What about safe flights / follow up comments

In the same vein of "What about safe flights?" Bob Kustra recently interviewed world renowned security expert Bruce Schneier for some powerful insights on the subject:
stream.publicbroadcasting.net

"Remember the day after the 'underwear bomber', our Secretary of Homeland Security said, basically, that security succeeded on Christmas Day, and she was villified for it, which frustrates me, because, you know, security did succeed. Think of what happened: we had no bomb explode, no plane crash, nobody die, and terrorist arrested. Sounds like a success to me, sounds like a phenomenal success. I think we should be very happy, and we should be laughing at this guy.

"Instead, we went into sort of 'full fear mode', and, really succeeding in terrorizing ourselves, and this frustrates me. Here it is, this guy failed and yet he's succeeding and causing terror.

"And when you think about why he failed, and this is very important, he failed because of pre-9/11 security. Because, in Amsterdam airport, they screen for obvious guns and bombs, the bomb-maker had to build an inefficient bomb. So instead of using a plunger, or a timer, or a fuse, or something any normal, commercial user of this plastic explosive might employ, he had to build an ad hoc, home-brewed detonation device, with a syringe, and 20 minutes in the bathroom, and a fire in his lap, and actually we don't know what else. That failed. And that's security succeeding. And then after that, new developments in airline security, which is passengers fighting back, quickly subdued him, and the plane landed safely....

"When people are scared, they want to feel better. People are scared of stories. The Christmas Day suicide bombing attempt was a story, and the story made people afraid. And when people are afraid, they really can't hear. You know, 'it wasn't a big deal, relax.' You remember, the day after Christmas, nobody wanted to hear that. Everyone wanted to hear 'how are you going to make us safer? What are you going to do?' There's a belief that perfection is possible, that when something goes wrong, someone must be at fault, someone must be to blame, and there must be a fix.

"Even though in the real world, as we all know, you can do everything right and still have things go wrong. There doesn't have to be a fault. But as a politician you can't say that. So you have to look tough on terror, you have to give people a competing narrative.... even if it makes no sense, [even if it's just 'security theater'].

Thanks to Fort Boise's Tom von Alten for pointing this out.
fortboise.org

It’s remarkable that a Northwest Airlines flight was subject to a high-profile Christmas attack; eight years to the day, that shoe-bomber Richard Reid bumbled a similar airline assault. Equally noteworthy is the international media scrutiny placed on the uncommon events; while meanwhile few news outlets report on the over 500 million airline flights that took place in the last ten years, without confrontation of any sort.

The years I worked in the airline industry before 9-11, made it clear that our security system was largely a charade, requiring vast improvements. For one thing, I would have felt more secure back then, knowing our security agents were earning more than six bucks an hour. It’s great that our dedicated screeners now earn something more approaching a living wage; however, I never dreamed we would become compliant to authoritarian rules of such a large ballooning boondoggle agency. Besides being required to obediently kick off our shoes, we’re now sometimes subject to fishing expeditions that have absolutely nothing to do with transportation security. Currently at some airports, innocent flyers are even forced to pass through high-resolution X-Ray scanners, which clearly violate child pornography laws!

Although the TSA has manufactured over 1 million “terrorists” for our state-of fear watch-lists, air travel remains a safer mode of transportation then most long highway journeys. It’s too bad that while we’re being hyped and barked at by talking heads all along the terrorism watchtower, about these extremely rare violent air-incidences, that we aren’t able to divert some of these massive funds for some simple down-to-earth homeland security measures, such as upgrading some of Idaho’s terribly dangerous high speed rural roads into safer divided highways.