In A Barrel

I just came back from doing a little traveling, and flew to Seattle from Chicago O'Hare airport. And was reminded of something that first occurred to me in 2004, when I was flying out of London Heathrow. Namely that airport security is, in a lot of cases, set up to protect airplanes and, to a lesser degree, airports, more that it is to protect travelers. And, in so dong, shows that terrorism might not be the threat that it's been made out to be.

Whether it was due to the layout of the terminal, to renovation or something else, I don't know, but the lines for the security checkpoint wound up cramming a lot of people into a fairly small space.

The line continues around the corner to the right...

The point behind terrorism is to bring about some sort political change. Violence is a means to that end. Accordingly, it doesn't necessarily matter what sort of violence is used. If the goal is to protect people from acts of mass violence, packing them into a relatively enclosed space like this seems to defeat that purpose, because anyone who can show that they have a boarding pass can get to this point in the airport. The security checkpoint, the destination of these snaking lines, is out of the frame to the right. So it wouldn't be particularly difficult for someone to enter this space with the bomb or a gun.

So the fact that no-one has chosen to attack the security lines of airports can be said to demonstrate that terrorism is pretty difficult to pull off in many societies where the tools of terrorism are decently controlled, and/or that there isn't a lot of motivation for such attacks.

Because while the security apparatus of the airport would prevent a person with a gun or a bomb from getting to one of the gates or on to an aircraft, this setup does little to protect the people actually flying. This is morbid, but a person with a weapon, standing at the point where I took this picture, would be capable of doing a lot of damage, pretty quickly. A few people could coordinate even more mayhem.

And I suspect that I'm not the first person that this has occurred to. It's possible that for most airports, there simply isn't anything to be done about it; the design and layouts of spaces that pre-date the War on Terror weren't put in place with this consideration in mind. So I'm not contending that this is proof that The Powers That Be are prosecuting the War on Terror in bad faith, or that it's indicative of deliberate Security Theater. But this sort of bottleneck, one that places a lot of people into a small area, seems counterproductive if the goal is to protect those people, rather than the travel infrastructure.