Sunday, January 23, 2011

Time to Ring Down the Curtain on Abusurd Security Theatrics?

Forbes blogger Art Carden thinks so:

...Defenders of the Department of Homeland Security and TSA ask whether we are willing to sacrifice safety and security to avoid being inconvenienced. There is no evidence that this works. I have said it before and I will say it again: the data suggest that if anything, the TSA actually costs lives.
No doubt, there are plenty of people who heartily endorse increasingly-invasive measures employed by the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration because it makes them feel safe. That feeling of safety is an illusion. As Bruce Schneier and others have pointed out, the entire operation is “security theater” that costs us time and money while leaving us no safer. As Wikileaks is showing us, an opaque government saying “just trust us” is not to be trusted...
Neither is a system which, for the sake of political correctness ("profiling"? Allah forfend!) employs a ridiculous mechanism called a "Randomizer". (It's so "random" that the other day it randomly selected Ezra Levant, of all people, for extra-special scrutiny.)

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