Flying with Fish contacted the Transportation Security Administration to further probe into the broken security paradigm at American airports and promptly received a reply from a “threat assessment analyst” at the Department of Homeland Security.
How does it make you feel to know that the following letter came from DHS?
Two men enter two airports, one with a rectal bomb the other with a masterfully concealed detonation device.
By splitting up the components of a bomb, concealing one part in the rectum of one terrorist and the other parts hidden among benign everyday items intelligence is scrambled leaving us essentially blind. These two terrorists start the journey at two geographically separate airports that have been researched for relaxed security procedures and fly to a common hub airport. Once at a hub, these terrorists meet a third person, the suicide bomber, who has arrived at the hub with nothing. Now inside security, where they will not be checked again, because we don’t do screening at gates any longer and behavior detection officers are rarely at gates, the bomb is assembled. Assembly would likely take place in a restroom because the PETN hidden in a rectal cavity needs to be extracted. The bomb is placed in a bag of the suicide bomber, the two couriers of the bomb parts fly off to two unrelated destinations on flights before the suicide bomber’s flights and the suicide bomber boards a flight.
We know how the story ends…
Not the most comforting scenario—especially coming directly from the U.S. government. Whether DHS is using hypothetical anecdotes like the one above to scare the public into submission or out of genuine self-reflection, this tacit admission that the TSA is literally defenseless against a wily terrorist again questions why we continue to employ ineffective security procedures at airports across the country.
As I speculated yesterday, maybe it’s just all about politics. Maybe the government feels it must “save face” in the eyes of the public and security theatre is the only way to do it.
In any case, the sad reality is that we are just wasting money and it is time for this madness to stop. We should not be spending billions on outdated security measures, even if it the “best” technology we have. Staying the course is futile: we need to return to the drawing board. We are wasting our time by targeting the threats of yesterday.
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