The TSA is a discussion proof issue. Their mission is to make all transportation safe -- which is prima facie insane.
When we have a political discussion about any other government agency, there are usually some kind of stats we can judge our expenditures against. Need more police? Maybe so. What's the crime rate look like. Need increased defense spending? I don't know. What's the defense spend of other countries. And so on. [Insert long discussion here about whether such metrics are useful or just BS, but the point is that there are numbers, sorta]
With the TSA, we're protecting them from something not happening that's only ever happened once in our history. If we spend 100 Billion over the next ten years and there are no attacks, was that money well spent? Who knows? Maybe we should spend twice that, or half that.
I'm not even going to go into the civil liberties problem. From a funding discussion alone, there's simply no way to know if we have "not enough", "just right", or "too much"
And so we end up with this kabuki theater, where we pay untrained people to go through the motions of looking like they might be doing something useful.
Politicians have a tendency to create issues that only have one side to them. So we have "Mothers Against Drunk Drivers" -- anybody know people in favor of drunk drivers? Or people in favor of "clean water" -- is there a political group actively lobbying for dirty water? We create these edge cases where the way the issues are framed, reasonable discussion becomes impossible. This is the case with the TSA.
Politicians have a tendency to create issues that only have one side to them. So we have "Mothers Against Drunk Drivers"
'Mothers' against drunk driving' was created by a woman whose daughter was killed by a drunk driver and who was the subject of a TV movie about the death and her subsequent activism. Likewise, there are people who lobby for clean water because their local water supply has become polluted, typically by agricultural or industrial concerns in a 'tragedy of the commons' situation where the externalities of production are not billed to the producer.
I don't understand why you're ascribing the existence of such lobbies to politicians. Nobody campaigns for dirty water, but there are plenty of politicians who speak against the EPA and implicitly support their constituents' wish to pollute for free.
"When we have a political discussion about any other government agency, there are usually some kind of stats we can judge our expenditures against"
Usually those stats are ignored. You brought up good examples:
"Need more police? Maybe so. What's the crime rate look like"
More like, "I can be tough on crime, so let me fund more cops!" The crime rate has been declining lately, but the police are more powerful than ever before. Paramilitary teams are routinely used to serve search-and-arrest warrants, the police can recycle the proceeds of seized property into their own budgets, and there are more and more ways for us to become criminals with each passing year.
"Need increased defense spending? I don't know. What's the defense spend of other countries"
Once upon a time, we only spent substantial money on the military when we were in a state of war. Then we began to panic over the USSR's military might, so we created a standing army. Now there is no USSR and we have the most powerful and well-funded military on Earth. Despite the changes in other countries' military sizes and budgets, our standing army faces more budget cuts from failures to compromise on the domestic budget than any sort of quantitative comparison with other countries.
The thing about the executive branch is that it is constantly trying to get more power, and the legislative branch is constantly giving more power to the executive. The old protections against executive abuses are being eroded, and new ways for the executive to act without democratic process are being created. Declare drugs to be illegal without consulting Congress? Sure. Shoot and kill American citizens hundreds of miles from any battlefield? Of course! Expanded the military presence in countries that never threatened or attacked us? Why wait for Congress on anything? The only politicians who are even trying to stop this are outsiders, libertarians and the far-left whose ideas are nowhere near the mainstream.
"With the TSA, we're protecting them from something not happening that's only ever happened once in our history."
The issue here is that there was never actually a problem for the TSA to address. America does not have an ongoing problem with terrorist attacks; every few years we see one very determined attacker manage to cause a lot of destruction, and otherwise we go on with our lives oblivious to the numerous ways we can be attacked. Other countries are not so fortunate: they have to deal with terrorists attacking garbage cans, buses, markets, etc. They can judge their policies by reductions in such attacks.
Bruce Schneier has a good point: instead of an agency meant to secure transportation against rare and unpredictable attacks, we should fund an agency meant to make transportation generally safer. We have lots of car accidents each year; once upon a time, we addressed that by mandating seatbelts as a standard feature. Why not continue to develop safer cars? If we are no longer creative enough to do that, why not spend the money on making alternative modes of transportation easier, cheaper, and more available? We can determine the success of such a policy by the reduction in vehicle-related injuries and deaths.
"Exactly two things have made airline travel safer since 9/11: reinforcement of cockpit doors, and passengers who now know that they may have to fight back."
Schneier goes on to claim that everything else is security theater. I'm open to the idea that there's something else out there that's helpful (though I couldn't name it off the top of my head). But we should definitely apply steady pressure towards the demilitarization of the airports so this cruft doesn't stay entrenched forever.
Claiming the TSA agents at the airport are the first line of defense is idiotic thinking. If the bad guys get that far then everything else has failed. They are the last line, and not a very good one. (Bad guys can try multiple times, and use multiple people - they just need one to get through while the TSA needs to stop every single one.) The other thing/something else is good old fashioned police work and intelligence to discover/prevent the plots before they reach the stage of people at the airport.
