What we obtain too cheap, Thomas Paine famously wrote, we esteem too lightlyand it turns out that the converse holds true as well. Its a well known and robustly confirmed finding of social psychology that people tend to ascribe greater value to things they had to pay a high cost to obtain. So, for instance, people who must endure some form of embarrassing or uncomfortable hazing process or initiation rite to join a group will report valuing their participation in that group much more highly than those admitted without any such requirementwhich is one reason such rituals are all but ubiquitous in human societies as a way of creating commitment.
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The short version: weve spent some $56 billion on enhancing airport security over the past decade, with almost no actual security enhancement to show for it.
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Reinforced cockpit doors and changed passenger behavior pretty much made a repeat of a 9/11-style suicide hijacking of a domestic flight infeasibleat negligible economic and privacy costlong before we started installing Total Recall style naked-scanners, which makes explosives the real remaining risk. Yet the notable bombing attempts by passengers weve seen since 9/11 have (a) originated outside the United States, and (b) been foiled by alert passengers after the aspiring bomber slipped through the originating countrys formal screening process.
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Its become commonplace to refer to many aspects of airport screeningthe removal of shoes, the transparent plastic baggies for your small allotment of shampooas security theater. Security guru Bruce Schneier coined the term to refer to security measures whose ritualistic purpose is to make passengers feel safer, even though they do almost nothing to actually increase safety. But on reflection, this seems wrong. It probably holds true in the immediate aftermath of a high-profile attack or disaster. Once the initial heightened fear subsides, however, these visible and elaborate security measures probably do more to increase our perception of risk than to assuage our fears. It is, after all, something of a cliche that hyperprotective parents tend to end up raising children who see the world as a more dangerous place.
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Security theater, then, isnt onlyor even primarilyabout making us feel safer. Its about making us feel we wouldnt be safe without it. The more we submit to intrusive monitoring, the more convinced we become that the intrusions are an absolute necessity.
