From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Tue Aug 20 2002 - 21:21:58 MDT
On Tuesday, August 20, 2002, at 08:35 pm, Mike Lorrey wrote:
> El Al's most effective procedure we do not, and will not, put into
> place: that is the interview of every passenger by a skeptical security
> professional who is not paid by the airlines and cannot be fired or
> transfered for rejecting 'too many' passengers from the flight
> manifest.
I have no dispute with this procedure, however my personal favorite
security method is simply locking the cabin door. El Al has their
pilots enter through a separate door. During flight, there is no entry
into the cockpit under any circumstances. Hijackers can take over, bomb
the plane, kill all the passengers or do anything else they want, but
there is no way for them to take over the aircraft. This seems simple
and direct, and would limit the scope of a hijacking.
>> 2. The airport security systems didn't fail. They prevented people
>> from
>> bringing guns onto the plain. The hijackers had to resort to using
>> box-cutters which were allowed under the rules. The rules worked as
>> desired. We just need to adjust our our rules to block other
>> dangerous weapons, such as blades, as well.
>
> This is not quite accurate. While the hijackers did not try to bring
> guns on board,
True. The rules did not prevent guns from coming on board (in this
particular instance), nor did they attempt to prevent box-cutters from
coming on board. I guess this rule neither worked nor failed.
>
>> 3. The hijackers do not have weapons of mass destruction (yet).
>> They had to resort to using our own airplanes as weapons because they
>> didn't have any of their own. As far as we can tell, they have been
>> unable to get their hands on these weapons.
>
> This is also inaccurate.
[Excellent analysis of domestic versus foreign plane usage snipped
here....]
Good explanation, Mike. But actually, I was referring to all the fears
of suitcase nukes and biowarfare devices. So far, all the evidence says
they don't have these. Their attempts and experiments have been quite
limited compared to 9/11. They actually tried to use cyanide in the
earlier World Trade Center bombings, and we didn't notice it at first.
They poison gas failed to be useful. Bioweapons are more difficult to
make and deploy than they first appear. Mundane weapons like guns and
airplanes are still the primary threat.
>> In other words, many of our security procedures work just fine. It
>> is not true that we are incapable of defending ourselves. We just
>> haven't really tried before. Now that we know security is
>> imperative, we can
>> apply what we know in ways we have never tried before. We shouldn't
>> have to reinvent everything from scratch.
>
> No, we shouldn't. Restoring the ability of law abiding Americans to
> exercise their constitutional rights while onboard aircraft would go a
> long way to preventing future hijackings.
I'm not so sure about this, but then I don't tend to have the faith in
guns that others seem to have. I would be worried about false alarms.
How many false alarms have we had lately, where people thought they saw
a terrorist and later it turned out to be wrong? My fear would be that
armed passengers would open fire and find out they were wrong after
someone was dead.
We have actually had a few shooting incidents here in Florida where
people thought they saw terrorists and started shooting at people. One
involved a helicopter landing on a golf course. One of the golfers
assumed they were terrorists and started shooting at it. Another
involved refugees coming in on a boat. Someone on the beach started
shooting at the boat. False alarms are much more common than real
terrorist attacks, and even if a small fraction of them resulted in
mistaken shootings, we would have problems.
(Note that I believe this problem is exaggerated in Florida where a lot
of old people retire with their guns and then start having old-age
confusion issues. We frequently have old-timers start shooting at their
neighbors for no reason except that they are old and confused. This
probably has slanted skewed my expectations.)
-- Harvey Newstrom, CISSP <www.HarveyNewstrom.com> Principal Security Consultant <www.Newstaff.com>
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