all sorts of processes. It has yet another list of suggested best practices. It's simply another document in my increasingly tall pile of recommendations to make everything better. (The Clinton Administration had theirs, the "National Plan for Information Systems Protection." And both the GAO and the OMB have published cyber-strategy documents.) But plans, no matter how detailed and how accurate they are, don't secure anything; action does.

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One-time pads may be theoretically secure, but they are not secure in a practical sense. They replace a cryptographic problem that we know a lot about solving -- how to design secure algorithms -- with an implementation problem we have very little hope of solving. They're not the future. And you should look at anyone who says otherwise with deep and profound suspicion.

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