The real change in aviation security

Given the brevity of the American attention span, I understand that it’s a bit late in the game to be offering any insights into the underwear attack, but I took the holidays off from blogging. In any event, the President is getting the results of his investigations into the matter today, so I say that it is still timely. Even in 2010.

I think that the market in opinions about intelligence failures, al Qaida’s capacity to execute sophisticated attacks, and body scans is pretty well cornered at this point. Still, it’s worth pointing out that this attempted attack really highlights the fact that a 9/11-style attack would be really hard to pull off today.

The 9/11 hijackers were able to hijack the planes by using history against us. Prior to 9/11, it was widely understood that the best thing to do in a hijacking was to just let the terrorist do his thing and you would probably walk away safely. Hijacking and suicide bombing had, up to that point, been separate endeavors. What we saw in the case of the shoe bomber shortly after 9/11 was a radical shift in the average passenger’s cost-benefit analysis. All of a sudden, inaction seemed much more likely to kill you and lots of other people so attacking the would-be hijacker became a much more appealing option.

8 years later, the undie bomber episode tells us that the changed perception of hijacking is probably here to stay. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it is somehow less likely that suicide bombers will be able to blow up individual planes (though query whether pre-9/11 passangers would have been sufficiently suspicious to prevent either the shoe or the underpants bomb). It does mean, however, that it would be incredibly difficult to actually hijack a plane and use it as a missile. That may seem like cold comfort to the victims on the plane that blows up, but it’s a significant security improvement and it has nothing to do with the TSA or the US counterterrorism apparatus. 9/11 was at least an order of magnitude worse in terms of human life, economic cost, and damage to the national psyche than a successful underwear bomb would have been. That’s no reason to stop improving security or intelligence procedures, but it’s still good news.

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