First Class Bureaucrats, Coach Class Taxpayers

Here's a story I got from the Advice Goddess twitter feed. It seems airlines are upset that federal air marshals almost always grab first class seats. This isn't good for airlines, since it uses up seats that they need for paying customers. It's not good for security since the main threat in on-board explosives carried by terrorists who want to sit over the wings. And it's not good for Dan Mitchell since it means he's less likely to get upgraded when the good seats are occupied by bureaucrats. Since I'm waiting for a flight to Australia, you can guess which upsets me the most. Here's a blurb from the Wall Street Journal story.

To protect the nation's air travelers, federal air marshals deployed after the 2001 terrorist attacks try to travel incognito, often in pairs, and choose flights identified with the potential to fall under threat. And they almost always fly first class—something some airlines would like to change. With cockpit doors fortified and a history of attackers choosing coach seats, some airline executives and security experts question whether the first-class practice is really necessary—or even a good idea. It could weaken security by isolating marshals or making them easier for terrorists to identify, airline executives say. With more threats in the coach cabin now, first-class clustering may not make as much security sense. Security experts say bombers are a bigger threat today than knife-wielding attackers trying to get through secure cockpit doors, and Transportation Security Administration checkpoints are heavily focused on explosives, whether hidden in shoes, liquids or under clothes. Some believe bombers try to target areas over the wing—a structurally critical location and also the site of fuel storage—to cause the most damage to the aircraft. ...By law, airlines must provide seats to marshals at no cost in any cabin requested. With first-class and business-class seats in particular, the revenue loss to airlines can be substantial because they can't sell last-minute tickets or upgrades, and travelers sometimes get bumped to the back or lose out on upgrade opportunities. When travelers do get bumped, airlines are barred from divulging why the first-class seat was unexpectedly taken away.

Subsidizing Terrorism with Welfare Handouts

Here are some very depressing stories. The Daily Mail reports that a European Court has ruled that the U.K. no longer can impose restrictions on welfare payments to women married to suspected terrorists:

A European court has instructed Britain to drop restrictions which limit social security benefits paid to the wives of terror suspects. Ministers imposed tight rules on payouts to stop the money falling into the hands of alleged Al Qaeda fanatics. Under the restrictions, cash payments were strictly limited and families had to show receipts to justify every penny of spending. But yesterday the European Court of Justice said there was no danger of the handouts being used to fund terror and branded the measures unlawful.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated story. Here's a report from the Express about a Muslim cleric who collected welfare from the Brits while (to put it mildly) being a reprehensible slug: "The twisted cleric provoked outrage by comparing British troops to Nazi stormtroopers and telling parents of dead soldiers that their children had died in vain. ...Choudary, a former lawyer...rakes in more than £25,000 a year in welfare handouts." And CNN reports that, "Since the mid-90s, London has been a haven for foreign jihadi preachers, organizers, agitators and propagandists, many of them recipients of generous welfare benefits. And here's a BBC report noting that: "In November 2000, Mr Kaplan was convicted for incitement to murder and sentenced to four years in jail. Since then, intelligence reports say his followers have become even more devoted to Mr Kaplan, considering him a martyr for the cause of Allah. ...Mr Kaplan is believed to have a fortune worth millions. Nonetheless, he claimed social benefits in Cologne for many years until 2m Deutschmarks (1m euros, £700,000) in cash was found in his flat. This Mickey Kaus blog post has more nauseating details.

The most amazing story comes from Australia. Here's a Youtube copy of a report showing that Aussie taxpayers gave $1 million of welfare over 19 years to an Islamic extremist who planned to kill thousands of innocent people.

