7 ms·

Let's close down the TSA instead. Use intelligent profiling and random searches instead of universal scanning. Let anyone go to the gates, not just ticket holde

Let's close down the TSA instead. Use intelligent profiling and random searches instead of universal scanning. Let anyone go to the gates, not just ticket holders. Allow liquids, yogurt containers, etc. Allow knives. Allow people to "congregate" near the front lavatory. Try it for one year and I can almost guarantee, flights will be every bit as secure. Security theatre is not security.

marcus_holmes 10y ago
has the TSA stopped a single credible plot since it started doing all this theatre?
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  They boast of all the knives and guns they've confiscated. I wonder though, whether we'd not be more secure if everyone carried guns on board. A hijacker wouldn't stand a chance. Of course, there might also be some bloody air rage incidents as well. But at the same time, maybe people would act more civil if everyone around them is packing, or at least the flight attendants....
  - jimcsharp 10y ago
    Maybe this is the movies I've watched, but isn't firing a gun structurally dangerous to the airplane?
    - deelowe 10y ago
      Considering one plane flew and successfully landed with half the top missing, I think movies might exaggerate the risk a bit. Shocking, I know...
      - ceejayoz 10y ago
        The plane you're referencing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243 And no, folks, "half the top missing" isn't hyperbole.
    - frostburg 10y ago
      Not structurally, but you might hit something important.
      - diabeetusman 10y ago
        I can't imagine there's anything "important" enough that would bring down the whole plane with one shot. I mean, sure you might kill a person or two, but pretty much every system is double- or triple-redundant, even the pilot(s).
      - dajohnson89 10y ago
        What about the issue of depressurizing the cabin?
        zyxley 10y ago
        That's not a structural issue.
    - headShrinker 10y ago
      Not to get too chatty but, myth busters had an episode on plane cabin decompression. The gun didn't have much effect. Granted, the plane wasn't moving https://youtu.be/Fi1_1l7M8FA https://youtu.be/Fi1_1l7M8FA Edit: better link
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    Oh, a shoot out by multiple panicked passengers on a packed, pressurised plane. Sure, real safe. Not to mention it only takes one dimwit to not store his gun safely and accidentally fire it and someone (or everyone) dies. I've never understood this argument that if everyone has guns then everyone is safer.
    - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
      > Oh, a shoot out by multiple panicked passengers on a packed, pressurised plane. Sure, real safeYou You actually used to be able to travel with firearms on planes (edit: as carry-on). And the above never occurred afaik.
      - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        You still can, in checked luggage.
      - chris_wot 10y ago
        So if it never occurred, then what was the point of carrying the guns?
        blisterpeanuts 10y ago
        Same reason as carrying your other personal possessions--to get them from point A to point B.
        chris_wot 10y ago
        Except the OP posited we'd all be safer if everyone carried guns on a plane. If it was to merely transport them and they aren't used, I'm just unclear how it makes anyone more or less safer?
  - Kristine1975 10y ago
    >But at the same time, maybe people would act more civil if everyone around them is packing I think it's more likely someone would start shooting the passenger next to them for "taking too much space."
    - aft42 10y ago
      Or being a scary looking academic type: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11648758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11648758 - http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/16/southwest-airlines-man-removed-flight-arabic http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/16/southwest-air...
  - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
    Yes, the obvious takeaway from all those knives and guns? For decades folks have been bringing all that stuff on airplanes and there never was a 9-11. Never was an inflight shooting as far as I know. By reporting this stuff they're actually making the case of how totally useless they are -- and how pointless and misguided the "find the weapon" school of security theater is.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      It seems it is merely incredibly rare. This guy shot the pilots: http://murderpedia.org/male.B/b/burke-david.htm http://murderpedia.org/male.B/b/burke-david.htm This guy stabbed one pilot to death before he was subdued: http://murderpedia.org/male.N/n/nishizawa-yuji.htm http://murderpedia.org/male.N/n/nishizawa-yuji.htm The stabbing occurred after he reported the security flaw he used to get the knife on board the plane. Previously checked baggage could be picked up after passing through security for another flight. He was able to simply take the knife out of a bag he had checked on a previous flight.
      - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
        There was also a guy that planted a bomb in order to kill his wife. I'm guessing the number of weapons on U.S. planes that get by security run into the thousands every year. And before all the checks, probably the tens or hundreds of thousands per year. Looks extremely rare. I mean really, really extremely rare. Handful of examples and roughly 9 million U.S. airline flights last year[1] It'd be interesting to run some comparative statistics. I bet the odds show that you're safer with a plane full of gun owners, having their guns in holsters and loaded, than you are spending the same amount of time in each of those gun owners' homes. [1] http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/acts http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/acts
  - marcus_holmes 10y ago
    I think we can work this out. Everyone in the USA has the right to bear arms, and a lot of them do. Result: huge murder rate. Everyone in the rest of the world does not have the right to carry guns around the place. Result: much smaller murder rate. I think we can infer that if everyone could take guns on planes then we'd have more people shooting guns on planes and hence more death on planes. Going from that to stopping people from carrying pocket knives on planes is the bit that I think is suspect logic.
