DHS insider says "body bombs" are a good thing

[thewayne]

I'm not entirely clear why they think this. There's a huge number of problems involved in the concept of surgically-implanting a bomb inside a person: surgeon skill, infection issues, toxicity of explosives, how to detonate, the dampening effect of water mass on explosives, etc. So from the top, the difficulties of doing this in a third-world country would be very difficult to overcome.

Aircraft defense still boils down to: x-ray everything that goes on to the plane to prevent Locherbie attacks and lock the cockpit door. Everyone knows that a hijacked plane now represent potential mass death, so there's nothing to lose to attack a hijacker. DHS still constantly talks about the terrorist attacks that they've stopped that they can't talk about, yet you never hear about the TSA stopping mad bombers at the security checkpoints.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/body-bombs-are-a-good-sign-dhs-insider-claims/

Comments

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

Eh. TSA is just Security Theater. In that sense the general inconvenience and assholism of the TSA is a good thing, since it convinces the cattle that it's hard to sneak something onto a plane; thus they feel they're being protected, they keep buying tickets, the airlines keep making money, and so on. Also, it probably discourages some of the disorganized and flighty whack jobs from even trying an attack. But even I can see several ways to get around it, just walking through the airport. And when some pilot gets upset at all the holes in security and posts pictures to point them up, they discipline HIM instead of the TSA rent-a-cops who allow such holes to exist.

It figures, really. I work for an oppressed bureaucracy myself, and you very quickly learn that there is one crime in such a bureaucracy, and one crime only. And that crime is making your superiors look bad.