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"Anything that assumes people aren't bad guys is nothing more than a show of force designed to intimidate the marginal bad guy, we aren't dealing with marginal bad guys any more."

Well, we do it wrong, of course, by using random selection for extra screening. That trick never works. Either we screen everyone thoroughly, or the screening is essentially useless.

Prior to 9/11, the last hijacking of a plane in the US was in 1987. A commuter plane was hijacked in CA by a disgruntled former employee of the airline, then he killed the cockpit crew and crashed the plane, killing all aboard.

One could argue that a fired employee is a security risk, but this guy was not a Muslim or anything of the sort. He didn't work at the place of origin of the flight, so nobody there knew him as a former employee. He bought a ticket like anyone else, then proceeded to carry out his action.

And after 1987, there were no hijackings until the 9/11 events. Hijackings are really, really rare, and highly unlikely, actually, to occur, screening or not.

Personally, I think the old style of screening, pre TSA, was adequate, with the magnetometer and carryon x-ray. The additional stuff probably isn't necessary, although viewing the contents of checked luggage probably isn't a terrible idea.

I wouldn't go so far as to say random screening never works, but it's not very good. We do have a so-so level of default screening in place.

Hijackings are rare now. I remember the 70s, seemed like we alternated monthly between a hijacking and Ali defending his title. It's important to note that in this interim periods there haven't been many failed hijackings (at least that we know of), it just seemed to fall out of vogue with the terrorists. The problem with fashions is they come back, I'm suprised there was a spate of them after 9-11 which proved pretty substantially that it could still be done.

9-11 proved the old style screening wasn't enough. We'd been being told by a lot of people for a lot of years that the barn door was open and the only reason the horse hadn't left was he didn't feel like it. We still have the least secured air travel of any major nation. So the question really is: are they all paranoid, or are we just that lucky?