    - zeveb 10y ago
      > Everyone in the USA has the right to bear arms, and a lot of them do. Result: huge murder rate. The rate of murders committed by folks legally carrying guns is low; the rate of murders committed by Americans using weapons other than firearms is high. It's almost as though Americans in general are more violent than people in many other parts of the world.
      - dsfyu404ed 10y ago
        murders committed per legally owned firearm vs murders committed by illegally owned firearm, and probably the same for legal/illegal owners is another stat you should take into account...
      - marcus_holmes 10y ago
        I had to re-read that twice before I got the meaning... I was thinking "hang on, so everyone carries guns but knife murders are up? what?" but what I think you're saying is that law-abiding people don't shoot people. Well, duh... There's this really straightforward clear correlation between number of guns and amount of gun violence. Everyone else in the world gets this. Americans don't for some reason. I'm always curious why Americans don't get this. Y'all seem perfectly intelligent and reasonable otherwise.
        zeveb 10y ago
        > what I think you're saying is that law-abiding people don't shoot people. Well, duh... No, OP complains that in the U.S. 'everyone' can carry firearms legally (not actually true: felons, wife-beaters, citizens of New Jersey & similar folks are prohibited from carrying firearms) and thus we have a high murder rate. I pointed out that the issue is not the legal right, since the folks committing the murders are not, for the most part, legally armed. > I'm always curious why Americans don't get this. There's this really straightforward clear correlation between arms-bearing and liberty (viz.: an unarmed man is fundamentally not free). Americans seem to get this; many other folks don't for some reason. I'm always curious why not.
  - GVIrish 10y ago
    I'm all for gun rights but allowing firearms on airplanes would be a disaster. Just to start with, if you allow firearms a group of hijackers could ostensibly open fire on the cockpit and kill the pilots before any other passenger could neutralize them. You'd be depending on more passengers having guns than hijackers, which would be completely down to luck. Secondly, you'd have a bunch of incidents of idiots pulling their gun when they shouldn't have, which would lead to avoidable injuries, deaths, panic, etc. TSA should screen for firearms with metal detectors and xray machines, its just all of the removing the shoes, body scans, laptop scans, banning liquids, and understaffing that are a problem.
- coldpie 10y ago
  No.
- DanBC 10y ago
  They stop about 10 handguns a week. They don't say, and it's hard to know, how many guns they don't stop. I think none of those gun owners had plans to use the gun at an airport or on a flight. There's small amounts of evidence that "terrorists" moved to different approaches - the Inkjet cargo bombs, for example.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - ceejayoz 10y ago
    > They don't say, and it's hard to know, how many guns they don't stop. 95%. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851 http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-u...
    - DanBC 10y ago
      For fucks sake, that link talks only about internal testing, which tells you nothing about the actual failure rate of real world people smuggling guns onto aircraft.
      - drdeca 10y ago
        I would think that it would be something one could take into account when coming up with an estimate.
      - ceejayoz 10y ago
        I'd be very interested to know why you think that makes a difference. These tests were run during normal checkpoint operation, with normal screeners. Even if they used some internal knowledge, everyone here should know the adages about security through obscurity. TSA checkpoints are clearly enormously vulnerable if they can get through 95% of the time.
- Angostura 10y ago
  How would we know? How would we know how many actions haven't happened due to the perps being dissuaded by the security measures?
  - marcus_holmes 10y ago
    Good point. How do we prove negatives in other areas? I guess we could experiment. Suspend checks and see how many planes get blown up. If it's none, then de-fund the TSA. If it's more than none then sack whoever thought this stupid idea up.
realusername 10y ago
Can we also bring water bottles ? Water bottles do NOT explode, even by throwing them really hard on the ground, I'm pretty positive about that.
- smileysteve 10y ago
  You forgot to add dry ice. Then they explode when they hit the ground.
ivraatiems 10y ago
I agree with you 100% on security theater, but you have to be careful with "intelligent profiling." Remember that if it involves singling somebody out by race, gender, religion, etc., it's almost certainly unconstitutional in the US.
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  by intelligent profiling, I mean more the way the Israelis do it: psychological profiling, looking for telltale signs of nervousness/guilt etc., ranking people by profession/origin/appearance, and randomly singling people out for more extensive scrutiny (but not so random as to nab the 80-year-old grandmother in a wheelchair).
  - schoen 10y ago
    Israeli airport profiling also uses religious and ethnic or national origin. When I've heard people endorse it as a good model for the U.S. in the past, I thought they were often saying they wished U.S. airport screening would use those things.
  - athenot 10y ago
    But that kind of profiling involves human judgement in a qualitative way, which is not very popular in the US. Instead, we prefer to use metrics, which we can mesure, aggregate and compile in neat reports. But metrics are a projection of a multidimensional situation onto a few dimensions, and hoping we picked the correct projection. I'm all for collecting stats but I wish that was just a tool used in addition to a broader qualitative approach.
  - ivraatiems 10y ago
    > ranking people by profession/origin/appearance So a white computer programmer from Seattle might be "safer" than a brown janitor from Dearborn? And right there is your discrimination lawsuit. No government agency wants to expose themselves to that kind of challenge, even if they might win.
Thriptic 10y ago
Hell, just roll things back to how they were before 9/11. I think it makes sense to have metal detectors, but we don't need to be taking clothes off or going through x-ray machines

