>>If he got on the plane with the bomb in the first place, doesn't that imply the system doesn't work?

I think that means part of the system had a failure, but that failure did not propogate catastrophically. If anything, this is reminiscent of a working AND resilient system.

Which system are we talking about?

The "keep bombs off of planes" system failed.

The "keep folks from blowing up bombs on planes" system succeeded.

Note that the former is what the US govt is claiming to do while the latter was entirely the doing of random folks on the plane.

Do we have any instances of air marshals stopping anyone? I ask because both the shoe and underwear bomber were handled by ordinary people.

The ultimate goal is to keep folks from blowing up bombs on planes, correct?

No.

the Ultimate Goal is to create and maintain as much of an ideal society as we can pragmatically attain. An ideal society has no crime. In Canada we've realized we can't entirely eliminate crime, because many of the more drastic measures to "get tough on crime" have harmful side-effects that take us further away from the ideal society, not closer towards it.

We take the same arguments towards cigarettes, alcohol, automobile speeding, and children in swimming pools. Draconian measures that would increase our safety--like banning tobacco, prohibition, stringent requirements to obtain and maintain a license to drive, or banning personal swimming pools--actually move us away from our ideal society, not closer.

We have to "Play God" and agree that someone, somewhere, must die as a result of terrorism. We as a society already do that with our respective health care systems, with our automobils, with the sale of alcohol and tobacco, with the sale of guns, by allowing children to swim in swimming pools,and the ridiculous ease with which we allow people to obtain and drive vehicles.

The ultimate goal is to define what it means to be a Canadian or an American and then to live as much of that life as possible. The argument is whether the goal of zero airplanes downed can be achieved without compromising our Canadian or American identities.

I'll leave it up to others to argue whether strip searches and banning toner cartridges will achieve this.

The ultimate goal would be to live in a world where nobody wants to blow up planes.

That's not a goal. That's a fantasy world.

There will always be a tiny fraction of people that want to harm others. Whether it is because they have an agenda or are simply crazy (or likely both), they will always exist.

We have the choice of whether we want to sell our liberties and freedom for the illusion of safety from insignificant, yet inevitable, risks.

It's interesting that the part of the system that works cost $0 and the part of the system that failed costs billions.

A safe system is one that has redundant subsystems, so the complete failure of any one subsystem does not cause the whole to fail.

Do we know if air marshals were on the flight? Sample size is too small to draw conclusions.

> Do we know if air marshals were on the flight? Sample size is too small to draw conclusions.

I assume that they weren't. If we can't afford to put air marshals on every flight, that's a weakness. (It may be a reasonable weakness given the cost, but it's still a weakness.)

Note that the deterrence argument of air marshals assumes that folks who are willing to die are unwilling to spend time in prison. That may be true, but I'd like to see some evidence. (The deterrence argument is how you get from "air marshals on x% of the flights protects more than x% of the flights".)

There are always other passengers on passenger flights.

The bit that worked though, both for this and Richard Reid's shoe bomb, was that passengers - not air marshals - noticed the terrorist trying to set light to something in the main cabin area.

All it takes is a terrorist bright enough to try and set light to their bomb in the toilet rather than sitting surrounded by other passengers while fiddling with a fuse and lighter, and the system has failed. These attacks are failing because the chosen attackers are stupid, not because the system is effective.

Air Marshals. 4.2 arrests per year average, $200m per arrest. A very, very expensive comfort blanket.

The author of the article is the one who rightly explains that the only thing that has made us safer since 9/11 is locking cockpit doors and the knowledge that passengers should not comply with terrorists. In fact, that last one was learned so quickly it disrupted the 4th plane of that very attack.

Everything else is security theater.

I don't know that you could really get away with it in the lavatory either. Those smoke detectors are meant to stop people from having a cigarette, which doesn't necessarily emit that much smoke, so they're probably tuned to be pretty sensitive, right? But yeah, I assume the guy wouldn't really care if he was going to blow up the plane; attendants probably aren't in the habit of storming the lavatory when the smoke detector goes off.

Exactly. Every system will experience failure; it's how the system responds to the failure that is so important.

You can only reject the robustness principle ("Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle) if you can completely control the input 100% of the time.

To get the bomb on the plane, he had to have a bomb that was ineffective.

It's not ideal, but I'm pretty sure I can live with a system that lets faulty bombs through.

I could live with a system that lets working bombs through, too. I didn't stop flying after Pan Am Flight 103. Why was 9/11 so different? (More people died? But many, many, many more people die of preventable heart disease. Why do we have a war on people flying planes into buildings and not a war on heart disease? I don't want to die of either, and a bad diet seems a lot riskier than a random wacko hijacking a plane and flying it into stuff. Right!?)

I blame the cable-news rating frenzy for the over-reaction to 9/11. Everyone saw those planes fly into the twin towers. "Something drastic had to be done!", the pundits declared... and here we are. CNN got some ad revenue, and you have to let a rent-a-cop grope your balls to get on a plane. We defeated the terrorists for sure!

The system should not be designed to prevent bombs in planes. This is focusing on the method you will use instead of the result you want.

The idea is to prevent planes from being hijacked or destroyed and passengers and crew to be harmed.

Besides, military planes routinely carry bombs and hardly experience any problem with them

And, to top that (as someone else said before) the only reason he was able to get into the plane was that his bomb was not a functional one - it would be very difficult to take down the plane with it.

Of course the system worked. Chertoff's buddies have sold a shitload of body scanners the past year, haven't they?

A bomb too small to cause harm and no way to detonate it properly. It worked.