Wendover Productions
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2019–2023
14:18 · 5.5M views · Apr 17, 2018
A Wendover Productions explainer on how airport security is designed, covering screening layers, x-ray scanning, and the contrast with Israel's profiling-based approach. It walks through the logic behind why security works the way it does.
HN commenters point to it as a well-researched primer when airport security theatre and Israeli-style screening come up.
5 comments from Hacker News
If you actually want to be informed on the subject I highly recommend: How to Design Impenetrable Airport Security by Wendover Productions ( this video , 14 minutes, well researched) Doesn't appear to have any downsides, appears to be logical, effective, and necessary. Appeals to emotion not withstanding. If you have any good faith suggestions for improvement after watching this I'd be all ears.
That's great that they came over to visit the beach but nobody can look into your soul and know that and sometimes people who are not so nice don't just come over to visit the beach. This presents a challenging problem. It sounds like you are under the impression that people are being inconvenienced simply out of spite or due to the discretion of some unfriendly TSA-type airport employee - nope. Understandable why you would perceive things as such but the reality is very different, there is quite a lot going on, before you even board the plane, that you don't see. Places where it really matters, like Israel, cannot afford to engage in security theatre, it is all derived by logic. How it works as is explained in great detail in this video: this video Appeals to emotion mean nothing to me. I get that it feels bad and don't particularly care as being blown up feels worse, promise. If after watching that you have pragmatic improvements to suggest I am all ears.
it's not rare in israel becuse they do have a very big terror problem... but the missing laptop is unusual and... mybe you'v had some iligal shit/... cracked software/... idk -or mybe it was just a mistake/missplacment have you asked about the laptop? btw this is a nice video i'll suggest you'd watch regarding israels airport security and oparetion... this video
I agree with the unethical part but I'm not so sure about the statement that they don't work. Check out this video [0] which talks about profiling at Ben Gurion airport. [0] this video
These scans are theatre. Actual security is this video , and most people in the USA would not agree with this sort of checks.