From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Wed Sep 12 2001 - 04:21:58 MDT
Mike Linksvayer wrote:
>
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2001 at 09:07:07AM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> > So, in memory of today's sad events I would like to challenge the
> > members of the Extropian community to think long and hard about
> > what ways might be used to create innovative solutions to
> > terrorism that would increase trustability and personal security
> > without imposing restrictions on freedoms (in other words, please,
> > please lets not make it a debate about guns).
>
> I don't know that there's anything particularly innovative about
> these two ideas (and one involves guns, sort of), but anyway:
>
> * Arm and train all flight crew in antiterrorism measures. If the
> entire crew has handguns, you'll need a large number of terrorists
> to hijack a flight. The political hurdles facing this policy
> should be relatively low, as we're not talking about arming
> private individuals, rather airline employees, who would only be
> armed while on duty.
Agree in principle accept for two caveats:
1) regular handguns are a no-no in flight. Explosive
decompression is not anyone's good time. It could easily lead to
losing the plane and all on board;
2) Even one armed guard would be a huge and effective deterrent.
>
> * Make the cockpit, and perhaps the entire plane transparent to
> the outside world in realtime: audio and perhaps other feeds
> would be continuously be sent to the ground. Any abnormality
I assume you mean transparent in the sense of continuous
surveillance rather than actual transparency. This could be
done. The engines are already extensively monitored and
telemetry beamed by satellite to human engineers looking for
possible failures.
> detected would immediately alert human monitors, who could take
> appropriate action, from negotiation to shooting the plane down.
> In the worst case, where the terrorists still succeded in some
> fashion, we'd at least have a wealth of information about what
> happended and who did it, much more than we have now from a few
> chance cell calls. I'm not generally a fan of surveilance,
> but I think privacy issues are of less concern on a plane since
> you're already identified and subject to search, and if applied
> only to the cockpit, only the privacy of airline employees would
> be compromised, not that of private individuals/passengers.
>
It should be applied to the entire plane (except for the
restrooms).
- samantha
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