19 ms·

TSA: Fail

452 points by vamsee 15y ago

dsr_ 15y ago
TL;DR: Bruce Schneier is still right.
- willvarfar 15y ago
  Its natural to read your comment as though the article disagrees with Bruce and you think the article is wrong and Bruce is right. We all know that the article is completely in line with Bruce and he even blogged it: www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/02/fbi_special_age.html Just clearing that up ;)
  - sukuriant 15y ago
    Erm... I honestly didn't read that from what he said... I thought the article was in agreement with Bruce. Where would someone get the opposite idea?
    - repsilat 15y ago
      It's in the interpretation of the "TL;DR". GGP could be read as, "Don't bother with TFA, listen to Bruce." For the record, I interpreted it the same way you did.
tnuc 15y ago
I disagree, he missed a vital point. TSA: Success The worlds most expensive security theater. Making you feel safer for your troubles.
- mahyarm 15y ago
  Before the TSA, didn't you have to wait in a similar luggage screening line anyway? Other than the addition of the backscatter machine, checking your id before you enter the line and some other procedural changes what is different?
  - saryant 15y ago
    Care to count the billions spent on those "differences"?
  - daeken 15y ago
    Take off your shoes, get rid of all liquids (unless they're in a plastic bag, of course -- those are always safe), look up at the anxiety detection cameras, and enjoy flying in Complete Safety (R) (TM).
  - donw 15y ago
    Having to dig my laptop and iPad out and put them in a separate bin than the rest of my things. Not being able to bring an expensive bottle of wine on the plane.
- mcantelon 15y ago
  >The worlds most expensive security theater. Making you feel safer for your troubles. And humiliating you so you're more likely to accept whatever the federal government doles out in the future. Psychological conditioning.
  - epochwolf 15y ago
    Most of school is psychological conditioning. This would be a wonderful conspiracy theory if the government was a bit more efficient about it. :)
- epochwolf 15y ago
  US Citizen here. I don't feel any safer. I feel like I'm a cow in a herd of cattle. Every time I see the security line I think about how much more effective detonating a bomb in the security line would be compared to crashing a plane. At an airport like Altanta International, there are more people in the line than would be on a fully loaded 474. I'm far more afraid to stand in the line for screening than sitting in a plane. All it takes is one terrorist to get this bright idea in their head and then I lose more of my rights to the next level of security theater. :(
- Natsu 15y ago
  The TSA actually makes me feel less safe, enough that I avoid flying if at all possible. It's like we're trying to replicate the Stanford Prison Experiment at scale. I wish they would focus on things that keep us safe and dispense with the security theater. They should listen to his recommendations. He's saying nothing new here. Every other security expert is saying much the same thing, but is still being ignored.
- smsm42 15y ago
  I'm not feeling safe. When I'm talking to Israeli security who actually try to evaluate who I am and if I'm dangerous, I feel safer. When I meet TSA agent that grabs my ass because his instructions says he has to do that to everybody, I don't feel safer. I feel I just participated in idiotic spectacle. I also get reminded that as a taxpayer I am paying a capable healthy person to spend his day touching other people's asses because instructions say so, when he could actually be earning a honest living instead doing something productive. Feeling safer is never even nearly there.
deleted 15y ago
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verelo 15y ago
As someone who travels regularly and is not an American, I've had nothing but frustrations generated by the "TSA". Initially it caused me to unfairly assume all Americans are like TSA agents (i know this isn't true, but i guess its just my human bias). A few things that frustrate me: - They are not friendly, have a real attitude problem and treat you as if you are guilty before proven innocent. You are the face of the country, the first impression every traveler gets. When i say "how are you doing?" as i approach, its what i say to everyone. Have the common decency to say "Yeah i'm ok" or "Not so great" rather than just looking at me like i'm an idiot. - The TSA doesn't make it clear that they are just specific to the USA. When boarding planes in another country you hear about the "TSA" and you're like "who the hell is this International body that rules transport?". They are private agents of the US, no different to the guards that any other country has. This should be explicitly clear, because they act like gods. - They seriously invade my privacy and treat me as if i have no rights just because im from somewhere else. Nothing says "Welcome to the USA" like having your body photograph, fingerprints taken (the finger printing seriously bothers me...i cant explain why because i dont know why, but it seriously bothers me is all i can say) and some border guard with an attitude problem treating you like you've turned up to take all the jobs. So much freedom, give me a break... Moving all invasions of privacy aside, forgetting about how effective or ineffective the TSA is...i just hate the way they treat people. They have a reputation to up hold, they are everyone's first impression of the US and...given the USA's global reputation today, they could really do with some advice from Rackspace on how to deal with customers. EDIT: Fixing my spelling of "planes" :-(
- danilocampos 15y ago
  If you think all of that is bad, imagine how it feels getting the exact same treatment as someone who helps fund the salaries of these assholes. For you, it's simple hostility. For Americans, it's a simple betrayal by our government.
  - verelo 15y ago
    Haha dont stress, i'm equally upset when i review the taxes and fees on my plane ticket...i too am funding the fun times!
tptacek 15y ago
It's funny to try to predict what's going to spark the inevitable huge flame war on a thread like this, given that there isn't a soul on HN that thinks the TSA is a good thing. (I didn't flag this article; it's pretty great.)
- jbooth 15y ago
  DON'T YOU DARE SAY THAT ABOUT RON PAUL
  - jbooth 15y ago
    So it turns out that even though the only display up to -4, it keeps going down from there on the karma score. Good to know.
Matt_Mickiewicz 15y ago
