Drunks, Keys and Public Policy

There is the old story about the drunk looking for his keys at night near a lamp-post because that is where the light is. It seems that a lot of our security policy uses the same logic.

This morning as I was being inspected twice to get through the airport at Mexico City and SFO, I wondered whether anyone in Washington has thought, even hastily, about the lead story in the WSJ, also this morning. It seems that the experts have found an increasing number of security breaches in key public entities like power grids and water systems. Think for a moment about the billions of dollars and millions of hours of wasted time that we have imposed upon ourselves to stop a repeat of 9/11. Yet it is highly unlikely that terrorists would try to do a repeat performance. Terrorists don't do encores.

This morning, I had a small amount of a leather preparation substance, used to recondition my briefcase, which I ultimately left in my hotel room after over dabbing the material on the briefcase and throwing some of it into a 3M rag (placed in a plastic bag). I was able to carry the liquid through "security" because it was not in a larger than 3 oz bottle. (Although the substance was the same as it had been in the bottle. But the bottle was too large. The post 9/11 rules say I cannot take that kind of stuff on an airplane because it came in a container larger than 3 oz. I passed by the airport vendors of Tequila and while I would have liked to buy a bottle, I knew I had to transfer in SFO and thus could not bring a liter of liquid through the second security point.

There is one area of the economy that has thrived under the new requirements in airports - those businesses including massage and high end goods and actually good restaurants - that are now available to those of us that are held captive waiting for our flights because we had to get there early enough to get through the lines. But then there is that chart on the front page of the WSJ. We don't seem to be doing much to respond to a real threat. I guess I should be confident about the misapplication of resources to a prior threat.