ABSTRACT
According to Bruce Schneier, whom The Register describes as “the closest thing the security industry has to a rock star” (Schneier 2008), “Security is a state of mind.” While this statement is likely to receive little more than a shoulder shrug from the burgeoning community of Critical Security scholars (a field that has its own approximation of “rock stars”), among the experts that comprise what Didier Bigo refers to as “the managers of unease” (Bigo 2002), this logic is rather, well, illogical. Mark Salter’s argument, which has been considered elsewhere in this book, regarding the reliance on “imaginary numbers” in aviation security echoes Schneier’s point, exposing the extent to which the measurement of false positives is all but impossible and can only adapt and respond to catastrophic failure, such as the changes to aviation security and prescreening following the actions of Richard Reid, aka “the shoe bomber” (see Salter 2008b).
