Homeland Insecurity.
There's an interesting article in the September 2002
The Atlantic Monthly entitled
Homeland Insecurity which features the ideas of
security expert
Bruce Schneier.
The point is made that when it comes to security,
technology is not nearly as important as human factors.
Just as strong cryptography is worthless if people choose
bad passwords or someone installs a "keystroke logger"
to capture what you type (like the FBI did to catch mobster Scarfo),
Schneier claims the technology based measures taken to stop
future terrorist attacks after 9/11 will not work.
Most interesting from my point of view is that he echos
what I said here August 9, 2002:
The federal government and the airlines are spending millions
of dollars, Schneier points out, on systems that screen every
passenger to keep knives and weapons out of planes. But what
matters most is keeping dangerous passengers out of airline
cockpits, which can be accomplished by reinforcing the door.
Similarly, it is seldom necessary to gather large amounts of
additional information, because in modern societies people
leave wide audit trails. The problem is sifting through the
already existing mountain of data.
and
Few of the new airport-security proposals address this
problem. Instead, Schneier told me in Los Angeles, they address
problems that don't exist. "The idea that to stop bombings
cars have to park three hundred feet away from the terminal,
but meanwhile they can drop off passengers right up front
like they always have ..." He laughed. "The only ideas I've
heard that make any sense are reinforcing the cockpit door and
getting the passengers to fight back." Both measures test well
against Kerckhoffs's principle: knowing ahead of time that
law-abiding passengers may forcefully resist a hijacking en
masse, for example, doesn't help hijackers to fend off their
assault. Both are small-scale, compartmentalized measures that
make the system more ductile, because no matter how hijackers
get aboard, beefed-up doors and resistant passengers will make
it harder for them to fly into a nuclear plant. And neither
measure has any adverse effect on civil liberties.
Why are these points hardly ever (never?) discussed
on television news and interviews?