An article over at WiredNews has me thinking.Let me explain. If you’re caught at airport security with a bomb or a gun, the screeners aren’t just going to take it away from you. They’re going to call the police, and you’re going to be stuck for a few hours answering a lot of awkward questions. You may be arrested, and you’ll almost certainly miss your flight. At best, you’re going to have a very unpleasant day.
Airport Pasta-Sauce Interdiction Considered Harmful
Airport security found a jar of pasta sauce in my luggage last month. It was a 6-ounce jar, above the limit; the official confiscated it, because allowing it on the airplane with me would have been too dangerous. And to demonstrate how dangerous he really thought that jar was, he blithely tossed it in a nearby bin of similar liquid bottles and sent me on my way.
(…)
This is why articles about how screeners don’t catch every — or even a majority — of guns and bombs that go through the checkpoints don’t bother me. The screeners don’t have to be perfect; they just have to be good enough. No terrorist is going to base his plot on getting a gun through airport security if there’s decent chance of getting caught, because the consequences of getting caught are too great.
Contrast that with a terrorist plot that requires a 12-ounce bottle of liquid. There’s no evidence that the London liquid bombers actually had a workable plot, but assume for the moment they did. If some copycat terrorists try to bring their liquid bomb through airport security and the screeners catch them — like they caught me with my bottle of pasta sauce — the terrorists can simply try again. They can try again and again. They can keep trying until they succeed. Because there are no consequences to trying and failing, the screeners have to be 100 percent effective. Even if they slip up one in a hundred times, the plot can succeed.
What the author of the article is missing is something my brother and I thought of last year when we all flew to Orlando. They flew there from Philly, I came from Charlotte. We met in the Orlando airport. At that point, we’d all already gone through security checkpoints. We’d all been cleared and have the legal amount of allowable liquids.
What Kev and I thought of was this: including the kids, there were 5 of us, each with potentially 3-9oz of liquid. That’s a total of 15-45oz of liquid. All beyond the security check point. All from two different airports standing around in a 3rd airport. What’s to keep someone from collecting the liquids from the others and getting in a plane with enough to do whatever it is they can do with it?
Or are we missing something in this liquid terrorist hoopla? Do they swipe the quart bags for explosives like they do my dangerous CPAP machine and the laptops?