The TSA could never be perfect - consider the example of prisons where there are essentially no rights, lots of searching, controlled access etc. Things still get through.
And even if they stopped everything getting on planes, they are still reacting to a tactic which has repeatedly been the problem. The bad guys can just blow up queues at the airport, or a mall, or a stadium, or a highway. There is no shortage of targets or methods that will instil fear. (Good old fashioned police work and intelligence should be tactic agnostic.) The reality is that not that many people actually want to be bad guys, and a US policy of not giving people reasons would be a good one.
Oh we have old fashioned police work too-- where the FBI finds am mentally retarded person, hands him a fake bomb, and then arrests him, and holds a self congratulatory press conference.
My grandma used to work as a TSA screener in Southern California, both before 9/11 (when they were ran by a private organization IIRC) and after. She would regularly have to go take classes because she would miss the dummy guns and grenades they would send through in bags. From what she told me, she was far from the only one who couldn't quite cut it, but she felt bad enough about the repeated failures she requested a transfer into one of the offices instead. The thing that always seemed the most alarming is that they acted like TSA was this new, more secure way to handle security, yet, at least at the airport my grandma worked at, they just moved the same people over to TSA, gave them new uniforms, a raise and then let business continue as usual.
What is extra weird is that the threat objects are all computer vision analyzed and automatically color coded. It's not clear why we have people looking at the images anyway, except to review the positive IDs.
But look on the bright side - they're providing jobs to the otherwise-virtually-unemployable, if the competence and dedication to work I've seen is indicative of the TSA workforce as a whole.
It's important to remember, it's easy to create jobs. Let's dig an enormous trench from Omaha, Nebraska to the Duluth, Minnesota using spoons. It'll take thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people; many of them will be women. So we'll have this gender equality that we're worried...
When we start worrying about these kinds of things, the creation of jobs per se, we give - we have costs that are often hidden and hard to notice. When you talk about digging a trench with spoons, it's obvious. As we talk about these other things, buying American, doing things in expensive ways - we're going to impoverish ourselves, not make ourselves better off.
It's a good indicator of how reviled TSA is though: Blackwater has changed their name how many times due to how reviled they are, and yet people still compare them favorably to the TSA!
I don't think this TSA screener understands that the TSA does not need perfection to be effective.
The purpose of the TSA is not to catch every piece of contraband; it is to reduce "aircraft attacks" [EDIT: by aircraft attacks, I maan "attacks against the airplane itself," that is, bombings capable of bringing down the plane. Hijackings are not really feasible anymore]. For that purpose, it does not have to be 100% effective, or even 95% effective, or even 90% effective; it just has to raise the apparent level of difficulty high enough such that:
a) An attack looks like it will take so much effort that the terrorist is no longer interested (terrorists are lazy, too) or capable. Attack frequency is inversely proportional to effort involved. If all a terrorist had to do to down a plane is click on a link in a web-browser, we would see catastrophes daily; if the sophistication of the attack is such that it takes months of training, the frequency drops by orders and orders of magnitude.
b) It forces a terrorist to get help from other terrorists; while a solo terrorist is hard to detect in advance, terrorist networks and their communications are routinely infiltrated by law enforcement and intelligence.
In this respect, pat-downs and body scanners force terrorists to up their game, which, in turn, discourages attacks from ever taking place. The Israelis also use this method [1] but they apply it more selectively based on the background of the passenger, which saves resources and, while politically difficult, is a much better approach.
[1] "At Ben-Gurion, some passengers have been searched so thoroughly that they have had to walk through the terminals, the gates and up to the doors of their planes with no handbags, wallets or even shoes."
http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2010/11/tsa_alterna...
The shoes part I find hard to believe. I.e. it is true that if the security suspects you you may be asked to remove your shoes and have them scanned, but walking through terminals barefoot into the plane? Sounds very un-plausible. I have flown through Ben-Gurion many times and have many acquaintances that did too. There are all kinds of horror stories, but I never heard anybody having to walk barefoot through the terminals, and of course never seen anything like that.
Despite what media people say, profiling is a large (but not only!) part of what happens there. It may not be PC, but it is true, and there are very few Israelis who have serious problem with that. I'm not sure if it is possible to borrow the system wholesale for the US - both threats and targets to protect are very different - but I can say definitely that Israel system seems to be effective and not hugely annoying to most (not all - as I said, there are horror stories) of the people, and TSA seems to be the reverse - not very effective, but hugely annoying. I think TSA should bring in some common sense. I know this may create vulnerabilities, but come on, taking toys from 5-year-olds is not necessary. What is necessary is to create a system that would detect behavior that would suggest this particular 5-year-old may be used for illicit purposes and only then check this particular toy. I believe this is possible and Israel experience could help.