But won't somebody please think of the children!
- Darkstar 15y ago
  They already did. That's why they started patting them down.
bostond 15y ago
"I have a unique position from which to make these statements. For 25 years, as many of readers know, I was an FBI Special Agent..." I couldn't believe he didn't finish the last paragraph of his background with "I am the most interesting man in the world."
- mitchellhislop 15y ago
  After reading the same paragraph, I think he is the type we need leading the TSA
ot 15y ago
I don't really buy the argument "TSA has never [...] foiled a terrorist plot or stopped an attack on an airliner.": it could be argued that the TSA measures act as an effective deterrent. A stronger argument could be to show that in none of the countries that do not adopt TSA-like measures there have been any terrorist attempts, let alone successful. How easy would it be to board in, say, Mexico or Canada, and hijack the flight to the US? EDIT: looking at the comments (and the downvotes) I have the feeling that I wasn't clear. I agree with the article pretty much on everything, I'm just trying to say that where there are no body scanners deployed, for example in Europe, there have been no terrorist attacks, and I think that this is a stronger argument than "the TSA hasn't prevented any attack".
- tikhonj 15y ago
  Yes, it could be argued. But I've never seen it argued with convincing data, and for something so expensive and invasive, convincing data is the least I expect.
- jasonkolb 15y ago
  As he said in the article, if they HAD stopped someone, that someone would have been charged with a crime. Where are the charges?
  - twoodfin 15y ago
    That's a fairly naive argument. My local bank discourages potential robbers with armed guards, alarms, and a locked vault. Just because they've never charged anyone with bank robbery doesn't mean those measures didn't prevent potential robbers from deciding to become actual robbers. It's really not any better than the argument that of course the TSA keeps away terrorists and tigers because there haven't been any hijackings or tiger maulings on airplanes since they took over.
    - swombat 15y ago
      Let me tell you about this new product of mine. It's called Rhinoceros powder, and it does - you guessed it! It scares away Rhinos. As long as you spread Rhino powder everywhere, you will not be attacked by a Rhino. It works particularly well in urban areas. It clearly works, too! I've been using it for decades, as have many of my customers, and wouldn't you know it! None of them have ever been attacked by a Rhino. $60b a pack.
afterburner 15y ago
"I am stunned, quite frankly, that the same people who fought against the Patriot Act because it was invasive and violated privacy rights have not howled about this invasion of personal privacy rights." Say what? I see the same people railing against both, all the time.
- glesica 15y ago
  I think he's referring to politicians more than private citizens. A portion of the Democratic party, after voting for the PATRIOT Act, spent the last 4-6 years of Bush's time in office speaking out against it. But TSA has generally maintained strong support. I'm not 100% sure that this is all true, but it is my own impression and, I suspect, the author's as well.
- smsm42 15y ago
  Definitely not all of them. A lot of left politicians raised a living hell about Patriot Act while Bush was in power, but shut up and silently agreed with its extensions and never raised their voice agains TSA and such once Obama came to power. Some were more principled, but I definitely not seeing the same fuss in the same places about it as there was when the people who are now in power were in opposition.
joelmichael 15y ago
Does he really think potential terrorists or criminals are going to hijack a plane using toothbrushes or popsicle sticks? The purpose of the TSA is to screen all passengers for real threats like guns, blades, and most of all, bombs. He says there was no outcry over the backscatters. That's just out of touch; it was all over the Internet and even major news media back around November of 2010. Liberals and conservatives alike found the idea of their nude images too far. This kept backscatters from being deployed for the most part; have you ever seen one? Seems to me that the TSA has changed their backscatter approach since then. Instead of showing the full images to security personnel it will do some computational analysis of the images and then represent any anomalies on a simple drawing of a human. The people going through the machine will see the same images the TSA will. See this image: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/02/TSA-Body-Scanner-Image.jpg http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/02/TSA-Bo... Nobody likes waiting in line or taking off their shoes. But I'd much rather do that than let people get onto my plane with explosives. Forget patriotism, it's a matter of your own personal safety.
- orthecreedence 15y ago
  The point he's making, which I believe is valid, is that you can take over a plane with just about anything. Also, with some plastic explosive and a detonator in your Rolex, you could easily make a bomb. I've never seen security dogs, and I've frequented some of the busiest airports. So how would they find the C4 in your bag/pocket/butt? Not to mention, it's easy enough to go through security in a smaller airport and then get into the secured zone in a hub with minimal effort. If you want to blow up/hijack a plane, it's easy. It takes a smart person, ingenuity, and nerves of steel, but I don't think there's anything hard about it...the reason is that instead of the TSA sitting around and thinking for a few minutes about how someone could blow up a plane, they only think about how people have already blown up planes. Their methods are flawed, and I feel absolutely no safer travelling via air with the TSA around.
- pkteison 15y ago
  Trying to prevent an -extremely- unlikely event via a lousy ineffective attempt at prior restraint is worth treating everyone as a criminal, ignoring the 4th amendment, and curtailing freedom? In America? Why? Prior restraint is a great evil that needs to be carefully weighed against its benefit and I just don't see the pre-boarding perp walk actually making us enough safer to be worth it.
maeon3 15y ago
There needs to be a webapp that grades airports for hassle index. So we can steer our dollars away from them.
- bdunbar 15y ago
