By Dave Anderson:
Pretty much anything that is not outlawed by the laws of physics can be done eventually. The only question is frequency, and cost, thus the degree of difficulty. Security is the act of balancing the need to protect and the costs of inconvenience and invasion of space and time so that decisions that otherwise would be made are no longer made. At some point, the law of diminishing returns usually comes into play so that any additional security measure is outweighed by the costs it imposes upon a system.
For instance, illegal immigration could be reduced to a trickle with appropriate security. That "appropriate" level of security might be a 10 mile thick minefield that is routinely reseeded by artillery tubes north of the border zone with multiple ten meter deep and fifteen meter wide anti-vehicle ditches backed by a 500 meter free fire zone along the routinely used corridors, backed by a national identification registry and a requirement to present papers to conduct any commercial transaction of more than twenty dollars. At that point, immigration (licit and illicit) will basically be a non-issue and the US economy craters as these steps would introduce massive friction into every transaction.
The same applies to airline security. The goal is to make it difficult to covertly blow up an airplane. That means screening for prepared explosives, that means screening for known operatives, that means screening and breaking up complex networks and SAM smugglers. That means making any attempt obvious so that the post-9-11 mindset of self-defense by the passengers (as seen in the shoe-bomber and the more recent underwear bomber attempts) could be activated. The goal is to increase the degree of difficulty of a successful attack, and right now the degree of difficulty is very high.
Further increases in security, especially security measures that minimize the self-defense mindset of passengers, could be counter-productive and impose net costs instead of net benefits.
Excellent observations. At some point we all must face uncomfortable facts. Security from threats is more about reducing the threat than devising more impenetrable armor.
ReplyDeleteAs I was reading your description of an immigration barrier I thought of others such as the Berlin Wall, the smuggling tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, and other international borders through which millions pass fleeing life or death situations. Then there are the borders between Zimbabwe and South Africa and virtually all those between Iraq and neighboring states across which millions of displaced people have fled.
Viewed through the lens of history, borders are more the tools of oppression than security. The Great Wall of China is a monument to the failure of walls as security.