So we waste billions of dollars per year to "force terrorists to up their game." My main issue with the TSA, besides the fact they violate my rights, is they are a non-solution to a non-issue. The fact is, TSA screening is a joke, and TSA screeners are largely incompetent. Furthermore, if a terrorist wanted to kill hundreds of Americans, they need only set off a bomb in the main terminal entrance, before screening takes place. Locking the cockpit doors and having more aware passengers are what keeps us safer from hijackers than before 9/11.
I wish airlines had a choice to use the TSA or not, because then we could vote with our wallets. But no, we are being forced to be groped by imbeciles who think that patting down frightened five year olds is worth it. While the finer points of your analysis are correct, the most compelling argument against the TSA lies outside the scope of your analysis. The idea that you can have absolute safety is a farce. Whenever we want more safety, we have to ask ourselves at what cost it's worth that safety. The TSA is a political response to an anomaly, and somewhere along the line we forgot that we are giving up our freedom by chasing ghosts.
>>>> So you would rather make it easier for them ?
False dichotomy. You can make it harder for them, or say it is already hard enough, without TSA. TSA is not the only way ever not to make it easy for terrorists.
>>>> Equating someone doing their job with a paedophile is a much, no ?
"Someone doing their job" should know better than that, or don't get this job. "Just doing my job" is not an excuse of bad behavior, that thing was settled in a little town called Nuremberg. I wouldn't go as far as saying TSA workers derive sexual pleasure from groping children, but they should know a lot of what they are doing is wrong, and if they do it, they bear moral responsibilities for the abuse. Each time TSA worker does something repulsive and justifies himself with "I'm just following instructions" - he's committing a moral crime, even if not a legal one. And this should be told over and over so everybody would know what is being done - so that when TSA worker has a beer with his neighbor, the neighbor would say "TSA? The guys that pat down five-year olds? How that's working out for you?"
"The purpose of the TSA is not to catch every piece of contraband; it is to reduce aircraft attacks."
Here I was, thinking that the security checkpoint was a measure to make everyone feel safer. Thanks for clearing that one up!
"An attack looks like it will take so much effort that the terrorist is no longer interested (terrorists are lazy, too) or capable"
Except that you can buy or obtain all the things needed to kill people on an airplane on the other side of the security check. You can buy glass, you can get knives from restaurants, etc. The fact that you get a security check long before you are anywhere near an airplane leaves a lot of room for an attacker, even a solo terrorist who is not particularly creative.
Note that the Israeli approach involves walking up to the door of an airplane without any carry-ons or shoes. Profiling is needed to determine who is even worth the attention (if they did that to everyone, there would be riots). Meanwhile, the TSA will let you bring a pocket knife onto a plane, which is more than enough to kill people.
The real difference today is not that terrorists have a harder time bringing weapons onto planes, but that passengers and crew do not believe they will survive a hijacking. People will now fight back. The locked cockpit doors -- locked from the inside -- help a lot too. Any security beyond explosives detection is pointless, and you could have that sort of security right at the departure gates.
I personally doubt that the TSA checkpoints were ever meant to keep us secure. The Bush administration just needed to reassure people that we would have better security than we did beforehand, in a visible and easy-to-understand way. Now the agency is huge and no politician can afford to void against checkpoints, just in case a clever terrorist manages to hijack a plane (or perhaps shoot it down with a surface-to-air missile; people would probably blame lax airport security in that case too). It also helps that so many contracts are awarded for building the TSA's equipment, and that the TSA has substantially weakened Americans' ideas about civil rights (and what mainstream politician will complain about such things?).
I should clarify that I think the TSA wants to prevent airline bombings (that is, loss of a plane) above all else. Hijackings are much more difficult than they were before 9/11, even if the terrorists were in a group and allowed some weapons. I don't think the TSA is, or should be, focusing on hijackings. AFAIK, since 9/11 there have been no more hijacking attempts, but several bombing attempts.
"I should clarify that I think the TSA wants to prevent airline bombings (that is, loss of a plane) above all else."
I have my doubts about that as well. I would think that the lack of K-9 teams near departure gates is a good sign that bombings are not the concern of the TSA when it comes to airport security. Bombings are probably a concern somewhere, but the security checkpoints do not seem to do much when it comes to stopping a bomb plot.
Keep in mind that private planes are exempt from the security checks. If a terrorist wanted to blow up a commercial plane, what would stop them from chartering a private jet, bringing bombs on board, and then ramming their explosive-laden plane into an airliner mid-flight? Why even bother doing it in flight? A terrorist might just roll their chartered jet into a fully-loaded passenger plane on the runway, and blow up a plane in front of a crowd of people.
Perhaps there is some other procedure in place to ensure that no bombs can make it past the numerous ways that people and vehicles can enter an airport without going through a security checkpoint. If that is the case, what is the purpose of the checkpoint? Why not just apply whatever techniques prevent terrorists from ramming private jets into airliners to the rest of the airport, and let us keep our rights intact?
