I spent last week in Barcelona at the Open Group’s Security and Jericho (deperimeterization) Forums. The meetings were reasonably interesting, but what really impressed me was the Spanish attitude toward airport security and physical security in general. Maybe the Spanish just have an unusually high risk appetite, given that Encierro is their idea of a national pastime, but for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel like I was being subjected to a bunch of pointless, insulting “security” measures at the airport.

On arrival from Heathrow, I walked up to the immigration booth and realized I hadn’t filled out an arrival form. I grabbed one but the immigration officer waved me off, flipped my passport open to a random page and stamped over what I think was an old Singapore stamp. He didn’t even run it through an electronic reader.

After that I collected my bag, walked through the Nothing To Declare lane without breaking stride, and was into the public concourse and in search of an ATM machine. Total time to deal with border control, including thinking I was missing a form, was about 15 seconds.

Once I was loose on the streets of the city, I continued to be impressed with what I saw. Spain is definitely no stranger to terrorism. They suffered the Madrid bombings just over 18 months ago and have been living with the current form of the ongoing sometimes-violent Basque Separatist movement since 1968. Somehow, though, the Spanish have managed to avoid falling prey to the sort of security paranoia that has befallen the United States. Or maybe they realized that the terrorists they’re most worried about already live there, something the United States still doesn’t seem to get.

This is similar to what I saw during my time in the United Kingdom, both before and after the Good Friday Agreement turned the IRA from political terrorists into plain old organized criminals. The police were present and often incongrously heavily-equipped (MP-5 submachine guns and tactical body armor worn over their shirts), but non-intrusive in my activities. Perhaps my experience would have been different if I weren’t a white male, but I never observed them pulling aside anyone else, either.

The biggest difference between Spain and the UK is that in the UK, you can’t turn around without running into a CCTV Camera. The British sure do love their CCTV Cameras and the “You are being monitored on CCTV” signs that go with them.

But the people are not overtly scared of terrorism in either place that I could see. Ironically, I think it’s because the threat is real. As a result, people can’t let it inflate in their minds until every building is a target and everyone who’s not From Here is a terrorist.

Here in America, on the other hand, the threat isn’t real. The only terrorism campaigns this country has seen in the past fifty years targeted the Civil Rights Movement forty years ago and abortion providers five to ten years ago. Modern Islamic terrorism is nothing but a brown-skinned bogeyman. The odds of dying in a terrorist attack are so infintesimally small that you would be much better off spending that mental energy on planning how to spend your lottery jackpot winnings. Throw in the fact that the sort of countermeasures that are most reassuring to the populace (armed guards and other forms of security theater) are also some of the least effective.

Personally, I think this is a key part of why people are so irrational in their fear of terrorism. They can’t conceptualize how remote the odds are so they tend to believe two things. First, people believe in movie plot security. People think that if Jack Bauer faced a situation last week on “24,” it is plausible.

I remember a lecture when I was at university talking about the percentage of people who believed that movies and TV shows were real. In some Third World nations, over 90% of those surveyed believed that the soap opera “Dallas” was real. I forget the rate for people in the United States but I remember being a bit incredulous at it. And that was before “Reality” TV further blurred the line between reality and entertainment.

Today, we have to take our shoes off to pass through security in a US Airport because one guy tried to hide some semtex in his shoes.

Second, people believe that the countermeasures they see are necessary. Seeing an armed guard in Yellowstone National Park doesn’t mean that there is a threat of terrorists trying to blow up Old Faithful. It means the State of Wyoming has a few hundred thousand dollars in Homeland Security funding they need to spend.

It’s not that the threats aren’t real. I fully believe that there is no shortage of people in the world who would like to commit acts of violence against the United States. What I don’t believe is that they are targeting Old Faithful, or that a few uniformed guards are going to make a difference in anything but the body count if they do.

And this is where security gets hard. How do you tell people that while there definitely is a bogeyman, they shouldn’t worry because he’s not hiding under their bed at night?

(No link on the TV reality belief statistics. Google let me down on finding them, but they were old enough to pre-date the modern Web)