Replace TSA Incompetence with Market Efficiency

Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz have a great column in USA Today explaining why we should let private companies be in charge of airline security. As a frequent traveler, I wish this would happen, but governments rarely give up power once they have expanded into a new area:

After the underwear bomber's attempted mass murder, Americans are losing patience with the airline security system. It is bad enough that our screening process makes innocent people work far too hard to prove that they are not terrorists. It also manages to make it too easy for actual terrorists to be treated as innocent. ...The security process needs several things it is lacking. It needs continuous adaptation, with a strong focus on satisfying customers and improving results. It needs to find new and better methods of meeting the demands of customers who value safety as well as speed and efficiency. It needs to function in a dynamic environment, disciplined by rigorous competitive pressure. In short, it needs the market. ...Responsibility for the design and implementation of airline security should be handed back to the private sector. ...A post-9/11 market system would combine the benefits of a competitive system with the much-stricter federal oversight necessary to ensure a basic standard of travel security. Airlines would select firms to screen passengers who will fly on their planes. Let's say that it would be up to each airline to contract with at least one security firm at each airport. The airline would pay the firm a set dollar amount per passenger, and this cost would be passed along through ticket prices. ...Several incentive mechanisms, some of them market-based, would keep private sector firms focusing on safety. First of all, the flying public may show a preference for airlines that employ security firms with rigorous procedures just as today many drivers prefer safer cars that get lower gas mileage. Second, if a private firm were to allow a single failure or even a near-miss, it would immediately lose the confidence of fliers. Airlines would switch to other suppliers, and the flawed firm would go out of business. Security companies also could be required to be liable for damages up to, say, $25 million from terrorism, and to post bond to cover that liability. (It is harder to sue the government for damages than the private sector.) The government's role would include two functions. It would collect intelligence on high-risk suspects (as it does today) and share this intelligence with private airline security firms — which will require the firms to have robust data security. And government would audit private security companies, with the power to impose fines if lapses are found. The government could still ensure, for instance, that every firm at least meet the minimum standards that the TSA employs today. ...good solutions are more likely to emerge regularly and consistently under a robust market dynamic than under government monopoly. Competition will force even the lowest-quality provider to raise standards year after year by adopting the good ideas that emerge from their competitors. This is why even a cheap automobile today has more amenities than a luxury car of 30 years ago.

Does TSA Stand for Three Stooges Association?

The government is so incompetent that it never put the Christmas-day underwear-bomber on the no-fly list - even though the nutjob's father reported his son't radical views to American authorities. But the TSA for several years has targeted Mikey Hicks, a cub scout from New Jersey who is eight years old. Nobody got fired after 9-11. Nobody got fired for this latest screw-up. Must be nice to have a government job:

Travel is a hassle for an 8-year-old Cub Scout from New Jersey. That's because Mikey Hicks shares the same name of a person who has drawn the suspicion of the Homeland Security Department. His mother tells The New York Times she sensed trouble when her son was a baby and she couldn't get a seat for him at a Florida airport. She says airline officials explained his name "was on the list." ...TSA officials have been under fire of late, after the failed Christmas Day terror plot aboard a U.S.-bound plane and a complete security breach led to a chaotic breakdown at Newark Liberty International Airport.

More Love for the TSA

Kudos to the folks at ReasonTV. This one-minute video mocking the TSA is very well done.

Should Airports Use Full-Body Scanners?

I'm not an expert on security issues, but Steve Chapman's column seems very sensible.

More TSA Incompetence

Isn't this just wonderful? The feds have announced new rules, but it's not clear what they are. According to some reports, though, passengers will not be allowed to have anything it their laps. Does this mean books? Blackberries? Are we allowed to twiddle our thumbs? Since I have speeches next month in Canada and the Cayman Islands, I look forward to seeing what petty and pointless inconveniences the bureaucrats at the Transportation Security Administration have in store for me:

The government was vague about the steps it was taking, saying that it wanted the security experience to be "unpredictable" and that passengers would not find the same measures at every airport — a prospect that may upset airlines and travelers alike. But several airlines released detailed information about the restrictions, saying that passengers on international flights coming to the United States will apparently have to remain in their seats for the last hour of a flight without any personal items on their laps. It was not clear how often the rule would affect domestic flights.

