I see that the Department of Homeland Security is now enlisting bus drivers in the War on Freedom. I’m sure this won’t produce the thousands of false positives tying up scarce law enforcement resources that always seem to plague any program involving well-intentioned amateurs.

Designers of the School Bus Watch program want to turn 600,000 bus drivers into an army of observers, like a counterterrorism watch on wheels. Already mindful of motorists with road rage and kids with weapons, bus drivers are now being warned of far more grisly scenarios.

Like this one: terrorists monitor a punctual driver for weeks, then hijack a bus and load the friendly yellow vehicle with enough explosives to take down a building.

An alert school bus driver could foil that plan, security expert Jeffrey Beatty recently told a class of 250 of drivers in Norfolk, Va. After all, bus drivers cover millions of miles of roads. They know the towns, the kids, the parents.

First off, how is a bus driver going to foil the plan? As long as we’re talking about movie plot scenarios, let’s not forget that other favorite scene which usually occurs at the start of the movie plot scenario. That’s the one where the Bad Guy walks up to the (security guard|cop|bus driver|Chauffeur|teacher|mailman|UPS driver|other random victim), asks a smart-ass question, then shoots them in the head with a silenced pistol.

“As a bus driver, going down the same streets and going into the same neighborhoods every day, you know when there’s a car that shouldn’t be there,” said Bob Pearson, who drives a school bus in Fairfax County, Va. “You have to realize that a school bus goes everywhere.”

Of course, if the “terrorists” have been monitoring the bus for weeks, wouldn’t they now be part of the cars that “should be there?” And isn’t the bus driver supposed to be focusing on other things, like making sure that they get their bus safely from point A to point B? Personally, I’m a lot more worried about an increase in the school bus accident rate as drivers make sure that no “suspicious” people look at their bus rather than the other idiots on the road.

And the kicker, in my personal opinion:

Down in Norfolk, Shelita Hill, a driver for 23 years, acknowledged that she never thought of her school bus as a target of terrorism until she heard Beatty speak. Neither had many others in the class.

There is no threat. Yet she will ignore 23 years of direct experience in the field out the window because some guy from DHS tells her she should. If I did this to someone over the phone, it would be Social Engineering. In this case, I’ll let her off as merely having made a Poor Trust Decision. Just keep your eyes on the road, Shelita. You’ll never see a terrorist, but your passengers will thank you for it.

On the bright side, I’m glad to see that the nation’s ports are now so well-protected and Osama Bin Laden is safely in custody so that the DHS has time to build up silly domestic survellience programs and try to stop people surfing porn at the library.