It is also worth pointing out that there are lots of other bombing targets that are not being bombed, despite a complete lack of security. Anyone can bring large packages onto the NYC subways without any harassment or scanning, yet those trains (which are packed with hundreds of people during the rush hour) have not been blown up. A truck full of explosives could easily drive onto a major bridge. Yet despite these clear vulnerabilities, and despite the fact that other countries see such attacks and more, we rarely have them here. Are airlines really more special targets for bombers than urban transit systems?
As has been pointed out before, an explosion in an airport would be bad but the damage would be pretty localized and everyone knows where the airport is, there are lots of emergency facilities in palace because they always have to be prepared for the possibility of crash landings or other accidental disaster.
An explosion in the air, or abuse of the plane as a missile as happened on 9-11, is a much bigger problem because the potential destructive radius is much larger and the area of incidence much less predictable. The costs of that happening in a city center in 2001 were staggering; likewise, consider the economic impact of an airliner plunging into or blowing up over a nuclear power station, which might result in less actual destruction but far more severe public panic and economic disruption.
I pointed this out elsewhere, but a rush hour subway train in New York City carries over two thousand people (and that is assuming that the train is not over capacity), nearly as many as were killed in the September 11th attack. One well-timed, powerful bomb could kill almost everyone on such a train, and if it were detonated while a second train was passing by even more people would be killed. These trains travel over major bridges and under important buildings; the damage of such an attack could be enormous.
It has not happened yet, and hopefully it never will happen. The bomb itself would probably be difficult to procure and transport to New York City without being detected by an intelligence agency. What we can say is this: body scanners, luggage X-rays, and shoe removal have done nothing to prevent such an attack, because no such measures are in place.
Such bombings as you describe have taken place in London, Madrid, and arguably Japan, to cite just a few. They certainly cause a lot of damage, but you can harden fixed infrastructure and to some extent this has already been done, since subway/rail operators already deal with the risk of switching failure and train collision. Train derailments and collisions are themselves powerful events, given the mass and momentum of a fast-moving train, and of course collisions involving freight trains carry additional risks because of chemical spills and so forth. I think it's unlikely that any sort of portable bomb would do the sort of damage you have in mind, because even commuter train carriages are engineered with the possibility of a collision in mind. Although terrorist incidents of this kind have been very destructive where they've occurred, the fact is that the damage is relatively contained, and because it's an elevated risk environment (due to the possibility of accidents) there are robust safety and rescue protocols already in place.
As an example of the difference, consider the Oklahoma city truck bomb had explosive force equivalent to 5 kilotons of TNT, involved 13 barrels of explosive, and other materials, requiring a small box truck to transport. It did horrendous damage, but in terms of pure destructive force it wrecked about 1/3 of a 9-story building. The two plane impacts on the WTC, by contrast, caused the total collapse of two 80-story skyscrapers. There was lots of ancillary damage in both cases, but I stand by my arguments that it's harder to predict where an attack from the air will occur and that the destructive potential is typically larger in the case of a successful attack, because of the extra mass, speed, and height inputs.
Firstly there are sniffer dogs as well as bomb detection equipment around every airport I've been to. They are just deployed randomly which should be fine as a deterrence.
Secondly the reason commercial airlines are different from smaller planes and other bombing targets is because you can use one to kill tens of thousands of people (fly into large skyscrapers). You can't do that with a car bomb or crashing a small plane into a large one.
And the fact you have these incidents at all should tell you that airline security is important.
"Firstly there are sniffer dogs as well as bomb detection equipment around every airport I've been to."
I have yet to see them at an American airport. Maybe we have been flying to different places.
"Secondly the reason commercial airlines are different from smaller planes and other bombing targets is because you can use one to kill tens of thousands of people"
Tens of thousands? That's funny, because the largest terrorist attack on American soil involved airplanes and killed about 3000 people.
"You can't do that with a car bomb or crashing a small plane into a large one."
I was replying to someone who claimed that the job of the TSA is to prevent an airline bombing. Crashing a private jet into a commercial jet is a perfectly valid counterexample.
"And the fact you have these incidents at all should tell you that airline security is important."
We had one successful attack, which was extremely well planned and extremely well coordinated. We spend billions of dollars each year on the TSA. Billions of dollars because of an event so rare that we can only point to one occurrence.
Meanwhile, millions of people ride urban transit systems in large cities every day, and none of them are subjected to even the most rudimentary security. A subway train in New York has a capacity of over two thousand people, which is around how many would be on a packed rush hour train. A single terrorist could kill a large number of those people by detonating a powerful enough bomb while the train is going over a bridge or through a river tunnel (and probably in many other places). Yet despite that terrifying possibility, there are no body scanners, no bag X-rays, no shoe removal requirements, and no security lines at subway stations.
You can go ahead and cling to the idea that the TSA's airport security program is keeping us safe. The reality is that their program does almost nothing to promote safety or security; it is all the work that you do not see that is keeping you safe. The body scanners are not even a piece of the puzzle, they are a distraction meant to help people like you feel safe.
