What increased security feels like

Posted at 10:27 AM on December 27, 2009 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

Twitter is providing the best glimpse of any media on how "increased security" is affecting air travelers in the wake of Friday's attack on a Northwest Airlines jet.

The Web site Mediaite has culled some of the Twitter reports. For example, you can -- apparently -- do Sudoku on the last hour of an international flight, but laptops are outlawed.

One commenter has an interesting analysis:

The way to security is not to try to combat specific tactics -- terrorists and criminals can always dream up new tactics and new approaches, and if they hit on one that our "security" personnel haven't thought of yet, they win. (If we focus too much on, say, airport security, then the terrorists will change tactics. What would a truck bomb at Disneyworld or at a Midwestern shopping mall do to make Americans feel threatened?) What we need to be doing is pouring less money and resources into defeating movie-plot threats, and more into intelligence, disruption, and interdiction of terrorist plots before they reach operational stages. NYPD, with its large Intelligence Division, is on the right track here.

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