Tremendous thanks go

Tremendous thanks go to Instapundit for introducing so many of you to this site — and more importantly for keeping the pressure on in the fight for real security at airports — that takes both actual threats and our liberties seriously.

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The current issue

The current issue of The Atlantic has an outstanding piece on security — airline security, computer security, and how to think about protecting ourselves from terrorism. The bottom line is that we need systems that “fail badly.” It makes no sense to have a security checkpoint where if something bad passes through the system shuts down. We need to strengthen cockpit doors, arm pilots, and create sundry other redundant systems.

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I had a

I had a Sand in the Gears moment at the local Giant grocery last night. My girlfriend asked me to pick up ice cream on the way home. A simple task that was about to become not so simple. I picked up a package of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey (let’s leave their politics out of this — we’re talking about ice cream, chocolate, and banana here!). I walked to the front of the store and found three checkout lines open, each one with at least five customers ahead of me. I got in the express line designated for shoppers with ten items or less and found that it was being worked by the store manager. I advanced through that line… and I was next. The store manager said, “I’m sorry, this line is closed.”…

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Our nation’s airlines are in

Our nation’s airlines are in dire financial straits, and the Transportation Security Agency makes their problems worse. The Dow Jones Transportation Index is down 13% over the last year, and the nation’s two biggest airlines lost more than $3 billion combined in 2001. USAirways, the nation’s sixth largest carrier, entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week. USAirways is a high cost carrier which relies on business travel up and down the East Coast. (Their route map is made up of short distance travel throughout the east coast, with plenty of takeoffs and landings relative to flight miles and utilization of high cost airports.) The economy is suppressing business travel, but so is the hassle (delay, cost, aggravation) of airline security. This has hurt USAirways especially, because their profitable routes are the New York-DC-Boston shuttle which has…

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