In case you haven’t heard, on Friday the Metropolitan Transit Authority and New York Police Department began randomly selecting people entering the New York City subway system for search of their bags or packages.

If selected for a search, you may consent to the search, or you may decline and leave. That’s right, leave.

The reaction from the public has been mixed, but I am here to tell you that this is completely useless. Having actually used the NYC subway, I can tell you why this won’t work. Many subway stations have multiple entrances, and many subway stations are fairly close together. If you’re randomly selected, just use one of the other entrances, or walk a few blocks to the next station. If I’m selected for a search at 103rd Street/Central Park West, where I usually get on, screw it, I’m leaving and I’ll go down to 96th Street and try my luck there.

A terrorist could do the same thing.

This is yet again one of those “feel-good” measures that is designed to make people feel safer without actually providing any real security. Expert Bruce Schneier finally speaks up and tells us that security money is better spent on catching terrorists before they attack, and on emergency response, ensuring that damage from an attack that succeeds is minimized. It is not possible to protect every possible target without massive disruption to society, so efforts must be directed first at ensuring that terrorist attacks do not happen in the first place, and then at ensuring that life returns to normal as soon as possible after an attack.

Mark says he’ll “fly to New York and eat a pound of spaghetti off the floor of the subway station where it happened” if these random searches actually catch a terrorist. I doubt he’ll be visiting anytime soon.

Update 26 July: Flex Your Rights has posted a Citizen’s Guide to Refusing New York City Subway Searches. Required reading. Hat tip to Hit and Run.