The ones I've seen to find something were sniffing for contraband imports to USA. Of course, elsewhere I've seen some sniffing for narcotics and explosives, but the only "live action" I've seen was when they did confiscate an apple from a passenger who just arrived in SFO. Not an Apple product, but an apple.
Agro produce regulations, probably. I had some produce confiscated once too. This is designed against various pests that could enter from overseas and from which local species have no protection, though I think it is futile because if they would get here they'd get here on cargo ship with thousand tons of apples, not in somebody's one apple.
Agreed. But I'd say the agro produce regulations, and sniffing the hand baggage of air passengers, are a bit similar thing for food hygiene as TSA checks are for air safety: an illusion that something is done.
You can buy glass, you can get knives from restaurants.
I can't speak for US terminals but in many international ones. The glass you get isn't large enough to cause serious damage e.g. snowdomes and the knives in restaurants have deliberately dull blades. And cockpit doors whilst locked from the inside are routinely opened in order to provide food/drinks to the captain. So it's hardly a fool proof system.
But hey don't let me stop with your confused anti-TSA crusade.
That's funny, because the last time I went to an international airport I saw a duty-free shop with big glass bottles full of liquor. Hey, I must be confused about how much glass is needed to make a useful weapon. I have seen plenty of glass that a clever terrorist might steal from restaurants at small regional airports as well. As for knives, any knife that is sharp enough to cut a steak is sharp enough to be used as a weapon.
The thing is, I am not a terrorist. What I see as potential weapons are probably just the tip of the iceberg of things that can be turned into a weapon. Prisoners manage to make weapons out of all sorts of seemingly innocuous objects. What makes you think that the things I can identify as possible weapons are an evenly remotely exhaustive list? What makes you think that a terrorist could not find more weapons on the other side of security?
It is non trivial to smash a liquor bottle to produce a long shard strong enough to cause mass damage. And it has to be smashed without rousing attention amongst passengers. And even if you did cut someone it would take minutes to bleed to death.
And the knives rely on serration to cut through steak so are very dull.
And given that every country in the world has a TSA and abides by almost identical rules I would guess that there is a lot of people thinking about ways to make us safer. Why isn't the status quo the safest yet reasonable measures we have ?
"It is non trivial to smash a liquor bottle to produce a long shard strong enough to cause mass damage. And it has to be smashed without rousing attention amongst passengers."
I am pretty sure a terrorist would (a) practice smashing bottles until he can reliably create a weapon and (b) smash the bottle before boarding the plane, in an empty bathroom (I have been to international airports where no flights depart from an entire section during the night, yet passengers are free to wander around or sit in those sections), and just carry it on board because there are no security checks before boarding the plane.
"And the knives rely on serration to cut through steak so are very dull."
So you think a somewhat dull serrated edge could not be used as a weapon? Prisoners manage to use far less effective weapons to kill each other; why couldn't terrorists do it?
"given that every country in the world has a TSA"
What is your point? Everyone has a public display of their airport security? Do you think that it is impossible that everyone just wants their citizens to feel safe and that the point of a public security check is to do just that?
$11.09 sounds pretty reasonable to me, but like parent, I don't know what to compare it to.
It doesn't even seem like "cost per screening" is a useful metric. What does it mean? What's the problem with it? The issue with the TSA is that it's spending billions at all to no apparent effect. No one cares about its efficiency at doing nothing.
I guessed twice as high, and the number of US air travellers you cited doesn't even account for foreign airlines flying in and out of US airports.
$8.1 billion is a lot of course, and I find the TSA to be a useless bunch, but compared to the defense budget, this is a steal. It's also providing work to 47,000 Transportation Security Officers, most of whom would otherwise be unemployed if the article is to be believed.
On defense budget, their build aircraft carriers, ballistic nuclear missiles and supersonic jets. On TSA budget, they have a bunch of dimwits groping your balls (or whatever you have depending on your sex) and taking naked pictures of you. Oh, and buying scanners that then they have to turn off because they lied about safety tests. Not exactly comparable things.
"TSA personnel primarily responsible for screening passengers make between $25,518 and $44,007" [1]
$8.1 billion is the entire TSA budget, it's not just wages for Transportation Security Officers. Looking at the budget [2], total wages for screening personnel are closer to $2 billion.
An iPad 2 battery contains about 90 kilojoules of energy. This is equivalent to about 20g of TNT, which is only 1/3 of the TNT used in a WWII-era "pineapple" hand grenade.
However, the real reason one can bring a laptop battery on a plane is because no terrorist has tried to use it yet. They would probably need multiple batteries: after the "shoe bomber" attack, the government determined that as little as 50g of PETN could bring down a plane, which is equivalent to 80+g of TNT, which is four iPad 2 batteries.
Even then, it would be necessary to deliver that energy in a very small amount of time, which may not be possible rapidly enough with lithium-ion; they can burn, but can they explode quickly enough, with all of their energy? The TSA aays they have studied the issue, and the answer is no [1], they "cannot be used as an explosive and are not a security threat in personal carry-on quantities."