  So we can steer our dollars away from them. How would that work? Most cities only _have_ one airport. If I live in Tulsa, I use the airport there. It's that or drive two hours to Oklahoma City.
  - maeon3 15y ago
    It would decrease tourist dollars, dollars of people moving to tulsa, and encourage young upstarts leaving and never returning. The government is accountable, technically, but only when people vote with their actions and dollars.
    - bdunbar 15y ago
      One problem with this. TSA is a federal organization. The pain would be felt at the local level. TSA is like the phone company. They don't care - they don't have to. Aside: the idea that anyone would go to _Tulsa_ as a tourist is bizarre. But I grew up there so it's hard for me to see it as anything but a good place to leave.
richardlblair 15y ago
True Story: A friend of mine was traveling through various airports in the states. He had accidentally left his pencil bag in his back pack which had a pair of scissors in it. The scissors were over the length allowed on a plaine (Something like 4" is considered safe.) He went through 2 security checks in the states, and boarded planes with these scissors in his back pack. It wasn't until he went through a simple, small security check in a small Canadian air port that they were found and confiscated. I find it funny that he made it through all this elaborate security in the States, and a simple security check in Canada with a Security guard who did his job well found the scissors.
- CurtMonash 15y ago
  I saw exactly the same thing happen on Grand Cayman. At the end of the summer, Cayman Islands security found a pair of scissors in a girl's backpack that she'd evidently been traveling with all summer.
  - richardlblair 15y ago
    It proves that technology doesn't solve these problems. Diligent employees who do their jobs solve these problems. My buddy was told that there was a faint line on the xray machine and they wanted to check it out. He didn't even know he had those scissors.
- pyre 15y ago
  At the same time, a couple of years ago they gave me a HUGE hassle over a fucking snow globe. Even going so far as telling me that I had to ship it because it was banned from checked luggage.
  - georgieporgie 15y ago
    I wish I could remember the source where someone determined the most confiscated items by looking at the government auctions. The TSA likes to issue self-promoting press releases like, "we confiscated over 300,000 prohibited items last year," but it turns out they're primarily bottled water, snow globes, and Swiss Army knives. Incidentally, states sell confiscated items at auction.
wkdown 15y ago
While I agree with his points, this is yet another rant with no solutions.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
As this terrific article says in many different ways: the TSA is a fundamentally flawed institution. It's an example of something that anybody who has spent too much on consultants will recognize: if you have money, there are people who will gladly say they will solve a problem, even if the problem doesn't make sense and there is no solution. It's like that old demotivator image says about consulting "if you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem" (http://www.despair.com/consulting.html http://www.despair.com/consulting.html) Don't get me wrong, the agency can be full of the most wonderful and talented dedicated intelligent people imaginable. I kind of doubt it, but it doesn't make a difference. If the paradigm of the agency is seriously broken, it'll never do anything but prolong the problem. If anything, it'll make the problem of terrorism worse (for many reasons too involved to go into here.) After 9-11 we overreacted and created a monster. We've created a system where the general public is the "enemy". Is the system so broken that even after this is obvious to 90% of the public we still can't get rid of the TSA? </rant> I know when I go on like this about the TSA that I sound like somebody running around with their hair on fire, but dammit, out of the dozen or so major intrusions on my privacy and life by the security state and corporate system over the last 20 years, the TSA is like a poster child for what's went wrong. Good intentions, a real (but very small) threat, bipartisan support, a mission to support air travel safety (something everybody is for). The problem is although it's great at getting votes, it's just not worth the trade-off. And it's such a political football that nobody can touch it. We're giving up too much for way too little in return. And it looks from here like the change is going to be permanent, no matter what we say or do about it.
- BigTigger 15y ago
  Great post, I do however much prefer the quote, "If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, order more tunnel"
- einhverfr 15y ago
  I have a friend who works for the TSA. We argue about the value of the organization a lot. And about airport security a lot. Here's my view. It's not just the TSA that is to blame. It's the fact that American politics is often driven by hysteria. As an American, I say the answer is teaching people about real security strategy. The hard truth, and one the American people have not accepted is that any idea of security must be firmly conditioned on the idea of acceptable risk. No matter what we do, the risk will never reach zero, so we are better balancing risk with the intrusiveness of the effort to eliminate it. Any security professional in any field worth his or her salt will tell you that. So the TSA folks on the ground are put in a bind. They are sold as the answer to security and told they must prevent all future attacks. But the TSA is not in a position to do that. What they are in a position to do is to make it hard enough to carry out an attack that the real security folks (FBI, etc) can stop the plot before the terrorists get to the airport. This means that the right screening measures are important because by the time a terrorist gets to the airport, having planned and prepared with airport security in mind, it's simply too late for airport security to stop them. Therefore you have to see airport security as an assist to security rather than as the mechanism as a whole. In that regard, the TSA has failed miserably. The article lists a few points, but misses one of the biggest problems with the way the bodyscanners are currently implemented: they replace metal detectors. Nobody has ever brought down a plane with a bomb detonated by a non-metalic detonator. There have been a few attempts (the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, etc), but