5 ms·
TSA lines are so out of control that travelers are hiring line-sitters
- bookofjoe 7mo ago[flagged]
- miyuru 7mo agohttps://archive.ph/cwDaq https://archive.ph/cwDaq (No account needed)
- arcza 7mo agoDoesn't this guy's server just DDoS some dude's blog with your own browser? Didn't click.
- javawizard 7mo agoYes, and: If I recall correctly, cloudflare is sinking all the extra traffic for him, so it doesn't actually impact him. Last I heard it's a morally objectionable thing at this point rather than something that's having any practical impact. (Which of course doesn't make it ok... I'm just a little less inclined to judge people that still use archive links when needed.)
- gradientsrneat 7mo agoContext: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843805 The archive.today domains have also poisoned DNS lookups from some privacy-preserving DNS providers, and in rare cases have been caught tampering the archive data. Make of that what you will.
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo agoI have been kind of experimenting with using single archive pages for archive.is /.ph/.today links and then experimenting with either putting these on my github pages (and then archiving) just for more preservation purposes. Today I wanted to try something different so I used singlefile to make a html and then make pdf file from that html and uploaded it to archive.org https://archive.org/details/tsa-lines-are-so-out-of-control-that-travelers-are-hiring-line-sitters-the-washi_202603/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/tsa-lines-are-so-out-of-control-... I don't wish to have news articles in my github as it clutters or I am not sure how these laws might follow (there is definitely a reason as to why archive.is creator is anonymous) and so I am looking for more anonymous ways to upload (my main intentions are that archive.ph can be nice but I feel like its not validated within wikipedia/all the controversies it has and I am just experimenting with things right now) I have also uploaded this on catbox.moe (https://files.catbox.moe/mt9sus.html https://files.catbox.moe/mt9sus.html) but it has plain/text content-type, does anyone know a more anonymous content-type plain/text -> html where I can upload things perhaps, I have thoughts about creating something like this (where people can give links to text .html files and I can then display the html) but I am also a bit worried that it might be used for nefarious purposes. I am not sure what I should do actually about it, I like thinking about archiving though, but anything other than archive.org like archive.is, can only function best if they are anonymous and I am not really anonymous/intend to be. This makes me sympathetic of them against the journalist who tried to dox them but also I kind of understand that journalist tried approaching first from a more curiosity, maybe a threat-actor model, I had done something like this once to a service because I wanted to know if govt.'s would be able to catch them or not (they had a reddit proxy) and I found that they had their opsec secure and I was really impressed but I sometimes wonder, if the journalist also did something like this and the archive.is owner felt like it was a threat to archive and decided to ddos and all the things that followed, I sort of understand both the perspectives, so it just makes me sad as how this ended up folding up. (This comment might've been more relevant within the archive.is drama hackernews thread but I think that its long gone and I was still forming my opinion on all of this which clearly has some nuance)
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- porridgeraisin 7mo agoIn Indian temples line-sitters are very common. Many queues are 5+ hours long.
- hellojesus 7mo agoFascinating. Is there something specific about those temples that draws the crowds, like something akin to a famous cathedral? Must worship take place in a temple? I don't know how the religion works but did get to visit a local temple once with some coworkers and enjoyed the atmosphere.
- functional_dev 7mo agomaybe they are considered direct link between heaven and earth :)
- porridgeraisin 7mo agoYeah each temple has its speciality. Every family has a "kuladeivam" which is basically a temple for that (patrilineal) lineage. Every family has one. Every temple has few families. Then it's special for people in the same town as the temple. Modern migration makes this a different set from the one above. Then each temple has special events on specific days/week/month/year. And then on top of that some few hundred temples are special in general and are crowded 365 days of the year with people from all over. Adds up. > Must worship take place in a temple? Just my understanding. You can worship anywhere even in your head, but temples are one thing which improve "quality" of worship by a lot. The logic roughly goes - since most people aren't capable of high (enuf) quality worship in their head or at home, temples help them. More of a magnitude thing rather than a binary thing.
- hellojesus 7mo agoThanks for the explanation. It sounds like a neat system.
- lotsofpulp 7mo agoStatus symbols among certain tribes. I went to <x> place. Most (all?) religions don’t prevent the poor from salvation, but humans like to make up hurdles to see who can overcome them. The status isn’t even necessarily money related, but can just be to see who is more “devoted”.
- cyanydeez 7mo ago[flagged]
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 7mo agoI know, I can't believe they refuse to pass the bill that would fund TSA. Wait a minute, I'm getting additional information....you're not gonna believe this, but Republicans have been voting for it. I wonder who the holdup is, then....
