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So best I can tell security at the recent dinner was somehow even worse than at the campaign event that nearly cost Trump his life. This sounds incredibly stupid but mainstream media reports of the security indicate it is so. And this is in a...storied location no less.
This is also not a situation where things have been calm for a while, we are at war and several attempts have been made, and people have died (ex: Kirk).
Some of this is probably due to security theater elements - security was never good, so it remains not good. You'd think we could make a bit of a change though?
Are all of our institutions really so rotten?
And perhaps more importantly - how many times can we get lucky and how will our civic norms survive when that luck runs out?
Idk, I hear all these people claiming all sorts of things about security and I don’t see whether it means anything. This influencer says security is blah blah blah, this influencer says that it’s actually yadda yadda, they know what exactly? Somebody I’ve never heard of before says something I have no ability to evaluate. Oh he’s an insider. Or pretending to be one. Must be serious.
I’m not sure what good security is supposed to look like. The guy with the gun got caught N layers before reaching the president. But actually it should have been N + 1 layers. Sure I guess. I can believe that. This says something important about society.
The number of people who really know what they’re talking about is probably at least three orders of magnitude smaller than what social media gives me access to.
I’m sure that some of those people are in the White House right now. And they’re making decisions. Maybe they’ll decide security was too lax and needs to be tightened. Maybe they’ll decide it was fine but we need some more theater. Maybe they’ll decide it doesn’t matter and we can take the headlines and build our ballroom and go. I don’t know. I guess I trust whatever Trump wants to do. He knows better than I do.
And it’s always possible that they keep security the same and something happens in the future, but not because anything is wrong with security but because it’s impossible to prevent everything. And it’s always possible we increase useless security theater and nothing happens because of sheer dumb luck and we say, wow, the security theater really worked. I admit I couldn’t tell the difference. I’m not sure most of these Washington “Insiders” can either.
There are ways to solve the security problem, but yes in terms of risk management the question is 'at what cost?'
Are people willing to shut the hotel down for 24 hours to deny guest access to the lobby? Who is paying for that? Are you willing to put multiple people on every single ground floor entrance to the hotel and at every portal on the ground floor before, during and after the event? Who is paying for that?
Are you willing to inconvenience the rich and powerful with tools like turnstiles, metal detectors, x-rays, pat downs and biometric recording the week before to be checked on the night? Who is paying for that (and not just in currency)?
How about shutting down the entire city block, snipers on every rooftop and swapping the chefs and service staff out for Seal Team 6 for the night? Who... well no one would.
The short version is that Security is a game of Risk Management utilizing limited resources deployed against a thinking adversary. Its most basic philosophy is of Defense in Depth, or a series of layered interlocking defenses with the presumption that some of them maybe vulnerable to being breached by certain attack methods while others aren't.
Here the system worked. If you want guarantees that it will work perfectly and that any event will always proceed undisturbed even though attackers are willing to throw away their own lives in the attempt, then you need to pay a significant price for that. Including a lot of inconveniences to the legitimate attendees.
Most of the complaints about how far the attacker got are complete cope (including by the attacker). They have nothing else to clutch onto at yet another failed assassination.
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