these require a lot more human intervention to set off, and therefore provide crew and passengers a better chance to react. In many cases they are also more difficult to get to work in the first place. So the bodyscanners eliminate a small security hole but in the process create a much larger one. Metalic devices can be hidden in body cavities and are invisible to the scanners. And without metal detectors we don't even have a chance to detect the worst of them. The TSA has shown that they are worried about this. They have repeatedly said they are concerned about, say, radio-controlled toys and cell phones, but they have created a situation where they can't do anything about it. Security is a process and not a product. When it becomes a product, we see what happens. The TSA is both a product of the product mentality (pun intended), and a product that was sold to the American People after 9/11 as the answer to our security woes. Until we can get the American people to go through the security assessment process, we will be stuck with more of the same.
noonespecial 15y ago
Carried to its logical end, TSA policy would have to require passengers to travel naked or handcuffed. I always just assumed that sooner or later they'd start issuing us some sort of jumpsuits and we wouldn't be allowed to fly in "street clothes". Sadly that sounds almost reasonable in this climate. Or at least no less reasonable than some of the other stuff they do.
orblivion 15y ago
"I am, as I have said before, a political conservative, a law and order kind of guy and I get misty when the national anthem is played at a football game and jets fly over in salute. If anything, I am pre-disposed to support the United States government." This doesn't sit quite right with me. I could be wrong but I don't imagine a conservative would fancy themselves a "supporter of the United States government." That sounds more like, right or wrong, what a liberal thinks of a conservative (and what a conservative thinks of a liberal, for that matter). Supporter of "the troops" or "the nation" sure, but "the government" seems a bit off.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - orblivion 15y ago
    Yeah I guess you're right. I was going to give a long counterpoint but it's all about how it came off to me, it just didn't seem like the sort of wording that would come from a conservative (and I grew up with conservative parents and listened to plenty of talk radio, I never take liberals at their representation of what a conservative believes). But looking again, I was just nitpicking.
morsch 15y ago
I'm not as convinced by his arguments as everyone else seems. He starts out with a huge -- and admittedly hugely impressive -- appeal to authority. The tilting at windmills argument -- you can't fix all security holes, prison inmates can macgyver deadly weapons out of iPod cables (not to mention laptop batteries), you'd have to tie up people naked to make it safe -- is well taken, but nothing new. His argument for random screening was more original (to me, at least): Certain terrorist organisations shy away from risk. Make the risk of failure high enough, and they won't strike. He proposes that 10% risk of failure is the sweet spot (based on his own experience with Al Qaeda) and says that thoroughly searching a random selection of 10% of the passengers will result in 10% failure. Two things don't add up there, in my eyes. First of all, you just told us that there is no security anyway: the iPod cable thing, naked tied up people. What if a terrorist was among the 10% "unlucky" ones, and he had simply been clever enough to think of a solution not covered by your screening process? Granted, the more thorough searches will be harder to "beat", but allegedly even very ordinary items can be used to do bad stuff. And while the fact of the search will be unpredictable, the process of the search will probably be just as predictable as before: with 10% of all passengers being searched, the procedures can't hope to remain secret. So I guess you have to rely on being extremely thorough; with the thoroughness of a search probably coinciding with the amount of inconvenience caused by it. Secondly, he does rely on the failure probability of 10% being enough to stop an attack. That might be what it takes to stop some organisations now, but other organisations might not be as risk averse, others might change their mind in the future (particularly if such a strategy is adopted). Obviously operations other than random screening will increase the failure probability beyond 10% anyway, but that is beside the point; as is the fact that he only addresses screening while also reporting that many threats originate from persons that are never screened because they are not passengers. Apart from the random screening argument, he addresses the impropriety of backscatter scanners. There is nothing new there at all. Apparently this is a huge issue to a large percentage of the population. Apparently, having a person of the same sex look at your naked picture would be an improvement. I don't really get it, personally. Maybe I'm a hippie. All that said, I guess his random search procecure would be a net improvement to most passengers, with his argument standing and falling depending on whether or not you buy into the risk-aversity argument. And of course if you assume that neither procedure gets you any notable amount of security, as could be argued from his first point, the procedure with the least amount of convenience -- his -- wins.
jonybluz 15y ago
TSA is a resounding success. As a jobs program, that is. What difference does it make whether they stop terrorists or not? The main thing is to create careers out of whole cloth, and photographing people nude is a much more dignified employment than digging holes and filling them in again. If you weren't totally against the working poor, you would see that.
njharman 15y ago
TSA should be and should have been funded directly from air fair increases. That way it will end tomorrow or would never had happened.
doug1001 15y ago
My life-long dream of becoming a TSA Agent is a little tarnished, i suppose. This Post is full of excellent lines. E.g., "Another time, I was bypassing screening (again on official FBI business) with my .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol, and a TSA officer noticed the clip of my pocket knife. "You can't bring a knife on board," he said." "With the congressional spotlight on the organization, TSA is finally feeling what it's like to be screened."

