Aviation Security Quotes
This quotation is one of the few honest answers that government politicians give to questions about the effectiveness of prevention. All prevention whether it is to reduce terrorist attacks, fatal crashes on out highways, illicit drug usage or anything else, have two major problems in terms of communicating effectiveness. First, it is impossible to accurately measure what did not happen. Second, whereas prevention failures have real people and faces of the victims can be identified, it is impossible to identify the specific benefits of prevention. We know who died in the Boston Marathon bombing, but we do not know exactly who was saved by the prevention of a planned terrorist attack that was thwarted in New York. Even when the government does know that a terrorist attack was thwarted, it is rarely a good idea to make that information public as then the tourists will learn details of how a particular planned attack went awry, whereas if the government is silent, they have much less information and cannot easily adjust their strategy and tactics.
The 2013 Congress was one of those that was politically polarized and unresponsive to party leaders. This presented gridlock in legislation that was needed to appropriate the money to maintain the needed level of air traffic controllers. So they were required to take unpaid furloughs reducing the number of air traffic controllers each day. Some critics wanted the Department of Transportation to try and control the usual number of aircraft flights with the reduced workforce. The Secretary refused.
