The Inheritance of a Single Morning
Most of it, directly or indirectly, is the inheritance of one Tuesday morning almost 25 years ago.
That does not mean, of course, that there was no security before 11 September 2001. There was. It turns out that passengers at American airports already passed through metal detectors and had their luggage scanned. Indeed, all 19 of the men who hijacked four aircraft that morning went through airport-security checkpoints.
Some of the 19, unbelievably, though it is right there in the 9/11 Commission Report, were actually flagged by the screening systems then in use. None was stopped from boarding. Arguably, had the security services that day done their job, the whole thing – or part of it – might have been prevented.
Indeed, the primary difference between now and the “before times” is not that there is security today where once there was none: it is that assumptions about the threat have changed. Now, the passenger is treated as a potential killer – no exceptions permitted, not even for your grandmother. After all, were the terrorists to discover that Granny was not being scanned, a jihadist Granny would soon appear.
A Different World, with Different Assumptions
The aviation system of 2001 was designed around a world in which a hijacker generally wanted something and at least wanted to survive. The most common demands were money or the release of prisoners, hijacking planes having been a favored tactic of Palestinian terrorists for years.
The possibility that the aircraft itself was the weapon – and that everybody on board, including the hijackers, was expected to die – had simply not been considered.
Until then, the world had known this phenomenon primarily from the Japanese kamikaze pilots of October 1944 during the Second World War, when Japan systematized this form of warfare, and military pilots sacrificed themselves more or less voluntarily.
That assumption disappeared at 8:46 a.m., when American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
What followed was, without doubt, the greatest expansion of everyday security procedures in modern Western history.
A New World – and a New Industry
The United States created the Transportation Security Administration. Airport security ceased to be primarily an inconvenience at the beginning of a journey and became, in many respects, an industry of its own.
Then came the second phenomenon: the security ratchet.
In December 2001, Richard Reid attempted to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes aboard a flight from Paris to Miami. Shoes consequently became objects of suspicion at airport checkpoints.
In 2006, British authorities disrupted a plot to destroy transatlantic aircraft using liquid explosives disguised as ordinary drinks. Restrictions on liquids followed, producing the familiar 100ml containers and transparent plastic bags which remain part of European airport travel today.
After the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in 2009, when explosives were concealed in the attacker’s underwear, body scanners were introduced, meaning that the average airport-security official now sees more intimate body parts on his screen daily than the most committed pornography addict.
Thus runs a political logic which means that security almost always moves in one direction – new threat, new response – even though the security measure itself probably guarantees that the old threat will not reappear and that new ones will take its place.
Introducing a new security measure after an attack carries little political risk. Removing one carries a great deal. Nobody wants to be the politician who removed body scanners, only for the first underpants bomb to take down a passenger jet.
Are We Safer? In Some Respects, Clearly
Some of the measures introduced post-9/11 are unquestionably effective. Hardened cockpit doors alone make an exact repetition of 11 September vastly more difficult.
But other measures have, unquestionably, acquired the character of quasi-religious ritual. Millions of perfectly harmless people are compelled to repeatedly perform the same actions, at their own inconvenience, because one terrorist, somewhere, once attempted a particular method of attack. When thought about, it is a little ludicrous, perhaps.
And there is another problem: terrorists adapt too.
In July 2022, for example, German police investigated three baggage and aircraft handling employees who proudly presented themselves on TikTok on the airfield, pointing their index fingers upward in a gesture associated with ISIS. To put the question differently: what use are the best passenger security checks designed to prevent terrorism if airport employees who load baggage are allowed to slip out of sight?
The 9/11 Commission itself warned against devoting too much of the security budget to aviation and thereby, in its words, fighting “the last war”.
That warning looks rather prescient in 2026.
And in Other Respects, No
The logic of it is obvious: make aircraft almost impossible to hijack, and aircraft become less attractive targets.
The great terrorist attacks on Europe since 2001 have demonstrated precisely this process. Nightclubs, underground and railway systems, London buses, city streets, concert venues and Christmas markets have all been attacked. The weapon need not even be sophisticated. One of the grim discoveries of the last quarter-century is that a van or truck driven into a crowd can cause mass casualties without explosives, specialist training or much preparation.
And so, the security architecture follows the terrorist out of the airport and into ordinary life. Hence the concrete blocks, referenced right at the very beginning.
There is more, of course: bags are searched before concerts. Festival sites are fenced. There are surveillance cameras, increasingly, everywhere. On and on it goes, in a never-ending war between the state and 0.1% or less of the population who actually wish to inflict a mass-casualty event.
It is tempting, looking at all this, to ask whether the vast post-9/11 security apparatus has therefore failed. Yet before that conclusion is made, some successes must be noted.
The Biggest Win: No More 9/11s
There has not been another 9/11. That matters. It would be absurd to imagine that 25 years of improvements in intelligence, aviation security, cockpit protection and passenger screening have had nothing to do with making such an attack much more difficult to carry out.
But that said, a question of logic remains.
An open society contains an almost infinite number of soft targets. This will always be so. From primary-school playgrounds to private weddings or sports events, any open society will always have places and events where large groups of people gather without any expectation of danger. Government cannot secure them all, nor would most people wish it to.
At some point, therefore, every free society must come to terms with reality: absolute security is impossible.
Which brings us to the strange legacy of 9/11.
Western countries are almost certainly harder to attack today in many important ways than they were in 2001. Yet reminders of danger are far more visible.
The Permanent Loss: Innocence?
To live in the West today is to live in a society where security and safety are everywhere, serving, paradoxically, as a constant reminder of danger. After all of the billions spent, we may actually feel less safe than we would if none of it had been spent at all.
That may ultimately be the most enduring security legacy of 11 September: the disappearance of the assumption that ordinary life is, by default, safe.
And so, what are we left with? Pre-9/11, there was an assumption of relative safety. Now, we live in a world where every day we are reminded of the terrible things that have happened and the new ways in which terrible things might yet occur.
Are we safer? God only knows. Do we feel safer? Not on your life.