TSA: Fail

452 points by vamsee 15y ago

dsr_ 15y ago

TL;DR: Bruce Schneier is still right.

willvarfar 15y ago
Its natural to read your comment as though the article disagrees with Bruce and you think the article is wrong and Bruce is right. We all know that the article is completely in line with Bruce and he even blogged it: www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/02/fbi_special_age.html Just clearing that up ;)
- sukuriant 15y ago
  Erm... I honestly didn't read that from what he said... I thought the article was in agreement with Bruce. Where would someone get the opposite idea?
  - repsilat 15y ago
    It's in the interpretation of the "TL;DR". GGP could be read as, "Don't bother with TFA, listen to Bruce." For the record, I interpreted it the same way you did.

tnuc 15y ago

I disagree, he missed a vital point. TSA: Success The worlds most expensive security theater. Making you feel safer for your troubles.

mahyarm 15y ago
Before the TSA, didn't you have to wait in a similar luggage screening line anyway? Other than the addition of the backscatter machine, checking your id before you enter the line and some other procedural changes what is different?
- saryant 15y ago
  Care to count the billions spent on those "differences"?
- daeken 15y ago
  Take off your shoes, get rid of all liquids (unless they're in a plastic bag, of course -- those are always safe), look up at the anxiety detection cameras, and enjoy flying in Complete Safety (R) (TM).
- donw 15y ago
  Having to dig my laptop and iPad out and put them in a separate bin than the rest of my things. Not being able to bring an expensive bottle of wine on the plane.
mcantelon 15y ago
>The worlds most expensive security theater. Making you feel safer for your troubles. And humiliating you so you're more likely to accept whatever the federal government doles out in the future. Psychological conditioning.
- epochwolf 15y ago
  Most of school is psychological conditioning. This would be a wonderful conspiracy theory if the government was a bit more efficient about it. :)
epochwolf 15y ago
US Citizen here. I don't feel any safer. I feel like I'm a cow in a herd of cattle. Every time I see the security line I think about how much more effective detonating a bomb in the security line would be compared to crashing a plane. At an airport like Altanta International, there are more people in the line than would be on a fully loaded 474. I'm far more afraid to stand in the line for screening than sitting in a plane. All it takes is one terrorist to get this bright idea in their head and then I lose more of my rights to the next level of security theater. :(
Natsu 15y ago
The TSA actually makes me feel less safe, enough that I avoid flying if at all possible. It's like we're trying to replicate the Stanford Prison Experiment at scale. I wish they would focus on things that keep us safe and dispense with the security theater. They should listen to his recommendations. He's saying nothing new here. Every other security expert is saying much the same thing, but is still being ignored.
smsm42 15y ago
I'm not feeling safe. When I'm talking to Israeli security who actually try to evaluate who I am and if I'm dangerous, I feel safer. When I meet TSA agent that grabs my ass because his instructions says he has to do that to everybody, I don't feel safer. I feel I just participated in idiotic spectacle. I also get reminded that as a taxpayer I am paying a capable healthy person to spend his day touching other people's asses because instructions say so, when he could actually be earning a honest living instead doing something productive. Feeling safer is never even nearly there.

deleted 15y ago

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verelo 15y ago

As someone who travels regularly and is not an American, I've had nothing but frustrations generated by the "TSA". Initially it caused me to unfairly assume all Americans are like TSA agents (i know this isn't true, but i guess its just my human bias). A few things that frustrate me: - They are not friendly, have a real attitude problem and treat you as if you are guilty before proven innocent. You are the face of the country, the first impression every traveler gets. When i say "how are you doing?" as i approach, its what i say to everyone. Have the common decency to say "Yeah i'm ok" or "Not so great" rather than just looking at me like i'm an idiot. - The TSA doesn't make it clear that they are just specific to the USA. When boarding planes in another country you hear about the "TSA" and you're like "who the hell is this International body that rules transport?". They are private agents of the US, no different to the guards that any other country has. This should be explicitly clear, because they act like gods. - They seriously invade my privacy and treat me as if i have no rights just because im from somewhere else. Nothing says "Welcome to the USA" like having your body photograph, fingerprints taken (the finger printing seriously bothers me...i cant explain why because i dont know why, but it seriously bothers me is all i can say) and some border guard with an attitude problem treating you like you've turned up to take all the jobs. So much freedom, give me a break... Moving all invasions of privacy aside, forgetting about how effective or ineffective the TSA is...i just hate the way they treat people. They have a reputation to up hold, they are everyone's first impression of the US and...given the USA's global reputation today, they could really do with some advice from Rackspace on how to deal with customers. EDIT: Fixing my spelling of "planes" :-(

danilocampos 15y ago
If you think all of that is bad, imagine how it feels getting the exact same treatment as someone who helps fund the salaries of these assholes. For you, it's simple hostility. For Americans, it's a simple betrayal by our government.
- verelo 15y ago
  Haha dont stress, i'm equally upset when i review the taxes and fees on my plane ticket...i too am funding the fun times!

tptacek 15y ago

It's funny to try to predict what's going to spark the inevitable huge flame war on a thread like this, given that there isn't a soul on HN that thinks the TSA is a good thing. (I didn't flag this article; it's pretty great.)

jbooth 15y ago
DON'T YOU DARE SAY THAT ABOUT RON PAUL
- jbooth 15y ago
  So it turns out that even though the only display up to -4, it keeps going down from there on the karma score. Good to know.

