Maciej over at Idle Words writes about security as theater. I especially like the line: “Alas, Mahmoud – foiled again! We must remain seated”. It seems to me that the whole security thing has gotten out of hands: it annoys regular people and doesn’t do much (if anything) to prevent the bad guys from doing what they want…

Other opinions on this same issue:

With all that display of security and paranoia, I want to know: did they arrest anyone? It’s obviously difficult to tell if they deterred anyone from trying anything but unless arrests are made isn’t all of this in vain? *sigh*

It’s like foreign nationals being fingerprinted and photographed upon entrance in the US. Does that really help? How likely are potential terrorists to have their fingerprints in a database already? How dumb would they be to try to enter the USA if they did? In any case, terrorists are more likely to keep a low profile until they’re ready to act than indulge in criminal behavior resulting in them being fingerprinted… so the potential terrorists are not really likely to be identified via fingerprints. The problem is not collecting data, it’s collecting the right data and then making sense of it.
I obviously don’t have a solution to the problem, I only have questions and doubts. I don’t know much about the issue but it doesn’t seem to me that what’s currently implemented is that useful.

Raining All the Time from the album For Never & Ever by Kill Hannah