marcus_holmes 10y ago

has the TSA stopped a single credible plot since it started doing all this theatre?

blisterpeanuts 10y ago
They boast of all the knives and guns they've confiscated. I wonder though, whether we'd not be more secure if everyone carried guns on board. A hijacker wouldn't stand a chance. Of course, there might also be some bloody air rage incidents as well. But at the same time, maybe people would act more civil if everyone around them is packing, or at least the flight attendants....
- jimcsharp 10y ago
  Maybe this is the movies I've watched, but isn't firing a gun structurally dangerous to the airplane?
  - deelowe 10y ago
    Considering one plane flew and successfully landed with half the top missing, I think movies might exaggerate the risk a bit. Shocking, I know...
    - ceejayoz 10y ago
      The plane you're referencing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243 And no, folks, "half the top missing" isn't hyperbole.
  - frostburg 10y ago
    Not structurally, but you might hit something important.
    - diabeetusman 10y ago
      I can't imagine there's anything "important" enough that would bring down the whole plane with one shot. I mean, sure you might kill a person or two, but pretty much every system is double- or triple-redundant, even the pilot(s).
    - dajohnson89 10y ago
      What about the issue of depressurizing the cabin?
      - zyxley 10y ago
        That's not a structural issue.
  - headShrinker 10y ago
    Not to get too chatty but, myth busters had an episode on plane cabin decompression. The gun didn't have much effect. Granted, the plane wasn't moving https://youtu.be/Fi1_1l7M8FA https://youtu.be/Fi1_1l7M8FA Edit: better link
- chris_wot 10y ago
  Oh, a shoot out by multiple panicked passengers on a packed, pressurised plane. Sure, real safe. Not to mention it only takes one dimwit to not store his gun safely and accidentally fire it and someone (or everyone) dies. I've never understood this argument that if everyone has guns then everyone is safer.
  - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    > Oh, a shoot out by multiple panicked passengers on a packed, pressurised plane. Sure, real safeYou You actually used to be able to travel with firearms on planes (edit: as carry-on). And the above never occurred afaik.
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      You still can, in checked luggage.
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      So if it never occurred, then what was the point of carrying the guns?
      - blisterpeanuts 10y ago
        Same reason as carrying your other personal possessions--to get them from point A to point B.
        chris_wot 10y ago
        Except the OP posited we'd all be safer if everyone carried guns on a plane. If it was to merely transport them and they aren't used, I'm just unclear how it makes anyone more or less safer?
- Kristine1975 10y ago
  >But at the same time, maybe people would act more civil if everyone around them is packing I think it's more likely someone would start shooting the passenger next to them for "taking too much space."
  - aft42 10y ago
    Or being a scary looking academic type: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11648758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11648758 - http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/16/southwest-airlines-man-removed-flight-arabic http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/16/southwest-air...
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  Yes, the obvious takeaway from all those knives and guns? For decades folks have been bringing all that stuff on airplanes and there never was a 9-11. Never was an inflight shooting as far as I know. By reporting this stuff they're actually making the case of how totally useless they are -- and how pointless and misguided the "find the weapon" school of security theater is.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    It seems it is merely incredibly rare. This guy shot the pilots: http://murderpedia.org/male.B/b/burke-david.htm http://murderpedia.org/male.B/b/burke-david.htm This guy stabbed one pilot to death before he was subdued: http://murderpedia.org/male.N/n/nishizawa-yuji.htm http://murderpedia.org/male.N/n/nishizawa-yuji.htm The stabbing occurred after he reported the security flaw he used to get the knife on board the plane. Previously checked baggage could be picked up after passing through security for another flight. He was able to simply take the knife out of a bag he had checked on a previous flight.
    - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
      There was also a guy that planted a bomb in order to kill his wife. I'm guessing the number of weapons on U.S. planes that get by security run into the thousands every year. And before all the checks, probably the tens or hundreds of thousands per year. Looks extremely rare. I mean really, really extremely rare. Handful of examples and roughly 9 million U.S. airline flights last year[1] It'd be interesting to run some comparative statistics. I bet the odds show that you're safer with a plane full of gun owners, having their guns in holsters and loaded, than you are spending the same amount of time in each of those gun owners' homes. [1] http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/acts http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/acts