Given that the TSA allows common lighters and matches to be taken on board, apparently not. I think aircraft cabins are designed to be "fire resistant" (for obvious reasons) though I'd be surprised if they were fireproof.
Because you can ban water bottles, and sell them in the shop that's after security checks, and that won't turn many people back. But banning laptop batteries would harm business travel really seriously - it would really stop very, very many business travellers.
People do want to have their batteries at the destination as well. The typical business traveler would be so severely inconvenienced by this that it would reduce air travel significantly.
Note that the water bottle scam isn't really profiting the airlines - it's benefiting the airport operators, in collusion with many national air regulators.
"I just caught a terrorist before he got on a plane", said no TSA agent ever. The times this has happened since 9/11 were all local police, FBI, or CIA
I hate flying in large part to the security process. Imagine the boost to the economy if flying was easier. Think of all the people that would fly more often.
OTOH, air travel is an environmental nuisance. Still, In would rather have a pollution tax go to conservation and cleanup, instead of hassling passengers.
Earlier this week the TSA announced a loosening of restrictions on carry-on items, which seems to have earned them absolutely no kudos at all with the people who are in the habit of calling for more sensible policies, but which is garnering opposition from airlines, since the burden of elevated risk falls disproportionately on airline cabin crew. EDIT: here's a link that I forgot to include http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/delta-joins-protest-ove...
The article wraps up with, "Anyone boarding an aircraft should feel maybe only a teeny tiny bit safer than if there were no TSA at all."
Well, yes. The TSA has not improved the security of airline passengers in the United States to any demonstrable degree. I remember a more innocent time almost three decades ago when my work involved frequent flying, such that I have been to most major airports in the United States repeatedly and have logged weeks above 30,000 feet of altitude. I have a photograph from those days showing me seated at the controls of a commercial airliner, which the crew of the airliner took after I boarded a flight early in the boarding process. In those days a business traveler could sit down to pose for a snapshot inside the aircraft cockpit, with the crew having no concerns about a person who was not an airline employee being there. That's the carefree ease of flying in the United States I remember from the beginning of my adulthood.
Years ago I wrote here on Hacker News, in response to one of the recurring complaints about airport security procedures, "Hear. Hear. I was just on flights out of town over the weekend, and it occurred to me that the terrorists have won by making air travel so inconvenient and annoying for every American who ever flies domestically. 'Maybe Secure Flight is a good use of our money; maybe it isn't. But let's have debates like that in the open, as part of the budget process, where it belongs.' This is the general answer for review of current security procedures: we should check whether they are worthwhile for the amount of improved security they promise to provide."
About one year ago another participant, who came to the United States from another country, wrote,
It's also the only place that made me take my shoes off before the metal detector, which I found quite humiliating
This appears to have been one of the calculations of the terrorist group that put up the shoe bomber
to trying his failed attempt to blow up an airplane with a bomb hidden in his shoe. Some of the co-religionists of some of those terrorists consider it extremely degrading to be bare-footed in certain situations deemed to be "holy" situations (I know this from being told this by a friend who had newly converted to Islam when I was overseas in 1984), and thus they have probably been glad to humiliate Americans as Americans have reacted to the failed shoe bomb plot. My proposal is that United States airport security give up on requesting passengers to remove shoes. Yeah, maybe have chemical sensing devices at airports to screen for bombs on shoes, but let us all wear our shoes onto airplanes and throughout the insides of airports. The screening procedures at present appear to be an overreaction to the actual risk of a shoe bomb destroying a passenger airplane, especially in view of other countries not having the same screening procedure for airline passengers.
I've summed up my response to past incidents of terrorism directed at people from civilized countries overseas or civilians in civilized countries this way: it's important for all of us to remember the basic issue here. The basic issue is whether people in free countries, like most readers of Hacker News, are going to be able to enjoy the right of free speech throughout their country, on any subject, or whether any American or Danish Dutch person or other person accustomed to free speech who happens to be within reach of attack by a crazy foreign person has to prepare for war just to continue to exercise free speech. On my part, I'm going to continue to comment on public policy based on verifiable facts and reason and logic, even if that seems offensive. I am not going to shrink from saying that people in backward, poorly governed countries that could never have invented the Internet have no right to kill and destroy just because someone in a free country laughs or scorns at their delusions. The people who are destroying diplomatic buildings and killing diplomats or journalists or bombing public buildings visited by random civilians are declining to use thoughtful discussion to show that they are anything other than blights on humankind.
Allow me to reemphasize this point. The many participants on HN who criticize Transportation Security Agency "security theater" as a meaningless reduction in the freedom of people who travel to the United States are right on the basic point. If free citizens of free countries can't live in freedom because of fear of terrorists, the terrorists have already won. You and I should be able to speak our minds and express our opinions in the manner of all people in free countries--sometimes agreeing with one another, sometimes disagreeing, but always letting the other guy have his say. To engage in self-censorship because of fear of violent thugs is to be defeated by the thugs.
