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To be productive, your question should be about the political costs of being seen to destroy the TSA. This will also answer the question about the political mot
by slurgfest 14y ago
To be productive, your question should be about the political costs of being seen to destroy the TSA. This will also answer the question about the political motivation for keeping it.
Consider also the reasons it was created (the real reasons) and the context in which it was created
- taligent 14y agoYou will ALWAYS need a TSA. Every country has one. The question is in what form it is and what its role is.
- briandear 14y agoNo, what we need is having El Al run security for America's airports. Those guys don't play around and it's why El Al is the safest airline in the sky.
- tzs 14y agoTo be fair, though, the total air traffic in and out of Israel is relatively small. It's comparable to a decent regional US airport, such as Sacramento. Generally, security in a big operation is harder than security in a small operation. It's not at all clear that El Al's methods would work when applied to a system the size of the US.
- tptacek 14y agoTwo reasons that's not going to happen: (i) As annoying as the TSA is, it is strictly speaking probably Constitutional; what they are doing falls under the "administrative search" category of "reasonable" under the 4th Amendment: (a) applied uniformly to all passengers, (b) tailored to specific administrative needs (ie, keeping explosives and weapons off planes), and (c) in some defensible way limited or minimal. They are pushing it with the body scanners, but who knows. El Al relies heavily on profiling; profiled searches are by definition not administrative, since they're done on suspicion. (ii) The TSA recruits people with advertisements on pizza boxes. El Al security personnel are trained (ie expensive) enough to do sophisticated subtextual behavior analysis while questioning people at length 1-on-1.