Begin forwarded message: From: Hugh Crawford <hugh-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: July 26, 2005 11:02:58 AM EDT To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: middle-aged white femalesIn 1986, a pregnant 32-year-old Irish woman attempted to take an El Al flight from London to Tel Aviv with a bomb that her boyfriend had hidden in her luggage. In 1987, a 70-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman--neither of whom were Middle Eastern posed as father and daughter and exploded a bomb aboard a Korean Air flight from Baghdad to Thailand killing all on board. In 1999, men dressed as businessmen and as a Catholic priest forced an Avianca flight to divert to an airstrip in Colombia and held passengers hostage for more than one and a half years.
So much for profiling. Anyway, if I were in charge of the MTA I'd be more concerned about the gasoline tankers that drive past very vulnerable points of the subway system such as stations or ventilation grates every day. The effects of a few backpack bombs would be trivial compared to a driving a gas tanker into the 72nd st. and Broadway station for instance
Protecting the NYC subway system ( mostly built in trenches just below the surface ) against the vulnerabilitys of the London subway system ( mostly built in deep tunnels ) is just silly
Hugh Crawford Brooklyn NY David Farber wrote:
Begin forwarded message: From: "Dr. James J. O'Donnell" <provost@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: July 25, 2005 8:00:10 AM EDT To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx Subject: middle-aged white females Dave, this one is easy. If the bad guy can discover that middle-aged white females or rosy-cheeked white children under 10 are never beingsearched, he will figure out how to booby-trap one. We make fun of TSA for its searches of unlikely figures, but by searching the categories weregard as unlikely, they are in fact protecting *all* members of those categories -- and us. Random needs to mean random in order to meananything, and has to have an appreciably high degree of frequency to bedeterrent. For entirely other reasons, customs agents are supposed topull over every hundredth person who comes through for random screening, and I suspect there are some years of experience for them in figuring outwhat's effective. Jim O'Donnell Georgetown U. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as hugh-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ipArchives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting- people/
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