Matt Yglesias offers some level-headed advice to the TSA:
Call me crazy, but I don’t see what kind of sense a ban on liquid travel on airplanes is. To be sure, letting people carry soda or shampoo onto an airplane could (apparently) allow them to conceal an explosive. And a bomb going off on an airplane would be a very bad thing. But by the same token, a bomb going off on a crowded Metro or Armtrak car would be quite bad. Hell, a bomb going off on a crowded airport security line snaking back and forth as everyone waits to have their bags searched for offending liquids woud be really point. At some point, common sense needs to kick in.
Banning firearms on airplanes is an inconvenience that is very effective at halting what could otherwise be a very easy method of hijacking airplanes since guns are pretty easy to obtain. It’s fairly clear, however, that permitting people to carry liquid aboard planes doesn’t necessarily lead to a rash of airplane-bombings. It is, however, a huge inconvenience for travelers.
Worst of all, it’s at best a minor inconvenience for terrorists. If you had a cell with some working liquid explosive devices ready to be set off, you could react to the ban by setting them off someplace other than an airplane. As outlined above, I would suggest a crowded rush hour Metro car.
This is what Jim Harper aptly calls security theater. We’ve given the TSA virtually unlimited powers and instructed them to accomplish an impossible task. As a result, they’ve taken to adopting erratic, reactionary, and comically ineffective anti-terrorism tactics. One terrorist tries to put explosives in his shoe? Make hundreds of millions of Americans take their shoes off when they go through security. Some terrorists try to smuggle liquid explosives on the plane? Ban Americans from carrying on liquids. And while you’re at it, require people to show you their IDs, close parking spaces close to the airport, subject people to random pat-down searches, ban tweezers and toenail clippers from carry-on luggage, etc, etc.
Life involves risks. Every form of transportation is dangerous. Even with the terrorist threat, airplanes remain among the safest of transportation modes. Yet thanks to the bizarre incentives of the political process, and the fact that terrorist attacks on airplanes make better news stories than car crashes, we remain obsessed with the miniscule dangers from terrorist attacks, while we think nothing of getting in our car and driving across country, an activity that, statistically speaking, is far more dangerous.
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