- rpdillon 7mo agoYesterday morning, CNN: > In a remarkable 24 hours in Washington, House Republicans snubbed a bipartisan funding deal cut by their own Senate GOP counterparts and instead approved an entirely different plan — prolonging the Department of Homeland Security shutdown. > Then, they left town. It's obvious what's happening. https://lite.cnn.com/2026/03/27/politics/dhs-shutdown-funding-bill-senate-house-vote https://lite.cnn.com/2026/03/27/politics/dhs-shutdown-fundin...
- cogman10 7mo agoNot just bipartisan. That bill was unanimously passed in the Senate.
- Simulacra 7mo agoNegative. It was passed with unanimous consent, there was only maybe five people there. I think that's a big difference between "passed" which gives the connotation that people actually voted on it, "unanimous consent" of the present. It was also at 2 o'clock in the morning
- gruez 7mo agoBut what effects does it have on the legislative process? It sounds like at the very least, all the senators vaguely wanted it to be passed, but didn't want to be on the record for voting for it.
- deadbabe 7mo agoI keep hearing about these long lines but I literally went to a major airport the other day for a flight and got through security in minutes.
- dawnerd 7mo agoIt’s really just a handful that have long lines part of the day. LAX for example hasn’t has a line at all really. Takes longer for my bag to be secondary checked every time than it does to wait in line.
- fourside 7mo agoI’ve heard this is very airport dependent
- amelius 7mo agoThat's why anecdotal evidence doesn't mean much.
- groundzeros2015 7mo agoThey are both anecdotal
- kotaKat 7mo agoEssential Air Service travelers aren't seeing any major pain either traveling outbound. Fortunately (though kind of sadly) the TSA folks only work a couple hours a day at the checkpoint for the single flight in and out so most of them are working side jobs anyways as their day job from what I hear. Our checkpoint doesn't even open until ~45 minutes before boarding starts in the middle of the day.
- arjie 7mo agoIt seems that SFO's policy of having an intermediate company that buffers salaries is working well because I flew through there to Taipei after this whole situation and there was no wait.
- nubg 7mo agobuffers salaries?
- Someone1234 7mo agoA strange way of saying, not TSA at all, and handled by a private for-profit company instead.
- BobaFloutist 7mo agoNo, it's accurate, because TSA (or at least the feds) ultimately pay for it, but the company has some runway it can spend to keep the employees working on the assumption it'll be paid later, I.E. a buffer.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- elromulous 7mo agoI _just_ went though the line. It wasn't too bad (5-10min, despite having bio ID), but it was by far the worst I've encountered at SFO in the decade I've been flying out of there.
- elromulous 7mo agoP.s. And as usual, TSA doesn't understand anything about queueing theory and doesn't implement round robin / starvation prevention. Global services and clear get absolute priority over other queues.
- 7mo ago
- oefrha 7mo agoFrom the last few paragraphs: > There is an official way for travelers to bypass long TSA waits if they’re willing to spend: hiring concierge services to escort them through security. > Perq Soleil is an airport arrival and departure assistance service that can help travelers through TSA in about a minute flat by accessing alternative lines usually reserved for airport staff and airline personnel. The company — which operates in more than 300 airports and 150 countries — charges a base rate that varies by location. Talk about burying the lede. Apparently the airports “highly discourage” line-sitters, but if you use services that pre-bribed airports you can skip the lines entirely.
- PearlRiver 7mo agoThe people arriving on private jets have always bypassed these bureaucratic procedures. Brotherhood and equality.
- hammock 7mo agoWhy should private plane passengers be subject to TSA? TSA (paid for by you and me by the way, not for free) exists to protect the public from harm, on public flights by common carriers. It used to be contracted by airlines themselves. Unless you are the most extreme of pro-seatbelt law people, it would make little sense for TSA to screen anyone on a private plane manifest unless the client asked them to.
- kacesensitive 7mo ago[dead]
- AzN1337c0d3r 7mo agoWere you born after 2001? Did you remember those planes that flew into the buildings? Private planes can do the same thing.
- kgermino 7mo agoAnd the TSA wouldn’t do anything to stop that Hell the TSA doesn’t do much to prevent that on commercial flights, but requiring private flights to start going through commercial security would be completely pointless
- ReptileMan 7mo agoCapitalism works quite well at solving problems.
- idiotsecant 7mo agoEfficiency is when you make a problem and then make people pay you to solve it. Or maybe that was some other word, I forget.
