Yeah 9/11 definitely enhanced the surveillance state which is deeply unfortunate, but we had security screening for planes long before we had 9/11, and it wasn't just 9/11 that made the experience miserable, it was the 10 follow on attacks targeting different vulns in the screening process (liquids, shoes, blah blah).
Actually there was no attack involving liquids. There was "chatter" indicating that someone might be thinking of combining liquids to make a bomb. We freaked and instituted the rule. Then discovered that it was a false alarm.
But, having alerted everyone that terrorists could try to make a bomb that way, we now have the liquids rule. (Though the arbitrariness of 3 ounces is made clear by the rule that now lets 12 ounce bottles of hand sanitizer through...)
The security measures need to be decently strong because we vehemently refuse to employ the more effective authoritarian technique of flagging passengers based on history and demographics like they do in places like Israel (eg, simply flag anyone with a higher probability of being a muslim because most attacks were performed by muslims). We are actually resisting the aggressive response in this case.
There are two issues at play here.
The first is that for political reasons, we don't want to do enhanced checks against the actual biggest danger - Saudi Arabia. (Half the 9/11 bombers were from there.)
Second, targeting on the basis of religion poses some major Constitutional problems in the USA. And religious affiliation is not information that we can rely on having about people coming from elsewhere in the world.
And third, the supply of potential terrorists is sufficiently large and Al Qaeda sufficiently well-organized that they could simply choose terrorists who don't appear to fit whatever our screening criteria happened to be. Israel doesn't have that problem because there aren't a supply of people from around the world who are willing to die for the Palestinian cause. However we had a British guy carrying a bomb in his shoe, a Russian (well actually Chechen) who set off a bomb in Boston, a white American shooting up an army base in Texas, and a Nigerian who carried a bomb in his underwear.
This has nothing to do with terrorism or 9/11.
To the contrary. I lived in New York when 9/11 happened. A ton of office buildings went from no security guard to security guards. Other office buildings that I later worked in in Los Angeles made the same shift at about the same time.
Actually there was no attack involving liquids. There was "chatter" indicating that someone might be thinking of combining liquids to make a bomb. We freaked and instituted the rule. Then discovered that it was a false alarm.
But, having alerted everyone that terrorists could try to make a bomb that way, we now have the liquids rule. (Though the arbitrariness of 3 ounces is made clear by the rule that now lets 12 ounce bottles of hand sanitizer through...)
The security measures need to be decently strong because we vehemently refuse to employ the more effective authoritarian technique of flagging passengers based on history and demographics like they do in places like Israel (eg, simply flag anyone with a higher probability of being a muslim because most attacks were performed by muslims). We are actually resisting the aggressive response in this case.
There are two issues at play here.
The first is that for political reasons, we don't want to do enhanced checks against the actual biggest danger - Saudi Arabia. (Half the 9/11 bombers were from there.)
Second, targeting on the basis of religion poses some major Constitutional problems in the USA. And religious affiliation is not information that we can rely on having about people coming from elsewhere in the world.
And third, the supply of potential terrorists is sufficiently large and Al Qaeda sufficiently well-organized that they could simply choose terrorists who don't appear to fit whatever our screening criteria happened to be. Israel doesn't have that problem because there aren't a supply of people from around the world who are willing to die for the Palestinian cause. However we had a British guy carrying a bomb in his shoe, a Russian (well actually Chechen) who set off a bomb in Boston, a white American shooting up an army base in Texas, and a Nigerian who carried a bomb in his underwear.
This has nothing to do with terrorism or 9/11.
To the contrary. I lived in New York when 9/11 happened. A ton of office buildings went from no security guard to security guards. Other office buildings that I later worked in in Los Angeles made the same shift at about the same time.
The timing wasn't a coincidence.