Portable Fiasco

Four years ago, when the federal General Services Administration unveiled its plans for a new border-crossing station here in northeastern New York State, the design was presented as part of the agency’s campaign to raise the dismal standards of government architecture. Even many in the famously fractious architectural community celebrated the complex — particularly its main building, emblazoned with glossy yellow, 21-foot-high letters spelling “United States” — as a rare project the government could point to with pride.

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Yet three weeks ago, less than a month after the station opened, workers began prying the big yellow letters off the building’s facade on orders from Customs and Border Protection. The plan is to dismantle the rest of the sign this week.

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“There were security concerns,” said Kelly Ivahnenko, a spokeswoman for the customs agency. “The sign could be a huge target and attract undue attention. Anything that would place our officers at risk we need to avoid.”

-- At a Border Crossing, Security Trumps Openness

This story has been making all the usual rounds for a security-gone-mad story, from BoingBoing to Bruce Schneier. The article itself does a pretty good job of ridiculing the decision, so I won't have to do so much of that myself. It is interesting to see how an organization's subculture can develop enough inertia to stick with ideas that no longer make sense to anyone outside that subculture.

I was surprised that there aren't more photos of this building on the web in easy-to-find places. As a celebrated government project (the government gave the project a design award before dismantling the design) you might think there would be a gallery of public-domain photographs of it somewhere. But I haven't been able to find anything like that.

There's a concept drawing here.

The "Image Gallery" link at the bottom of this page makes it clear that some pretty neat photos exist, but they were hung on the walls of a gallery. Then someone took photos of the gallery and put those photos on the web. So even the virtual experience (looking at pictures of a sight you cannot actually see) is itself virtualized.

Maybe that's appropriate; after all, if The Terrorists are likely to attack the United States by targeting a sign that says "United States," there's no telling how meta they could get. They might target pictures of the sign as well. So we're safer this way. Right?

One of our newfangled post-9/11 firearm-wielding airline pilots had a little accident. Peter Biddle had this to say about the faulty assumption that got us into this predicament:

The reason trust isn’t transitive is because trust is most often based on data regarding the past which allows us to make assumptions about specific competence, quality of performance, and behaviors in the future.

We can assume that a trained pilot, when facing piloty thingies, will act like a trained pilot. WE CANNOT ASSUME THAT A TRAINED PILOT WILL ACT LIKE A TRAINED LION-TAMER WHEN FACING A WILD LION.

-- Obsessed, Trust Isn’t Transitive

I think that's a great point, a great lesson that we should bear in mind when planning or evaluating security measures. An even simpler and more general way of making the point might be "specialization works" or "practice works," but the background of this incident surely doesn't hurt to drive the lesson home.

But another thought always occurs to me when I read about airline security measures. How many hijacking attempts have been made on US airlines since 9/11? How many times has the firing or even the brandishing of a gun been strictly necessary to secure an American plane since 9/11?

I expect that 9/11 was a trick that could only work once, or only once in a great while. It changed our collective attitude about hijackings dramatically, and that change has probably done more to improve airline security than every other measure we've implemented, combined. Richard Reid was subdued and restrained by a large number of unarmed passengers, after all, not an air marshal or an armed flight crew.

Even without armed pilots, we are safer than we imagine.

So Congress has decided that instead of holding the President accountable for his illegal orders, they'll just change the law so that what the President is ordering is legal. Which pretty much puts to rest any notion that the rule of law might apply to powerful members of our own government.

And for what?

But the problem with Congress last week was that Democrats were afraid to explain to Americans why the White House bill was so bad and so unnecessary — despite what the White House was claiming. There are good answers, if Democrats are willing to address voters as adults. To start, they should explain that -- even if it were a good idea, and it's not -- the government does not have the capability to sort through billions of bits of electronic communication. And the larger question: why, six years after 9/11, is this sort of fishing expedition the supposed first line of defense in the war on terrorism?

While serving little purpose, the new law has real dangers. It would allow the government to intercept, without a warrant, every communication into or out of any country, including the United States. Instead of explaining all this to American voters -- the minimal benefits and the enormous risks -- the Democrats have allowed Mr. Bush and his fear-mongering to dominate all discussions on terrorism and national security.

-- The Fear of Fear Itself

Meanwhile, steps are being taken to punish not the people who decided undermine American law in secret, but the people who outed the secret.

There is at least one online petition to Congress that one can sign to protest this latest move.