We should also be able to fly freely about the country with no more than strictly necessary security precautions. I want to be able to walk into an airport with my shoes on and walk calmly to an arrival gate to greet arriving passengers there. I used to do that. And I want to be able to carry a Swiss Army knife in an airline carry-on bag. Grandmothers and mothers and children should surely be able to board an airliner unmolested in a free country like the United States.
That said, I remember when conditions changed in the United States. I stood on top of the former World Trade Center in New York City twice while traveling with foreign visitors to the United States during my earlier frequent flyer days. Even today, the United States is still second only to France as a country destination for foreign tourists (and rather more of the tourists to France can drive cars or ride trains to France than can many visitors to the United States). So as obnoxious as current TSA security procedures are to me and to many, they are not so obnoxious that people have stopped visiting the United States for fun. Because I remember the peace and freedom I long enjoyed here to welcome visitors to the United States from around the world, I want the leaders and active participants in terrorist networks to identified through constant surveillance and intelligence, and I want terrorists to be attacked relentlessly where they live, so that they have to hide in caves while people all over the world who renounce their goals get to lead civilized, peaceful lives in the Twenty-First Century.
I think the United States has been chastened by some of the results of its well documented policies from the 1950s and 1960s of assassinating foreign leaders with which it disagreed. These days the democratic, developed countries agree to win influence in the world mostly through persuasion and demonstration of the benefits of freedom and rule of law and free trade. I think now the United States is much more interested in information openness as a means to make sure that countries all around the world trade peacefully rather than waging war one one another, and I think that is the only long-term way to defeat terrorist networks. The current armed warfare strategy of drone attacks on specific terrorist leaders rather than mass bombing attacks on cities (as in World War II) is a step forward in war-fighting effectiveness and an improvement in reducing civilian casualties.
The reactionary movements that use terrorism to stop progress must be destroyed. What really seems to work for this is active intelligence gathering aimed at the terrorist movements themselves. Comments in previous threads have said that Israel succeeds in doing that for the most part. Israel also led the world in making airliner cockpits were secure from hijackers entering them. Certainly we should make sure not to harass citizens or visitors who happen to have the wrong name or the wrong pattern of physical appearance, but identify threats on the basis of more relevant information. (My own children look very central Asian, and when my oldest son grows out his black beard he could readily pass for a terrorist by mere appearance.) Taliban delenda est. Al Qaeda delenda est.
Really good post - just a note from myself - I've had to remove my shoes for screening many times while flying out from my native country(Poland) and that wasn't even to the US,but to other EU countries. So this is not something that only TSA does.
I have, including on flights inside EU. What shoes do you have?
(Really, this has an impact - many shoes contain some metal reinforcements that beep at the detector.)
(I've also been asked to take off the shoes for screening, inside EU, without any detector issues - I suppose the security people have to take in a quota of white middle-aged and old men and women, in order to avoid accusations of racial, age and gender profiling.)
I've flown to over 50 countries and the rules are the same everywhere.
The whole TSA uproar is actually more of a reflection of the anti-government, libertarian, personal rights above community rights attitude that uniquely exists within many Americans.
in view of other countries not having the same screening procedure for airline passengers - the procedure is essentially similar anywhere I've flown (not all of the world, but US, Europe and some Far East). Of course this is to some extent a necessary outcome of U.S. regulations (as any flight which has people and luggage transferring to U.S. bound flights needs to take care of this to comply) but it is impacting far more people and geographical area than just U.S. And more global standards do make sense here.
co-religionists of some of those terrorists consider it extremely degrading to be bare-footed in certain situations deemed to be "holy" situations - I think you have got this backwards. It is actually a custom for Muslims to take off shoes in holy places and when praying. Likewise, when you go to a mosque, or the home of a Muslim, take off your shoes or at least offer to do so.
Finally, I'd say it's not going to be possible to "destroy" reactionary movements like the Taliban. You can kill some people, and some killing may be necessary, but a total victory in that kind of war would only be possible through such a force on ground for such a long time that it isn't feasible. It's only feasible to convert them to believing that more tolerance of different religions gives them a better and more honorable life.
"Anyone boarding an aircraft should feel maybe only a teeny tiny bit safer than if there were no TSA at all."
I feel less safe. Same risk of death, near 100% chance my child is going feel uncomfortable during some process, wonder why it happened, wonder why I let it happen and I'll have no explanation other than "If you wanna go to Legoland, this is what you gotta deal with."
Perhaps 'feeling a tiny bit safer' is the whole point. Maybe the intended product of 'security theater' is an emotional response by the flying public - sort of a marketing campaign that generates a increased sense of confidence and well being for air travelers.
Many people still seriously believe that Medicare would be more efficient in the hands of private profit-seeking companies, so I'm not surprised at all about this.
If the only change would be privatization, of course it won't work. If the change would be to let the airlines design proper security measures and implement them using professionals - then it might work.
