Security Theatre

Here's a bit from a blog post by James Fallows on petty bureaucracy making people's lives unbearable simply to pretend to deliver "security":

The TSA: bringing us ever closer to China!

One of the predictably nutty aspects of life in China was the tyranny of objectively unimportant details of ID records. To mention only experiences I had first-hand:

I once had to buy a whole new airline ticket for a Beijing-Shanghai flight, and tear up my existing one, because the airline ticket agent had hand-written my first name on the ticket as "Jame," which didn't match my passport name. Similarly: the English-language on-line ticketing system for the Beijing Olympics had spaces for entering your first name and family name -- but no space for a middle name. (The Chinese version had spaces for the three characters in most Chinese names.) So when I went to the Bank of China to pick up the tickets I'd ordered and paid for, I showed my passport for identification -- and settled in for hours of argument, since my passport showed that I was James M. Fallows and the tickets were for James Fallows. How could this be the same person?

Thus it was with with a sense of deja vu and doom that I heard this summer about the TSA's new "Secure Flight" system, designed to match the Chinese government's pettifoggery about ID cards. (And in China, it is a more defensible bias. They have many more people, and many fewer available names, so their hairsplitting about naming details comes closer to making sense.) Well done yet again, TSA! If you were going to learn something from the Chinese security system, how about their "of course you can keep your shoes on" screening policy at airports?

Bureaucracies can impose mindless regulations because it costs nothing to them. But it slowly strangles the economy and even social civility. Much of life requires implicit understandings and civil treatment. But you can't mandate that.

Another thing to realize is that there is no such thing as 100% security. Life is full of risk. The trick is to reduce the risk down to something manageable. Sure, that sounds cruel because just one failure in security means somebody will die. But we constantly make assessments and tradeoffs about risk, e.g. cars could be 100% safe if they couldn't be driven faster than 2 miles per hour. But that makes them useless. Setting the speed limit requires balancing risk versus reward. There is no clear value at which you have "maximized" the tradeoff. Life is fuzzy and uncertain. You just have to muck through it.