The bike bomb someone set off outside a Times Square recruiting station last week had most of the city news media thinking about terrorism; me, it had thinking about the odd things being done in the name of fighting terrorism:

It was interesting, in the wake of Thursday’s Times Square bike bomb, to contrast the excited headlines with the actual stories that followed: New Yorkers were by and large unfazed (“What blew up, did you say? Wake me when it’s a gas main”) while security experts shrugged their shoulders and said there’s only so much that a free society can do to prevent bombs.

If so, maybe it’s time to revisit some of what we are doing under the rubric of “stopping terrorism.” Take the subway bag-check program, which turns 3 years old this summer, having sucked up untold amounts of money and manpower… [read more]