Complaining about TSA screening is considered by the TSA to be cause for additional scrutiny.
Agent Jose Melendez-Perez told the 9/11 commission that Mohammed al-Qahtani “became visibly upset” and arrogantly pointed his finger in the agent’s face when asked why he did not have an airline ticket for a return flight.
But some experts say terrorists are much more likely to avoid confrontations with authorities, saying an al Qaeda training manual instructs members to blend in.
“I think the idea that they would try to draw attention to themselves by being arrogant at airport security, it fails the common sense test,” said CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen. “And it also fails what we know about their behaviors in the past.”
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April 19, 2011 at 4:45 am
Sean
Peter Bergen’s common sense is wrong. If security believes that people who confront are less likely to be terrorists, then terrorists will confront in order to disguise themselves.
Similarly, if security believes that people who confront are more likely to be terrorists, then terrorists will be non-confrontational in order to disguise themselves.
Assuming that confronting or not is costless for the terrorists, the process reaches a mixed-strategy equilibrium when the probability of search is the same for both confronting and not confronting. But if TSA (reasonably) prefers an equilibrium where fewer people confront them, then they can set the probability of search to be slightly higher for confrontationalists.