Its a perfect show, on could say. In its core, its like "hey, Americans are scared because of some idiot put a bomb in his shoe [1], lets take advantage and use their tax-dollar money to make them _feel_ safer. They won't refuse because they are scared and when you scare, most seem to submit. But its just a show. Twice on occasion I have seen TSA agents coming back from lunch and passing security just by flashing badge even if the scanner went off. Well, we have internal affair departments in cia, fbi, police for a good reason. If there is remotely a chance (there is) one of those good TSA guys turn bad, then we are all screwed.
[1] Let's not speculate whether he was CIA operative or at least drugged idiot who submitted.
It gets better. My summer employer used to do IT for the local airport. After passing background checks, most of the staff were issued badges/prox cards that let them pass through into a restricted area, walk under the checkpoint, and reemerge in the terminal.
TSA is proposing new rules that allow small knives, ski poles, hockey sticks, lacrosse sticks and pool cues aboard in carry-on luggage. They call this a risk-based approach...
But still they hound you to turn off your ipad on takeoff and landing. If the government is using a risk-based approach, this would be the most useful rule to change.
I never believed official statements on 9/11. No body explained how a skyscraper fell on its footprint even though there was no attack on the building. I'm talking about WTC7. Then they said they had to take down that building. Correct me if I'm wrong but it takes weeks to prepare for such demolition. You can't decide in one day and plant explosive and all these happen while you are dealing with a major crisis like 2 commercial airliners hitting towers.
All this has been a farce. They wanted to paralyze people scaring with stories. TSA is just another tool to do that.
Edit after down votes: What this TSA guys says is correct, it is very difficult to stop any seriously thought security breach. The reason behind existence of TSA as we know it is not what we expect it to do. It is not designed in sprit to do that. That is the reason it renders itself ineffective.
Reply to all down voters. Are you scared to write a reply to what I said? Clicking is easier, and following herd is easier than asking questions with an open mind. Just because you're reading HN does not make you smarter.
Independent of the potential truth of your comments, they're entirely off-topic, which is why there's downvoting. And complaining like that won't help you, I' afraid. Being wrong doesn't necessarily get downvotes. contentless or off-topic posts generally do! But then I'm fairly new here, so I stand correctable. My advice: Start a WTC thread with a good link if you think it's really important!
I think I did not make myself clear. Fair enough. What I am saying that TSA is not capable of doing the job it is expected to do (due to bad hires or whatever other sloppy execution) because there is not much need for that. This is known by their designers and originators (this is the point I am trying to make), and it is just functioning at the very basic level and most of the time in an irritating way (patting down toddlers, etc.). What happened on 9/11 is known by those circles that is why TSA is not taken seriously.
ps. I do not care about down votes. I care about people giving serious thought about what others might have to say. Down voting for me is kind of censorship act. I believe up voting weeds out (pushes bottom) bad comments anyway.
I do not think I am still making myself clear. But it is good that this is happening, so I improve.
If you know where the attack has really come from you do not really invest serious resources on something marginally effective and relative. TSA is that, irrelevant, however it is a tool to instigate and keep alive terrorization. I was trying to explain why TSA is ineffective at the core for the purpose we think it and what the TSA guy could only be correct.
As a side note, I do not think HN is a relevant place to post this article we are commenting on anyway, and in general it is off topic. I started to hang around on HN almost from its first days for the sole purpose of reading about techies and startups.
What's the motive for destroying building 7 when the much larger twin towers had already collapsed? The marginal impact of destroying a smaller building seems completely insignificant. Most people aren't even aware of those smaller buildings that were destroyed.
All I know and say is from the videos I watched, things I read and common sense. I read that WTC7 had offices of the NYC and they were kind of control and observation room of the city. So they say it was part of the evidence cover up.
When we have a political discussion about any other government agency, there are usually some kind of stats we can judge our expenditures against. Need more police? Maybe so. What's the crime rate look like. Need increased defense spending? I don't know. What's the defense spend of other countries. And so on. [Insert long discussion here about whether such metrics are useful or just BS, but the point is that there are numbers, sorta]
With the TSA, we're protecting them from something not happening that's only ever happened once in our history. If we spend 100 Billion over the next ten years and there are no attacks, was that money well spent? Who knows? Maybe we should spend twice that, or half that.
I'm not even going to go into the civil liberties problem. From a funding discussion alone, there's simply no way to know if we have "not enough", "just right", or "too much"
And so we end up with this kabuki theater, where we pay untrained people to go through the motions of looking like they might be doing something useful.
Politicians have a tendency to create issues that only have one side to them. So we have "Mothers Against Drunk Drivers" -- anybody know people in favor of drunk drivers? Or people in favor of "clean water" -- is there a political group actively lobbying for dirty water? We create these edge cases where the way the issues are framed, reasonable discussion becomes impossible. This is the case with the TSA.
The TSA needs to be abolished. Immediately.