This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 7th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

The attempted Christmas Day airline bombing was a miserable failure, not of security, but of an attempt to circumvent it.

But tensions are still running high for travelers after the attempt.

The dreaded and invasive full body scan is now among the proposed solutions.

Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute,

says a more effective security solution would be one that is private, distributed, and varied.

The immediate consensus after the Christmas bombing attempt was that weapons detection

failed, but I think that more careful examination suggests that it had some effect and that shouldn't be discounted.

The weapons detection layer, if you will, security layer, caused this attacker to modify what was supposed

to be a bomb in order to get through the detection layer, and it ended up being a mere

incendiary device. This allowed the human intervention

that ultimately ceased the attack, caused it to fail. So don't discount the

existing weapons detection we've got.

It caused the weakness in the attack that allowed it to be rendered far less dangerous than it was planned to be.

That has not stopped calls for, in many cases, more invasive techniques

for screening people at airports. Full body scans are one. People say that those aren't necessarily going to be

effective. They may again alter people's behavior in terms of trying to

sneak materials onto airplanes.

What is next and what is the likely result from that?

Yes, the whole body scanning has came to front and center.

It's actually suffered some setbacks in Congress

over the past year because people came to regard it as too invasive for the margin of

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