"Responsible" people will be rushing to condemn the humour programme personnel who went through two roadblocks and got close to the Bush hotel, showing how fragile the wall of steel around central Sydney is. We are told that two of them have been arrested and may face 6 months in prison, whilst briefing tells us they are lucky the snipers did not shoot them.

Instead of behaving like this in response to a group who have made the security forces look silly, it would be better if security experts and governments around the free world asked themselves a few more funadamental questions about how and whether so called physical security does work against a possible terrorist threat. The fact that such a large and expensive operation could allow a convoy of cars through with mock papers and a man dressed to alert suspicion shows that these systems are far from foolproof. If a group had really wanted to penetrate such a system they doubtless would have done so with well forged papers and with their personnel disguised in a convincing way rather than advertising themselves.

We are about to have the political conference season in the UK. Delegates have to procure complex security passes to get in, showing that they are authorised and vetted. Despite this, they also have to go through eleborate bag and clothes checks each time they wish to go into the conference areas. The one occasion when I and others were the subject of a serious bomb attack at conference, it had been placed weeks before we arrived in town when there were no checks in place.

The truth is that a free society is vulnerable to determined groups of fanatics who want to kill people. The extent of physical restriction that would need to be imposed on all of us to make terrorist acts impossible would be unacceptable and unachievable. I have raised in the UK the question of why we require the removal of shoes and of all larger bottles and tubes containing liquids by those travelling by air, but impose no checks of any kind on those travelling by train. The true answer is, of course, that the authorities think they can get away with the delays and incovenience at airports, but reckon they could not get away with them at a tube or mainline railway station. There is just as much risk of a terrorist bomb on a train as on a plane, as the pattern of terrorist outrages in Europe in recent years demonstrates.

The best defence against terrorism is to pursue the networks and followers of terrorist causes, seeking through intelligence to gain advance warning of what they are up to, and to collect evidence to prosecute them successfully and then lock them up. The best long term way of solving the terrorist threat is to work away at resolving the underlying tensions and conflicts between and within communities.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS