Weekend Opinion & Commentary

Mission creep with airline security initiatives is compromising both civil rights and airline security.

Ruben Navarrette at the Dallas Morning News (link not yet posted) has a fine opinion piece about who benefits most from illegal immigration: Americans do!

The familiar Kryptonite bicycle locks that look so tough can be easily opened (link not posted, but apparently already a source of alarm in the bicycle world).

Plus, before too much time passes, it's good to mention Richard A. Posner's excellent critique in the New York Times of the 9/11 Commission Report. The 9/11 report mixed policy recommendations with reportage, and serves the interests of those who favor centralized intelligence (as opposed to more dispersed, and perhaps better intelligence).

Indeed, all kinds of unintuitive things were done post 9/11, the new Department of Homeland Security being just one small piece. Posner ends on a sobering note:

When a person dies at the age of 95, his family is apt to ascribe his death to a medical failure. When the nation experiences a surprise attack, our instinctive reaction is not that we were surprised by a clever adversary but that we had the wrong strategies or structure and let's change them and then we'll be safe. Actually, the strategies and structure weren't so bad; they've been improved; further improvements are likely to have only a marginal effect; and greater dangers may be gathering of which we are unaware and haven't a clue as to how to prevent.