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Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 05:47:52 -0400 (EDT)
To: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
From: James W Mickens <jmickens &AElig eecs.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: stupid feel-good "no liquids" rule
Status: O

> Have you flown in Britain yet, James? My mom
> was under the same impression about the
> situation in the states.

I haven't flown back to America yet, but several of my friends have tried, 
and they have been subject to the draconian measures which I mentioned 
earlier. Here is the August 10 security statement from the British Airport 
Authority which outlines these measures:
   http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/08/10/uk.terror.baa/index.html
The BAA relaxed some of the rules today, allowing small carry-ons. 
However, liquids are still not permitted.


> Is it so unspeakably horrific? A plane can carry what? around 300 people? 
> Assuming it blows up in a major metropolitan area, that will kill in the 
> neighborhood of 3000 people, maybe? Of course this is bad, but is it so bad 
> that you want hundreds of millions of tax dollars wasted to prevent an attack 
> they have no realistic chance of stopping (not to mention the inconvenience 
> caused to all travelers).
> <snip>
> Hell, carbon monoxide poisoning kills 700 people per year, making it 17% more 
> unspeakably horrific than terrorists on airplanes (who've been averaging ~600 
> deaths per year since 9/11/01).

This type of calculus ignores important associated costs. For example, 
Hurricane Katrina "only" resulted in the deaths of 1,800 people. However, 
most people would agree that the impact of Hurricane Katrina was more than 
2.6 times worse than the yearly impact of carbon monoxide poisoning. Key 
transportation and energy infrastructure was destroyed, hundreds of 
thousands of people lost their belongings and were displaced, etc. These 
tragic costs are not captured by raw death statistics. In the same sense, 
even though domestic terrorism has "only" killed an average of 600 
Americans in the last five years, its impact expands beyond these numbers. 
The terrorist attacks directly lead to the Patriot Act, an act which many 
think restricts our right to privacy. The 9-11 attacks lead to the 
American assault on Afghanistan, an assault which I thought was justified 
but which resulted in at least 1,000 civilian deaths. The 9-11 attacks 
provided one of the justifications for the Iraq war, since Bush was able 
to channel national anger over 9-11 into a broad feeling that we must 
strike back at arbitrary evil doers in the Middle East; since the 2003 
invasion, over 50,000 Iraqis have died. If you want to look at things in 
purely financial terms, the 9-11 attacks caused severe economic damage to 
domestic airlines, and the American stock market lost approximately $1.2 
trillion in the days after the attacks. A study from the GAO estimated 
that the September 11 attacks caused $83 billion dollars in damage to New 
York City alone:
    http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02700r.pdf
Economists still argue about the overall impact of 9-11 in the context of 
a weak national economy, so the numbers given above should be taken as 
estimates. But if we focus only on the cost of the post-9-11 military 
build-up, we can see that Bush's 2006 budget request increased DoD funding 
by more than 50% from 2001 levels:
    http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1464
This works out to hundreds of billions of dollars of extra defense 
spending per year. All of these things represent the cost of a domestic 
terror attack. If we can spend millions, or even hundred of millions, on 
security precautions to prevent such attacks, we lessen the risk of 
incurring the more onerous financial and humanitarian penalties associated 
with striking back at the people who struck us. One might argue that 
striking back is not prudent, but most Americans would demand vengeance if 
we were attacked again, even if the associated costs of such an action 
were high. Thus, spending money on precautionary measures generally seems 
like a good investment to me.

~j