It depends on what you mean by "effective." If that means full security with no inconvenience at low cost, that's not going to happen.

But there's plenty of technology out there that needs to be tested, it's just that we're not testing it.

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Frequent comment troll Al

I'll interpret that in the best possible light.

But you say in your article the following:

there's good reason to be very skeptical of terrorism-prevention schemes in general...

Money spent securing airplanes against unlikely attacks with exotic explosives might well be better spent on conventional crime-fighting strategies -- more police, better supervision of parolees, more drug treatment, etc. At a minimum, it makes sense to channel terrorism security money into "dual-use" activities. Better surveillance or more law-enforcement personnel in mass transit would help reduce terrorism and ordinary crime.

How to square the above with your interest in effective explosive scanners? If we were able to make effective explosive scanners, would you in favor of spending money on "terrorism-protection schemes" involving such scanners? Or would you still object to spending money on "securing airplanes against unlikely attacks with exotic explosives" and, in lieu of buying lots of new scanners, spend the money on "conventional crime-fighting strategies"?

And lets not limit this to theoretical scanners. What other Homeland Security expenditures would be better spent on "conventional crime-fighting strategies"? Enquiring minds want to know.

i stayed out of the airline security thread, but i do need to go Al one further here: he is not a troll (even if he interprets the phrase in its best light).

now, he is often wrong in his judgements (which is to say that i only agree with him on sports) and he sometimes employs trollish tactics, but really, in a blogosphere full of real jerk commenters who deserve the term "troll," Al doesn't begin to rate....

I am not sure if the "whos" will invent radically different "hows".

My favorite, if gruesome comparison: a "death cult" in Japan spend a lot of effort to produce poison gas, released it in Tokio subway and killed three people (or was it four?). A deranged Korean set a can of gasolize of fire in a Korean subway train and the resulting fire and fumes killed 100 people. If tour twisted goal if to kill many people, any people, technological inventiveness is not the best direction to go.

A couple months ago some kid near Atlanta managed to take a tanker truck for a joyride. Think about it: how lethal 30 tons of gasoline can be? Detonate two such monsters at two ends of a suspension bridge during a rush hour --- can a sufficiently violent fire set a chain reaction of gas tanks getting hot and detonating?

The problem with fancy chemicals is that there is a lot of things that can go wrong. Combining chemicals? I am afraid that this is usually more involved than just pouring liquid from one bottle to another. A premature explosion can spill most of the stuff with paltry damage. Or you can spill it outright during a turbulence. Or chemicals will not be ezactly right.

I am not sure if the "whos" will invent radically different "hows".

So for discussion's sake...do you think they will stop planning attacks even if we figure out how to completely safeguard commercial airliners?  They will move from planes to trains and automobiles.  That is why going after the "who's" is the best tactic...just pay attention to who visits Pakistan and monitor communications to and from that country.  Use a bit of old fashioned "police work"... 

Depends what you mean by technological inventiveveness. There's a principle that applies to this thread, to threads about assorted rogue countries buiding their own nuclear-tipped ICBMs, etc. There are reasons that large national militaries, even allowing for the problems of doing it the first time, use expensive, heavily staffed laboratories and engineering groups.

To take your "death cult" example, which was Aum Shinyo, they did manage to make impure sarin (agent GB). While they had a chemical warfare agent that could have had significant lethality, they utterly screwed up the means of getting it out of containers and, as a vapor, into the air. They also tried an anthrax aerosol attack on humans, and again missed a key piece: they didn't know if their strain of Bacillus anthracis made humans sick. The attack would, however, been disastrous to the cattle population of Tokyo.

For whatever reasons, the terrorists have been pretty crude in their weapons. This is not, however, to say that there's a technological detector for every threat, even with the obsession with airline security. In the last few days, I've seen horrified news reports of threats, which would have left anyone with freshman chemistry in hysterical giggles.

As far as detection systems making sense, it may take more background to suggest why something is not a universal detector, but not a huge amount. Essentially all the chemical detectors around are limited to nitrate-based explosives, not incendiaries, not explosives based on other chemical families, not poisons, not radioactives. To be able to analyze arbitrary threats in the seconds available for passenger screening, with one or two instruments, and people not trained to be chemical lab technicians, goes beyond bad science fiction into space opera.

Where is E.E. "Doc" Smith when you need him? Yes, a Lensman at every departure screening station, checking minds, while the Rigellian assistance use the "sense of perception" to look inside every package and body. Unfortunately, even the Rigellians, without further training, don't know what they are trying to find.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

On the other hand, functional NMR scanning based lie detectors are starting to look promising. In a few years it *might* be possible to just ask passengers if they're carrying anything dangerous. Wouldn't do any good in the case of ignorant mules, though.