Matt_Mickiewicz 15y ago

But won't somebody please think of the children!

Darkstar 15y ago
They already did. That's why they started patting them down.

bostond 15y ago

"I have a unique position from which to make these statements. For 25 years, as many of readers know, I was an FBI Special Agent..." I couldn't believe he didn't finish the last paragraph of his background with "I am the most interesting man in the world."

mitchellhislop 15y ago
After reading the same paragraph, I think he is the type we need leading the TSA

ot 15y ago

I don't really buy the argument "TSA has never [...] foiled a terrorist plot or stopped an attack on an airliner.": it could be argued that the TSA measures act as an effective deterrent. A stronger argument could be to show that in none of the countries that do not adopt TSA-like measures there have been any terrorist attempts, let alone successful. How easy would it be to board in, say, Mexico or Canada, and hijack the flight to the US? EDIT: looking at the comments (and the downvotes) I have the feeling that I wasn't clear. I agree with the article pretty much on everything, I'm just trying to say that where there are no body scanners deployed, for example in Europe, there have been no terrorist attacks, and I think that this is a stronger argument than "the TSA hasn't prevented any attack".

tikhonj 15y ago
Yes, it could be argued. But I've never seen it argued with convincing data, and for something so expensive and invasive, convincing data is the least I expect.
jasonkolb 15y ago
As he said in the article, if they HAD stopped someone, that someone would have been charged with a crime. Where are the charges?
- twoodfin 15y ago
  That's a fairly naive argument. My local bank discourages potential robbers with armed guards, alarms, and a locked vault. Just because they've never charged anyone with bank robbery doesn't mean those measures didn't prevent potential robbers from deciding to become actual robbers. It's really not any better than the argument that of course the TSA keeps away terrorists and tigers because there haven't been any hijackings or tiger maulings on airplanes since they took over.
  - swombat 15y ago
    Let me tell you about this new product of mine. It's called Rhinoceros powder, and it does - you guessed it! It scares away Rhinos. As long as you spread Rhino powder everywhere, you will not be attacked by a Rhino. It works particularly well in urban areas. It clearly works, too! I've been using it for decades, as have many of my customers, and wouldn't you know it! None of them have ever been attacked by a Rhino. $60b a pack.

afterburner 15y ago

"I am stunned, quite frankly, that the same people who fought against the Patriot Act because it was invasive and violated privacy rights have not howled about this invasion of personal privacy rights." Say what? I see the same people railing against both, all the time.

glesica 15y ago
I think he's referring to politicians more than private citizens. A portion of the Democratic party, after voting for the PATRIOT Act, spent the last 4-6 years of Bush's time in office speaking out against it. But TSA has generally maintained strong support. I'm not 100% sure that this is all true, but it is my own impression and, I suspect, the author's as well.
smsm42 15y ago
Definitely not all of them. A lot of left politicians raised a living hell about Patriot Act while Bush was in power, but shut up and silently agreed with its extensions and never raised their voice agains TSA and such once Obama came to power. Some were more principled, but I definitely not seeing the same fuss in the same places about it as there was when the people who are now in power were in opposition.

joelmichael 15y ago

Does he really think potential terrorists or criminals are going to hijack a plane using toothbrushes or popsicle sticks? The purpose of the TSA is to screen all passengers for real threats like guns, blades, and most of all, bombs. He says there was no outcry over the backscatters. That's just out of touch; it was all over the Internet and even major news media back around November of 2010. Liberals and conservatives alike found the idea of their nude images too far. This kept backscatters from being deployed for the most part; have you ever seen one? Seems to me that the TSA has changed their backscatter approach since then. Instead of showing the full images to security personnel it will do some computational analysis of the images and then represent any anomalies on a simple drawing of a human. The people going through the machine will see the same images the TSA will. See this image: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/02/TSA-Body-Scanner-Image.jpg http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/02/TSA-Bo... Nobody likes waiting in line or taking off their shoes. But I'd much rather do that than let people get onto my plane with explosives. Forget patriotism, it's a matter of your own personal safety.

orthecreedence 15y ago
The point he's making, which I believe is valid, is that you can take over a plane with just about anything. Also, with some plastic explosive and a detonator in your Rolex, you could easily make a bomb. I've never seen security dogs, and I've frequented some of the busiest airports. So how would they find the C4 in your bag/pocket/butt? Not to mention, it's easy enough to go through security in a smaller airport and then get into the secured zone in a hub with minimal effort. If you want to blow up/hijack a plane, it's easy. It takes a smart person, ingenuity, and nerves of steel, but I don't think there's anything hard about it...the reason is that instead of the TSA sitting around and thinking for a few minutes about how someone could blow up a plane, they only think about how people have already blown up planes. Their methods are flawed, and I feel absolutely no safer travelling via air with the TSA around.
pkteison 15y ago
Trying to prevent an -extremely- unlikely event via a lousy ineffective attempt at prior restraint is worth treating everyone as a criminal, ignoring the 4th amendment, and curtailing freedom? In America? Why? Prior restraint is a great evil that needs to be carefully weighed against its benefit and I just don't see the pre-boarding perp walk actually making us enough safer to be worth it.

