More Security Stupidity?
Published at 09:16 on 19 September 2011
There’s been an awful lot of security stupidity since 9/11: measures instituted ostensibly to improve security, but which upon further thought (sometimes not much further thought at all) reveal themselves to be nothing but mindless exercises in petty fascism.
And when going through airport security yesterday, it struck me how the whole business of forcing airline passengers to remove their shoes so they can be X-rayed is probably one of these exercises. Consider that what shows up on an X-ray are metal objects, and that most high explosives are nonmetallic.
What tends to have metal is blasting caps; electric ones have wires, and the increasingly rare non-electric ones have brass or copper jackets. However, it is not all that hard to make your own homemade plastic-jacketed non-electric blasting caps. Once you’ve done that, all you need is some fuse (also conveniently non-metallic), and there you have it: your very own shoe bomb that will sail through the X-ray machine with nary a suspicion.
So unless I’m seriously missing something with the above analysis, the whole “take off your shoes” drill is merely a feel-good propaganda measure designed to reassure passengers that something has been done to screen out future shoe bombers. At least it has the side-benefit of enabling me to “forget” to put my shoes back on and enjoy a little barefoot time on my walk to the gate.