The key question, of course, is whether any of these rules make flying safer. After all, there are real nutjobs out there who want to kill Americans. But as Christopher Hitchens explains, the new rules are bureaucratic nonsense:

For some years after 9/11, passengers were forbidden to get up and use the lavatory on the Washington-New York shuttle. Zero tolerance! I suppose it must eventually have occurred to somebody that this ban would not deter a person who was willing to die, so the rule was scrapped. ...But now fresh idiocies are in store. Nothing in your lap during final approach. Do you feel safer? If you were a suicide-killer, would you feel thwarted or deterred? ...Why do we fail to detect or defeat the guilty, and why do we do so well at collective punishment of the innocent? The answer to the first question is: Because we can't—or won't. The answer to the second question is: Because we can. The fault here is not just with our endlessly incompetent security services, who give the benefit of the doubt to people who should have been arrested long ago or at least had their visas and travel rights revoked. It is also with a public opinion that sheepishly bleats to be made to "feel safe." The demand to satisfy that sad illusion can be met with relative ease if you pay enough people to stand around and stare significantly at the citizens' toothpaste. My impression as a frequent traveler is that intelligent Americans fail to protest at this inanity in case it is they who attract attention and end up on a no-fly list instead. Perfect. It was reported over the weekend that in the aftermath of the Detroit fiasco, no official decision was made about whether to raise the designated "threat level" from orange. Orange! Could this possibly be because it would be panicky and ridiculous to change it to red and really, really absurd to lower it to yellow? But isn't it just as preposterous (and revealing), immediately after a known Muslim extremist has waltzed through every flimsy barrier, to leave it just where it was the day before?

Anti-Gun Policy Helped Terrorism at Fort Hood

The indispensable John Lott explains how a Clinton-era anti-gun policy created a safe environment for Major Hasan's terrorist attack. As Lott explains in his Foxnews.com article, gun bans only disarm innocent people. Terrorists and other human refuse take advantage of such situations to kill more people:

Shouldn't an army base be the last place where a terrorist should be able to shoot at people uninterrupted for 10 minutes? After all, an army base is filled with soldiers who carry guns, right? Unfortunately, that is not the case. Beginning in March 1993, under the Clinton administration, the army forbids military personnel from carrying their own personal firearms and mandates that "a credible and specific threat against [Department of the Army] personnel [exist] in that region" before military personnel "may be authorized to carry firearms for personal protection." ...The unarmed soldiers could do little more than cower as Major Nidal Malik Hasan stood on a desk and shot down into the cubicles in which his victims were trapped. Some behaved heroically, such as private first class Marquest Smith who repeatedly risked his life removing five soldiers and a civilian from the carnage. But, being unarmed, these soldiers were unable to stop Hasan's attack. The wife of one of the soldiers shot at Ft. Hood understood this all too well. Mandy Foster's husband had been shot but was fortunate enough not to be seriously injured. In an interview on CNN on Monday night, Mrs. Foster was asked by anchor John Roberts how she felt about her husband "still scheduled for deployment in January" to Afghanistan. Ms. Foster responded: "At least he's safe there and he can fire back, right?" -- It is hard to believe that we don't trust soldiers with guns on an army base when we trust these very same men in Iraq and Afghanistan. ...The law-abiding, not the criminals, are the ones who obey the ban on guns. Instead of making areas safe for victims, the bans make it safe for the criminal. Hasan not only violated the army's ban on carrying a gun, he also apparently violated the rules that require soldiers to register privately owned guns at the post. Research shows that allowing individuals to defend themselves dramatically reduces the rates of multiple victim public shootings. Even if attacks still occur, having civilians with permitted concealed handguns limits the damage. A major factor in determining how many people are harmed by these killers is the amount of time that elapses between when the attack starts and someone is able to arrive on the scene with a gun. ...All the multiple victim public shootings in the U.S. -- in which more than three people have been killed -- have all occurred in places where concealed handguns have been banned.