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I once made the mistake of expressing this opinion (i.e., that airport security is pure theatre, completely irrelevant, and isn't making anyone safer) on a shut

I once made the mistake of expressing this opinion (i.e., that airport security is pure theatre, completely irrelevant, and isn't making anyone safer) on a shuttle for a high-tech software company. I guess I kind of assumed that software engineers would be natural skeptics, and predominantly liberal to boot. Well, nope, that wasn't a safe assumption at all. I had 2-3 people agree with me enthusiastically, 4-5 argue passionately about how the terrorists would win if we let up, and the rest of the bus just stared like me like I just transmogrified into Osama himself for daring to suggest such a thing. So yeah, if the a supposedly scientific, data-driven, skeptical population broke down like that, I'm not surprised that this sort of thing is happening without much resistance. And it's for this reason I hold nearly no hope that any of these abuses will ever be curbed. The only question I really want answered is: when did America turn from being such a badass, never running away from a fight, to such cowards, willing to do anything, give up anything, for one iota of perceived safety? This was in 2009 FWIW...

tptacek 15y ago
I want to move to your dimension. In my dimension, the bad-ass America of yore imprisoned the entire Japanese population of the west coast during WWII. Compared to HUAC, the TSA is positively rational. It is not remotely hard to see why we have the TSA and it has nothing to do with cowardice; it has to do with rational actors and their incentives. To wit: there is no incentive whatsoever for anyone in authority to dial back airport security. It's the same reason you have to "turn" "off" your iPod at takeoff and landing. This isn't some scary new trend. Our whole system of government is designed with the assumption that stuff like this is going to happen. The Constitution isn't an electric fence. It is the constraints provided to a stochastic and inefficient algorithm to get it to eventually converge on an answer John Locke might have approved. 10 years is the blink of an eye in historical terms. Give it another few decades. Meanwhile, it is simply people's job to hypothesize about "harmlessly" "scanning" mass transit passengers. I guess it's good that we freak out about it, to quash it earlier in the process than later. But nationwide deployment of strip search scanners at train stations isn't imminent.

tptacek 15y ago

I want to move to your dimension. In my dimension, the bad-ass America of yore imprisoned the entire Japanese population of the west coast during WWII. Compared to HUAC, the TSA is positively rational. It is not remotely hard to see why we have the TSA and it has nothing to do with cowardice; it has to do with rational actors and their incentives. To wit: there is no incentive whatsoever for anyone in authority to dial back airport security. It's the same reason you have to "turn" "off" your iPod at takeoff and landing. This isn't some scary new trend. Our whole system of government is designed with the assumption that stuff like this is going to happen. The Constitution isn't an electric fence. It is the constraints provided to a stochastic and inefficient algorithm to get it to eventually converge on an answer John Locke might have approved. 10 years is the blink of an eye in historical terms. Give it another few decades. Meanwhile, it is simply people's job to hypothesize about "harmlessly" "scanning" mass transit passengers. I guess it's good that we freak out about it, to quash it earlier in the process than later. But nationwide deployment of strip search scanners at train stations isn't imminent.