On the pointlessness of watch lists and airport security

A comment over on thebustocrookes's journal prompted me to reply, and it turned into more of a mini-rant, so I've posted it here instead. One of my areas of interest in doing my current degree is the issue of personal privacy in the age of the internet, particularly where governments and large commercial concerns are involved.

If you look at the past decade there have been six planes involved in terrorist attacks in the US - the four on 9/11, the shoe bomber and the pants bomber. The numbers have been crunched here but to summarize, your chances of getting on a plane that is a terrorist target are less than one in ten million (or twenty times less than your chance of being struck by lightning).

If you exclude 9/11 then there have been *no* successful plane attacks on the US and UK, the two biggest western targets. The issue of terrorism on the populations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is another matter entirely though. There was also the 7/7 bus bombing in London, but no amount of id cards or biometric scanning could possibly have prevented that.

Looking at watch lists and biometric scanning, let's conduct a thought experiment. Imagine you have a scanner that is 99% effective at spotting a terrorist going through the security gate (wildly optimistic given the current technology). Suppose you have a thirty million people using an airport like Gatwick in a year, then 1% of them will be falsely accused of being a terrorist. That's three hundred thousand suspects with the real terrorist hidden somewhere amongst them. Even if your scanner is 99.99% effective that still leaves three thousand suspects to sift through trying to spot the genuine terrorist.

Current governments in the US and UK want to create vast databases of personal information on every citizen in order to 'fight the war on terror'. Leaving apart the simple fact that no large government IT project has *ever* been successfully completed on time and on budget (or done what it was supposed to) this is a vast expense and encroachment on our civil liberties for no real benefit in security.

The transport watch lists sound like a good idea, but currently there is no way to know if you are on the list or of getting off of the list if you have been falsely accused (for example, of having a similar name to a real terrorist). Do you think this is only going to affect people with foreign sounding names? The shoe bomber was called Richard Reed, which is about as innocuous as you can get. Also, all of the 9/11 bombers and the current pants bomber were on watch lists and had been reported to the authorities, but it didn't stop them from getting on planes to carry out their attacks.

The current and ever increasing restrictions are always foiling the last plot, and a determined terrorist will always find a way through. It is inevitable. However, there aren't many terrorists and there a lot of people using airports, so it's just something that we're going to have to live with.

Christopher Hitchens makes the point quite eloquently in an article over at Slate that ordinary travelers are being punished while the terrorists are not being caught.

Go figure.