- marcus_holmes 10y ago
  I think we can work this out. Everyone in the USA has the right to bear arms, and a lot of them do. Result: huge murder rate. Everyone in the rest of the world does not have the right to carry guns around the place. Result: much smaller murder rate. I think we can infer that if everyone could take guns on planes then we'd have more people shooting guns on planes and hence more death on planes. Going from that to stopping people from carrying pocket knives on planes is the bit that I think is suspect logic.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    > Everyone in the USA has the right to bear arms, and a lot of them do. Result: huge murder rate. The rate of murders committed by folks legally carrying guns is low; the rate of murders committed by Americans using weapons other than firearms is high. It's almost as though Americans in general are more violent than people in many other parts of the world.
    - dsfyu404ed 10y ago
      murders committed per legally owned firearm vs murders committed by illegally owned firearm, and probably the same for legal/illegal owners is another stat you should take into account...
    - marcus_holmes 10y ago
      I had to re-read that twice before I got the meaning... I was thinking "hang on, so everyone carries guns but knife murders are up? what?" but what I think you're saying is that law-abiding people don't shoot people. Well, duh... There's this really straightforward clear correlation between number of guns and amount of gun violence. Everyone else in the world gets this. Americans don't for some reason. I'm always curious why Americans don't get this. Y'all seem perfectly intelligent and reasonable otherwise.
      - zeveb 10y ago
        > what I think you're saying is that law-abiding people don't shoot people. Well, duh... No, OP complains that in the U.S. 'everyone' can carry firearms legally (not actually true: felons, wife-beaters, citizens of New Jersey & similar folks are prohibited from carrying firearms) and thus we have a high murder rate. I pointed out that the issue is not the legal right, since the folks committing the murders are not, for the most part, legally armed. > I'm always curious why Americans don't get this. There's this really straightforward clear correlation between arms-bearing and liberty (viz.: an unarmed man is fundamentally not free). Americans seem to get this; many other folks don't for some reason. I'm always curious why not.
- GVIrish 10y ago
  I'm all for gun rights but allowing firearms on airplanes would be a disaster. Just to start with, if you allow firearms a group of hijackers could ostensibly open fire on the cockpit and kill the pilots before any other passenger could neutralize them. You'd be depending on more passengers having guns than hijackers, which would be completely down to luck. Secondly, you'd have a bunch of incidents of idiots pulling their gun when they shouldn't have, which would lead to avoidable injuries, deaths, panic, etc. TSA should screen for firearms with metal detectors and xray machines, its just all of the removing the shoes, body scans, laptop scans, banning liquids, and understaffing that are a problem.
coldpie 10y ago
No.
DanBC 10y ago
They stop about 10 handguns a week. They don't say, and it's hard to know, how many guns they don't stop. I think none of those gun owners had plans to use the gun at an airport or on a flight. There's small amounts of evidence that "terrorists" moved to different approaches - the Inkjet cargo bombs, for example.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ceejayoz 10y ago
  > They don't say, and it's hard to know, how many guns they don't stop. 95%. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851 http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-u...
  - DanBC 10y ago
    For fucks sake, that link talks only about internal testing, which tells you nothing about the actual failure rate of real world people smuggling guns onto aircraft.
    - drdeca 10y ago
      I would think that it would be something one could take into account when coming up with an estimate.
    - ceejayoz 10y ago
      I'd be very interested to know why you think that makes a difference. These tests were run during normal checkpoint operation, with normal screeners. Even if they used some internal knowledge, everyone here should know the adages about security through obscurity. TSA checkpoints are clearly enormously vulnerable if they can get through 95% of the time.
Angostura 10y ago
How would we know? How would we know how many actions haven't happened due to the perps being dissuaded by the security measures?
- marcus_holmes 10y ago
  Good point. How do we prove negatives in other areas? I guess we could experiment. Suspend checks and see how many planes get blown up. If it's none, then de-fund the TSA. If it's more than none then sack whoever thought this stupid idea up.