- otterley 7mo agoI don’t even understand why this is an issue, because TSA screening is funded through user fees. There’s a line item of $5.60 per one-way ticket for exactly this that’s separate from airfare and other fees. (https://www.tsa.gov/for-industry/security-fees https://www.tsa.gov/for-industry/security-fees) If this is so, why does Congress have to fund the program? Why not pass the funds through directly to the agency?
- gruez 7mo agoThe same article you linked has a chart that shows that actual expenses are around 4x the fees that are collected.
- Someone1234 7mo agoThe question itself feels like it calls for "Schoolhouse Rock" level basics about how the federal government works. The federal government does not work like a private escrow account where a fee collected for X automatically goes to Y. Tax revenue comes in to the Treasury, and Congress decides what agencies are allowed to spend. So even if TSA screening is funded in part by a per-ticket user fee, TSA still does not get to just collect that money and use it directly. Congress has to authorize and appropriate it. On a practical level, imagine the chaos if every federal department acted as its own tax collector and then set its own spending priorities. That is basically an argument for gutting Congress's oversight of TSA and treating it like an independent agency, just because Congress and the executive branch invented the modern shutdown in the 1980s. Keep in mind shutdowns are a fairly new concept, that nearly no other country has. The US also didn't have it for most of its history. Congress could stop at any time it wanted.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- otterley 7mo agoYou’re right that that’s the default state. However, Congress could have set things up such that the fees would pass through to TSA’s budget (i.e. earmarked) but chose not to.
- jt2190 7mo agoOnly FOUR people actually used these services? Edit: Newspapers have a long history of using headline editors who add “spin” otherwise reasonable stories handed in by journalists. This story was built by talking to a few entrepreneurs who offer line-sitting to see if they’d served any customers for airport security waits. Only one had.
- mrtksn 7mo agoI wonder why Trump just doesn't sell this himself, like golden tickets that you can buy from ICE where they just push back the free-tier line enjoyers to insert the patriotic gold level travelers. In Turkey people with connections to the government get strobe lights permit to skip the traffic through the emergency line. There's so many opportunities both for monetization and loyalty rewarding. Due to lapses like that sometimes I question my theory that all those people(Erdogan, Trump, Putin etc) are in the same group chat.
- foolfoolz 7mo agowe already have this with TSA Pre
- tartoran 7mo agoIf some of his minions gave him this idea he’d probably do it.
- pjc50 7mo agoThe reverse applies: if you protest against the regime, your TSA pre can be revoked. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/minnesota-border-patrol-agent-tsa-b2916845.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
- gsibble 7mo ago[flagged]
- bookofjoe 7mo agoHacker News Guidelines What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ....................... Nowhere does it say it must have to do with technology.
- gsibble 7mo ago"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." They've been covering all of this on TV news.
- bookofjoe 7mo agoThere's my problem: I don't watch TV news.
- isthatafact 7mo agoAt least it is a break from the endless stream of anti-LLM posts written by LLM with half the comments being serious replies and the other half fake-politely debating whether it was written by LLM. Plus there is a bonus start-up opportunity to LLM-code an app that enables travelers to earn money while they wait in line at the airport.
- joquarky 7mo agoHow do you feel about complaints about complaining?
- fhdkweig 7mo ago
- alfanick 7mo agoI know it's bad, but yeah, I just hate waiting, it's stupid. So whenever I can I just go through "first class" security and nothing bad happens, just skipping the queue. Look decent, look busy, keep on walking and bam you're past the security in a minute compared to tens of minutes or hours. And don't ever remove that "short connection" or "priority" tag from your luggage, it indeed goes out first. Airports are so freaking annoying way to commute, take a bus/train/tram/taxi/car to the airport, figure out the maze, wait in queue, get bored after security (because you arrived to early not knowing how much you're going to wait in security), go to a gate, then a different gate, queue again, get inside, and wait again. Why did we do this to ourselves!?
- joquarky 7mo agoSome people are challenged by the choice whether to go without medication or food this week.
- jeremie_strand 7mo ago[dead]
- api 7mo agoThe basic competence of elected officials and they people they appoint matters.
- GaProgMan 7mo agoI flew out of SeaTac yesterday (March 28th), and the TSA there were pretty well staffed. Took me around 6 minutes, and that was only because the person in front of me was talking to the agent about the tote bag they got from Trader Joe's.
- natas 7mo agothose tote bags are the town's talk!!!
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- AVA_Travel 7mo agoThe TSA experience is a big reason why some international travelers actively avoid US layovers. I've talked to people who book longer routes through Europe or Asia just to skip US airport security theater. It's interesting that the market solution is hiring line-sitters rather than, say, pressure on TSA to improve throughput. Says a lot about how normalized the dysfunction has become.