I don’t know if anyone else has been following the French plastic explosive debacle. In a training exercise, French authorities placed plastic explosives in a passenger’s bag. The idea was that the bomb sniffing dogs would find it. Unfortunately, they lost the bag and it was loaded on to a plane and left the airport.

I’m not so concerned about the screw up. 5 more ounces of plastique out in the world doesn’t bother me. There are plenty of ways to make something explode for those who are truely determined. What bothers me is that once it left the airport, they couldn’t find it. Authorities had a window of only a few hours, 90 flights to search, and a description of the bag the explosives were in. They still couldn’t find it. Even after a week and media coverage, no one seems to have come forward to say that they found the stuff in their luggage. I’m still looking for news reports that it has been found and I’m not seeing anything.

News stories seem to be focusing on how glorious a mistake this was, assuring people that there was no danger of an explosion, and that those responsible for loosing the plastic explosive have been punished. For me, this just proves how poor our methods of security really are. We rely on people to catch things; the idea being that if we look hard enough, we will find and catch the terrorists and their wares. We expect that our security aparatus will be able to find a random terrorist, on a random flight, on a random day. We use profiling to try and guess who might be more likely to be carying. We allow ourselves to be searched, sometimes quite personally. However, given almost ideal information, security personnel were unable to locate the explosives.

A suprising number of Americans say that we have to give up some of our freedoms in the name of security. This incident is really proving the reality of the situation: we are only giving up our freedeoms…were aren’t getting any security out of it.