Heaven give me strength. Airport screeners find sharp things hidden in a young Bulgarian’s luggage — but that’s not all!

Robert Johnson, a Transportation Security Administration spokesman . . . said the fact that the man’s one-way ticket was purchased over the Internet in August also raised suspicion.

(Hat tip to Rachel Lucas.)

For at least a decade, paying cash at the counter has been a confession that you’re a drug smuggler, and any cash you happen to have on you is forfeit. Now, if you buy your ticket on the Net a month in advance, you’re a terrorist. Is that nice Mr Mineta in bed with the traditional travel agents, or what?

I’m going to visit Dad in a few weeks (for my birthday, which is also my stepbrother’s; he’ll be 21). Dad bought the tickets, over a month in advance, on the Net — relieving my worry that the Keystone Kounterterrorists might hassle me for nothing.

An op-ed advocating militia-based defense — from a professor of aesthetics at Harvard. What is the world coming to?

Virginia Postrel observes:

So here’s the question: What happens when we find ourselves facing militant reactionaries who, for purely pragmatic reasons, are willing to use adaptable, decentralized organization and technologies against us? Unlike our Cold War adversaries, the militants who want to build an unchanging Islamicist world have no ideological dedication to central planning and control. They’re nimble, they’re transnational, they’re adaptable, they’re quick. And our defenses depend in large part on hypertrophied technocratic institutions — sluggish, highly bureaucratic, and driven as much by poltics as pragmatism. If we can’t respond by playing to our dynamist strengths, rather than our technocratic weaknesses, we’re doomed.

Homeland Insecurity by Charles C. Mann in The Atlantic, September 2002:

Indeed, Schneier says, Kerckhoffs’s principle applies beyond codes and ciphers to security systems in general: every secret creates a potential failure point. Secrecy, in other words, is a prime cause of brittleness – and therefore something likely to make a system prone to catastrophic collapse. Conversely, openness provides ductility.

From this can be drawn several corollaries. One is that plans to add new layers of secrecy to security systems should automatically be viewed with suspicion. Another is that security systems that utterly depend on keeping secrets tend not to work very well. Alas, airport security is among these. Procedures for screening passengers, for examining luggage, for allowing people on the tarmac, for entering the cockpit, for running the autopilot software – all must be concealed, and all seriously compromise the system if they become known. As a result, Schneier wrote in the May issue of Crypto-Gram, brittleness “is an inherent property of airline security.”

Secrets are not the only thing that makes the system brittle; as the passengers are made more helpless, any sharp object smuggled in is made more powerful. Schneier goes on:

“The only ideas I’ve heard that make any sense are reinforcing the cockpit door and getting the passengers to fight back.” Both measures test well against Kerckhoffs’s principle: knowing ahead of time that law-abiding passengers may forcefully resist a hijacking en masse, for example, doesn’t help hijackers to fend off their assault. Both are small-scale, compartmentalized measures that make the system more ductile, because no matter how hijackers get aboard, beefed-up doors and resistant passengers will make it harder for them to fly into a nuclear plant. And neither measure has any adverse effect on civil liberties.

Airport screeners seize GI Joe’s rifle.

“We have instructions to confiscate anything that looks like a weapon or a replica.”

Fair’s fair. Wouldn’t want our airports to be less secure(d) than our schools.

No fair! This list of blogs ranked by number of links (each way) omits me, though I’ve been linked (at least in passing) by about fifteen of those on the list. I must have forgotten to turn off the Romulan device.

bon mot from Juan Gato:

Federal authorities said Sunday they have arrested a forest technician with the U.S. Forest Service for starting the Hayman fire, the largest wildfire in Colorado’s history.

You know, this kind of stuff wouldn’t happen if we federalized the U.S. Forest Service.