For HeloPlt,
Not to pee on your fire for feeling good about the fact that people died to justify your security suggestion, but you're barking up the wrong tree.
What would you have been able to find out had these surveillance measures been instituted?
This wasn't a highly skilled operation, it was based on Religious Fanatisism:
Equiptment? One twenty dollar watch, calling card and flight schedule per group.
You wanna know why the Intelligence community failed so completely?
No paper trail, no-body bought large amounts of nitrate based fertiliser, Diesel or heating oil, strange rentals of storage property or movement of rental vehicles across state lines.
Unless you come up with a : Religious Suicidal Maniac detector at your local airport, you're just P issing in the wind.
And you may consider that one doesn't need a shortlist of known terrorists, you need a shortlist of known Religious Zealots with the frightening possibility that those threatening the security of the United States number in their MILLIONS !
SO, In review, we need a Crazy Suicidal Idiot detector...or... we need to completely erradicate the threat ( For some idea of what that means read the part above" MILLIONS")
Or we need to withdraw our assistance to Israel ( Never happen of course but one must point out that THEY are the invader in Palestine and that they will always be the motivating force behind Arab terrorism in the US )
This will doubtlessly become another ' Vietnam' and also one of the saddest chapters in human history, begun, not closed , with the horrific, inhuman attack on the World Trade Center,