maeon3 15y ago

There needs to be a webapp that grades airports for hassle index. So we can steer our dollars away from them.

bdunbar 15y ago
So we can steer our dollars away from them. How would that work? Most cities only _have_ one airport. If I live in Tulsa, I use the airport there. It's that or drive two hours to Oklahoma City.
- maeon3 15y ago
  It would decrease tourist dollars, dollars of people moving to tulsa, and encourage young upstarts leaving and never returning. The government is accountable, technically, but only when people vote with their actions and dollars.
  - bdunbar 15y ago
    One problem with this. TSA is a federal organization. The pain would be felt at the local level. TSA is like the phone company. They don't care - they don't have to. Aside: the idea that anyone would go to _Tulsa_ as a tourist is bizarre. But I grew up there so it's hard for me to see it as anything but a good place to leave.

richardlblair 15y ago

True Story: A friend of mine was traveling through various airports in the states. He had accidentally left his pencil bag in his back pack which had a pair of scissors in it. The scissors were over the length allowed on a plaine (Something like 4" is considered safe.) He went through 2 security checks in the states, and boarded planes with these scissors in his back pack. It wasn't until he went through a simple, small security check in a small Canadian air port that they were found and confiscated. I find it funny that he made it through all this elaborate security in the States, and a simple security check in Canada with a Security guard who did his job well found the scissors.

CurtMonash 15y ago
I saw exactly the same thing happen on Grand Cayman. At the end of the summer, Cayman Islands security found a pair of scissors in a girl's backpack that she'd evidently been traveling with all summer.
- richardlblair 15y ago
  It proves that technology doesn't solve these problems. Diligent employees who do their jobs solve these problems. My buddy was told that there was a faint line on the xray machine and they wanted to check it out. He didn't even know he had those scissors.
pyre 15y ago
At the same time, a couple of years ago they gave me a HUGE hassle over a fucking snow globe. Even going so far as telling me that I had to ship it because it was banned from checked luggage.
- georgieporgie 15y ago
  I wish I could remember the source where someone determined the most confiscated items by looking at the government auctions. The TSA likes to issue self-promoting press releases like, "we confiscated over 300,000 prohibited items last year," but it turns out they're primarily bottled water, snow globes, and Swiss Army knives. Incidentally, states sell confiscated items at auction.

wkdown 15y ago

While I agree with his points, this is yet another rant with no solutions.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

As this terrific article says in many different ways: the TSA is a fundamentally flawed institution. It's an example of something that anybody who has spent too much on consultants will recognize: if you have money, there are people who will gladly say they will solve a problem, even if the problem doesn't make sense and there is no solution. It's like that old demotivator image says about consulting "if you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem" (http://www.despair.com/consulting.html http://www.despair.com/consulting.html) Don't get me wrong, the agency can be full of the most wonderful and talented dedicated intelligent people imaginable. I kind of doubt it, but it doesn't make a difference. If the paradigm of the agency is seriously broken, it'll never do anything but prolong the problem. If anything, it'll make the problem of terrorism worse (for many reasons too involved to go into here.) After 9-11 we overreacted and created a monster. We've created a system where the general public is the "enemy". Is the system so broken that even after this is obvious to 90% of the public we still can't get rid of the TSA? </rant> I know when I go on like this about the TSA that I sound like somebody running around with their hair on fire, but dammit, out of the dozen or so major intrusions on my privacy and life by the security state and corporate system over the last 20 years, the TSA is like a poster child for what's went wrong. Good intentions, a real (but very small) threat, bipartisan support, a mission to support air travel safety (something everybody is for). The problem is although it's great at getting votes, it's just not worth the trade-off. And it's such a political football that nobody can touch it. We're giving up too much for way too little in return. And it looks from here like the change is going to be permanent, no matter what we say or do about it.

BigTigger 15y ago
Great post, I do however much prefer the quote, "If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, order more tunnel"
einhverfr 15y ago
I have a friend who works for the TSA. We argue about the value of the organization a lot. And about airport security a lot. Here's my view. It's not just the TSA that is to blame. It's the fact that American politics is often driven by hysteria. As an American, I say the answer is teaching people about real security strategy. The hard truth, and one the American people have not accepted is that any idea of security must be firmly conditioned on the idea of acceptable risk. No matter what we do, the risk will never reach zero, so we are better balancing risk with the intrusiveness of the effort to eliminate it. Any security professional in any field worth his or her salt will tell you that. So the TSA folks on the ground are put in a bind. They are sold as the answer to security and told they must prevent all future attacks. But the TSA is not in a position to do that. What they are in a position to do is to make it hard enough to carry out an attack that the real security folks (FBI, etc) can stop the plot before the terrorists get to the airport. This means that the right screening measures are important because by the time a terrorist gets to the airport, having planned and prepared with airport security in mind, it's simply too late for airport security to stop them. Therefore you have to see airport security as an assist to security rather than as the mechanism as a whole. In that regard, the TSA has failed miserably. The article lists a few points, but misses one of the biggest problems with the way the bodyscanners are currently implemented: they replace metal detectors. Nobody has ever brought down a plane with a bomb detonated by a non-metalic detonator. There have been a few attempts (the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, etc), but these require a lot more human intervention to set off, and therefore provide crew and passengers a better chance to react. In many cases they are also more difficult to get to work in the first place. So the bodyscanners eliminate a small security hole but in the process create a much larger one. Metalic devices can be hidden in body cavities and are invisible to the scanners. And without metal detectors we don't even have a chance to detect the worst of them. The TSA has shown that they are worried about this. They have repeatedly said they are concerned about, say, radio-controlled toys and cell phones, but they have created a situation where they can't do anything about it. Security is a process and not a product. When it becomes a product, we see what happens. The TSA is both a product of the product mentality (pun intended), and a product that was sold to the American People after 9/11 as the answer to our security woes. Until we can get the American people to go through the security assessment process, we will be stuck with more of the same.

