Newsweek ( http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4549661/ ) interviews a security
expert who says America is less secure now than before Sept. 11.

Security expert Bruce Schneier: "We have built a geopolitical situation
where more people dislike America, more people hate us, and in that
respect we have made the world a more dangerous place. Though we have
also done a lot of good things to increase our security. We have
arrested and neutralized terrorist cells. We have disrupted terrorist
funding. Our investigations -- both internal in the U.S. and abroad --
are much better. We are better able at preventing plots and uncovering
them. 9/11 was a very unfortunate intelligence accident. A lot of those
sorts of things tend not to work because they get foiled. We were very
unlucky. We are probably better prepared in that we kind of expect these
things—local governments, when something like this happens, are going to
be more ready because they have thought about it. In terms of the
aftermath, we are more prepared. [But] in terms of whether we’ve made
the world safer in the past two years, most of the things we've done
have been irrelevant and some have been harmful."

"… We're still living in a world where politics trumps security. The
things that tend not to work are the broad surveillance measures. We are
spending $10 billion on a program to fingerprint foreigners, for example
… I think it is an enormous waste of money. The amount of security I'm
getting is not nearly worth that cost. I'd much rather take that money
and see it spent elsewhere … Politicians tend to prefer security
countermeasures that are very visible, to make it look like they're
doing something. So they will tend to pick things that are visible even
if they are less effective. Training FBI agents in Arabic is a really
good idea, but no one is going to see it. Fingerprinting foreigners at
the border is a very visible thing that, even if it is less effective,
is going to look like we're doing something."