So now, only actual travellers will be allowed into airports, and everybody else from your mother to your 3rd aunty twice removed has to say their teary goodbye at home rather than at the Airport KFC.
But why?
So that terrorist will now have to buy a ticket in order to blow up the airport? I can picture out now, “Al-Qaeda attempt to bomb KLIA foiled due to lack of funds for ticket purchase”
….riiiiggght!
Do these people even consider just how easy it is to circumvent some of the ridiculous ‘security measures’ they put in place these days. If all it takes for a terrorist to gain entry into an airport is a plane ticket, it’s not a very tall order for them to go out and buy one, or just print a fake copy good enough to fool the security officers.
We’d be spending countless of man hours, for security personnel on entry points scanning through useless documents with no real security in return.
What a waste–just like those women only KTM coaches that do absolutely nothing.
If I were a terrorist intent on bombing the airport, I’d build the biggest bomb that would fit into a travel suitcase, buy a ticket, take a taxi to the airport, load the suitcase on the trolley and waltz into the most crowded area in the airport– and then wait till I was in the middle of a sufficiently large crowd, then detonate!
Up until the point of detonation, I would look the same as any other legitimate passenger. It would be impossible to pick me up form a crowd, and it would be impossible to stop me.
What more if I were a lone-wolf terrorist.
The point being (and I know this isn’t very popular), stopping this kind of attack is next to impossible. We can’t pour police resources in the hopes of finding these types of attackers, because nothing short of a police state is going to be effective against them.
Airports are special in many respects, they involve lots of people with big bags, lots of travelers unfamiliar with the area (hence everyone looks suspicious) and everyone is getting on a Aeroplane, one of the few places where a bomb would actually kill everyone on board.
But sometimes we have to accept the risk of living a free society, and accept that these radicalized elements are not going to be caught by better policing, but by trying to stop the radicalization in the first place.
The Sun newspaper did a little publicity stunt, by sending in a male reporter to KLIA dressed up as a woman. The reporter then acted ‘suspiciously’ and was astonished that he was not caught.
I’m sorry, but that’s fucking stupid.
First off all, this is the airport–most people don’t know their way around, and so what they considered ‘suspicious’ behavior is actually typical for airport passengers.
Secondly, dressing up as a women isn’t exactly ‘suspicious’, especially in Malaysia where many women dress up in full burqa’s. To single out a women based on a burqa would be quasi-racial profiling, and that doesn’t work.
Thirdly, a ‘real’ terrorist doesn’t act suspicious, or waltz around, they know exactly what they’re doing and where they’ll do it. The truck bombers, and Paris attackers were well fully orchestrated and fully planned, they didn’t wait around in the departure lounge for two hours hoping for something to happen–so the entire premise of the piece from the Sun wasn’t realistic.
In fact, even if we fully secured the airport to the point where it was absolutely bullet-proof, what’s to stop the terrorist from waltzing into the Ikea food court (God knows it’s ALWAYS full of people), with a bomb strapped into a furniture box?
Do we really need to implement airport security everywhere we go?
And of course the more we spend time worrying about these things, the less time we have to spend on really securing ourselves from the real threat.
Oh and one last thing.
I’m not convinced (at all) that the Movida attack was from ISIS, but even if it were nobody died in that attack. That same week, two people were killed by a group of parang wielding assholes in KL.
So gangsters 2 – ISIS 0.
Our minds irrationally fear the emotional rather than the mundane. But if we really wanted better security for this country, we’d focus less on counter-terrorism and more on counter-gang violence.
Criminal elements prefer not to advertise what they do, they keep a low profile, ISIS on the other hand need a dramatic ‘marketing’ ability, because most of their fighters are foreigners travelling to Iraq and Syria to help them fight.
So if an explosion happened in KL, and it was the result of a gang turfwar, the gangsters would happily give ‘credit’ to ISIS, who would be happy to take it.