Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Terrorists, at least the methods they use, are stupid and primitive. The shit they do is really, really lame, and any hillbilly fool could do it better. So some terrorist plans on bringing liquid explosive on a plane, or blowing up his shoe, and what do we do? Treat them like the expert and ban liquids, shoes, and now all carry on luggage (there's not a chance in hell I'm flying and checking my laptop given that hundreds of thousands of pieces of luggage are stolen every year by airline employees).

If you want to know how to blow up an airplane and bypass security, you need to look at two industries:

1. Prison
People figure out how to get all kinds of crazy weapons inside prison, both by smuggling them in and by manufacturing them inside prison. Hell, you could build a battery operated hot-wire and use it to cut an insane shiv out of a strip of hard plastic in a jacket if you wanted, and that's primitive in comparison to the really scary stuff you can do. But seriously, buy any book on prison weapons and you'll see hundreds of weapons that could be brought or built on a plane that would bypass current security.

2. Drug Smuggling
How do drugs get across borders? Again, buy a book on drug smuggling and you'll see how easy it would be to get stuff onto an airplane if you applied the same rule to weapons, components, and explosives. The fact that terrorists don't use these methods suggests that the “buying pot pays terrorists” link is abstract at best.

The point is that if intelligent people with a small amount of money (less than $100,000) want to blow up an airplane, they can do it in their sleep if they have at least one person willing to go down with the plane. It's not hard. Thankfully very few intelligent people actually want to cause mass harm to others that isn't financially profitable. The real smart terrorists are in government.

This new security is idiotic. There are three answers (not all winning or sustainable) to terrorism:

1. We can institute prison-admittance-level security internationally and repeal privacy and expression rights, and enforce them with an iron first.
2. We can all keep on being assholes to each other globally and accept that the fighting will never end. So everyone once in a while something or someone we care about goes kaboom.
3. We can be fucking polite to each other and stop fighting.

Option three seems a whole lot easier than the rest.

UPDATE: And let me just parrot yttrx by saying: