On Air Travel and Security

It pays to be a well-informed traveler these days, especially when you're travelling by air.

Standing in line at the airport is one of everyone's least favorite parts of the trip. Take your shoes, your jacket, and your belt off. Empty your pockets. Go through the metal detector. Put all your stuff back where it originally was. If you're special they also go through your luggage. Nice.

3-1-1 Rules
Permitted and Prohibited Items

Basically, save all those mini-toothpaste tubes from the dentist, and forget bringing that huge bottle of contact lens cleaner with you. I'm fairly certain that it's best not to bring anything at all with you, but that's a little impractical. Theoretically, you could bring that big liter-size shampoo bottle with you, but I can imagine getting harassed for it.

I'm really fond of Bruce Schneier's work, and I admire his opinions on security issues. He publishes Crypto-Gram Newsletter every month, which I receive via e-mail. He finds a lot of interesting news articles and comments on why things are as innane as they are. He also writes a lot of essays and op-eds for a variety of magazines, e-zines, newspapers, etc. Here are some of my favorite articles he's written concerning airport security:
Why Everyone Must Be Screened
Let Computers Screen Air Baggage
Airplane Security and Metal Knives
Homeland Insecurity

And just for you, religious guerilla rebels, from his blog:
Why Terrorism Doesn't Work

Americans seem to be really focused on "fixing-the-symptom" rather than "fixing-the-cause" when it comes to the war on terror, and pretty much everything else in general. This makes me really sad. How do you turn a nation from being short-sighted and hedonistic to long-sighted and abstemious? Any ideas?

While I enjoy reading Schneier, I don't own any of his books. Not even Applied Cryptography (which now comes in a Schneier's Cryptography Library mega edition). I weep at the gaping crater in my overflowing library.