realusername 10y ago

Can we also bring water bottles ? Water bottles do NOT explode, even by throwing them really hard on the ground, I'm pretty positive about that.

smileysteve 10y ago
You forgot to add dry ice. Then they explode when they hit the ground.

ivraatiems 10y ago

I agree with you 100% on security theater, but you have to be careful with "intelligent profiling." Remember that if it involves singling somebody out by race, gender, religion, etc., it's almost certainly unconstitutional in the US.

blisterpeanuts 10y ago
by intelligent profiling, I mean more the way the Israelis do it: psychological profiling, looking for telltale signs of nervousness/guilt etc., ranking people by profession/origin/appearance, and randomly singling people out for more extensive scrutiny (but not so random as to nab the 80-year-old grandmother in a wheelchair).
- schoen 10y ago
  Israeli airport profiling also uses religious and ethnic or national origin. When I've heard people endorse it as a good model for the U.S. in the past, I thought they were often saying they wished U.S. airport screening would use those things.
- athenot 10y ago
  But that kind of profiling involves human judgement in a qualitative way, which is not very popular in the US. Instead, we prefer to use metrics, which we can mesure, aggregate and compile in neat reports. But metrics are a projection of a multidimensional situation onto a few dimensions, and hoping we picked the correct projection. I'm all for collecting stats but I wish that was just a tool used in addition to a broader qualitative approach.
- ivraatiems 10y ago
  > ranking people by profession/origin/appearance So a white computer programmer from Seattle might be "safer" than a brown janitor from Dearborn? And right there is your discrimination lawsuit. No government agency wants to expose themselves to that kind of challenge, even if they might win.

Thriptic 10y ago

Hell, just roll things back to how they were before 9/11. I think it makes sense to have metal detectors, but we don't need to be taking clothes off or going through x-ray machines