noonespecial 15y ago

Carried to its logical end, TSA policy would have to require passengers to travel naked or handcuffed. I always just assumed that sooner or later they'd start issuing us some sort of jumpsuits and we wouldn't be allowed to fly in "street clothes". Sadly that sounds almost reasonable in this climate. Or at least no less reasonable than some of the other stuff they do.

orblivion 15y ago

"I am, as I have said before, a political conservative, a law and order kind of guy and I get misty when the national anthem is played at a football game and jets fly over in salute. If anything, I am pre-disposed to support the United States government." This doesn't sit quite right with me. I could be wrong but I don't imagine a conservative would fancy themselves a "supporter of the United States government." That sounds more like, right or wrong, what a liberal thinks of a conservative (and what a conservative thinks of a liberal, for that matter). Supporter of "the troops" or "the nation" sure, but "the government" seems a bit off.

deleted 15y ago
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- orblivion 15y ago
  Yeah I guess you're right. I was going to give a long counterpoint but it's all about how it came off to me, it just didn't seem like the sort of wording that would come from a conservative (and I grew up with conservative parents and listened to plenty of talk radio, I never take liberals at their representation of what a conservative believes). But looking again, I was just nitpicking.

morsch 15y ago

I'm not as convinced by his arguments as everyone else seems. He starts out with a huge -- and admittedly hugely impressive -- appeal to authority. The tilting at windmills argument -- you can't fix all security holes, prison inmates can macgyver deadly weapons out of iPod cables (not to mention laptop batteries), you'd have to tie up people naked to make it safe -- is well taken, but nothing new. His argument for random screening was more original (to me, at least): Certain terrorist organisations shy away from risk. Make the risk of failure high enough, and they won't strike. He proposes that 10% risk of failure is the sweet spot (based on his own experience with Al Qaeda) and says that thoroughly searching a random selection of 10% of the passengers will result in 10% failure. Two things don't add up there, in my eyes. First of all, you just told us that there is no security anyway: the iPod cable thing, naked tied up people. What if a terrorist was among the 10% "unlucky" ones, and he had simply been clever enough to think of a solution not covered by your screening process? Granted, the more thorough searches will be harder to "beat", but allegedly even very ordinary items can be used to do bad stuff. And while the fact of the search will be unpredictable, the process of the search will probably be just as predictable as before: with 10% of all passengers being searched, the procedures can't hope to remain secret. So I guess you have to rely on being extremely thorough; with the thoroughness of a search probably coinciding with the amount of inconvenience caused by it. Secondly, he does rely on the failure probability of 10% being enough to stop an attack. That might be what it takes to stop some organisations now, but other organisations might not be as risk averse, others might change their mind in the future (particularly if such a strategy is adopted). Obviously operations other than random screening will increase the failure probability beyond 10% anyway, but that is beside the point; as is the fact that he only addresses screening while also reporting that many threats originate from persons that are never screened because they are not passengers. Apart from the random screening argument, he addresses the impropriety of backscatter scanners. There is nothing new there at all. Apparently this is a huge issue to a large percentage of the population. Apparently, having a person of the same sex look at your naked picture would be an improvement. I don't really get it, personally. Maybe I'm a hippie. All that said, I guess his random search procecure would be a net improvement to most passengers, with his argument standing and falling depending on whether or not you buy into the risk-aversity argument. And of course if you assume that neither procedure gets you any notable amount of security, as could be argued from his first point, the procedure with the least amount of convenience -- his -- wins.

jonybluz 15y ago

TSA is a resounding success. As a jobs program, that is. What difference does it make whether they stop terrorists or not? The main thing is to create careers out of whole cloth, and photographing people nude is a much more dignified employment than digging holes and filling them in again. If you weren't totally against the working poor, you would see that.

njharman 15y ago

TSA should be and should have been funded directly from air fair increases. That way it will end tomorrow or would never had happened.

doug1001 15y ago

My life-long dream of becoming a TSA Agent is a little tarnished, i suppose. This Post is full of excellent lines. E.g., "Another time, I was bypassing screening (again on official FBI business) with my .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol, and a TSA officer noticed the clip of my pocket knife. "You can't bring a knife on board," he said." "With the congressional spotlight on the organization, TSA is finally feeling what it's like to be screened."