From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Wed Sep 12 2001 - 12:20:00 MDT
In a message dated 9/12/01 7:33:42 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
bradbury@aeiveos.com writes:
> Would having computer systems that did automated matching of
> airline passenger lists with FBI/CIA/NSA lists of suspicious
> persons be a loss of freedom? Would being required to have
> forgery resistant "air travel" passports entail a loss of
> freedom? Only if you think one of your freedoms is the "right"
> to diminish the rights that other passengers who seek a high
> degree of confidence that you are a "trustably" safe passenger.
Robert, you're forgetting that the very agencies that
keep such lists are really the greatest threats to
life and liberty. It's a pact with the devil to
profoundly increase the power of the entity that
firebombed Dresden, carries out the War on Drugs,
drastically restricts medical improvements, and
is doing very disturbing things to IP on order to
stop the entity that destroyed the WTC.
This was indeed a horible event and we will act to
reduce chances of a repeat. But you don't want a
cure worse than the disease.
I think people are overemphsizing the knives as
the weapons. A four-or-less inch knife isn't too
much of a weapon and the passengers and crew could
have overwhelmed the hijackers easily with at most
a few casualties and probably no deaths. The real
weapon was the person. I notice these were all
lightly peopled flights, which I think was deliberate
as with 150 on board the hijack would have failed.
Parenthetically, I think this
kind of thing would not succeed again even with no
additional security changes. Now passengers will
assume hijackers intend to use the plane as a bomb
and will willingly accept the risks to stop the
hijacking.
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