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Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep fliers safe

86 points by spking 14y ago

tokenadult 14y ago
The article wraps up with, "Anyone boarding an aircraft should feel maybe only a teeny tiny bit safer than if there were no TSA at all." Well, yes. The TSA has not improved the security of airline passengers in the United States to any demonstrable degree. I remember a more innocent time almost three decades ago when my work involved frequent flying, such that I have been to most major airports in the United States repeatedly and have logged weeks above 30,000 feet of altitude. I have a photograph from those days showing me seated at the controls of a commercial airliner, which the crew of the airliner took after I boarded a flight early in the boarding process. In those days a business traveler could sit down to pose for a snapshot inside the aircraft cockpit, with the crew having no concerns about a person who was not an airline employee being there. That's the carefree ease of flying in the United States I remember from the beginning of my adulthood. Years ago I wrote here on Hacker News, in response to one of the recurring complaints about airport security procedures, "Hear. Hear. I was just on flights out of town over the weekend, and it occurred to me that the terrorists have won by making air travel so inconvenient and annoying for every American who ever flies domestically. 'Maybe Secure Flight is a good use of our money; maybe it isn't. But let's have debates like that in the open, as part of the budget process, where it belongs.' This is the general answer for review of current security procedures: we should check whether they are worthwhile for the amount of improved security they promise to provide." About one year ago another participant, who came to the United States from another country, wrote, It's also the only place that made me take my shoes off before the metal detector, which I found quite humiliating This appears to have been one of the calculations of the terrorist group that put up the shoe bomber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_shoe_bomb_plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_shoe_bomb_plot to trying his failed attempt to blow up an airplane with a bomb hidden in his shoe. Some of the co-religionists of some of those terrorists consider it extremely degrading to be bare-footed in certain situations deemed to be "holy" situations (I know this from being told this by a friend who had newly converted to Islam when I was overseas in 1984), and thus they have probably been glad to humiliate Americans as Americans have reacted to the failed shoe bomb plot. My proposal is that United States airport security give up on requesting passengers to remove shoes. Yeah, maybe have chemical sensing devices at airports to screen for bombs on shoes, but let us all wear our shoes onto airplanes and throughout the insides of airports. The screening procedures at present appear to be an overreaction to the actual risk of a shoe bomb destroying a passenger airplane, especially in view of other countries not having the same screening procedure for airline passengers. I've summed up my response to past incidents of terrorism directed at people from civilized countries overseas or civilians in civilized countries this way: it's important for all of us to remember the basic issue here. The basic issue is whether people in free countries, like most readers of Hacker News, are going to be able to enjoy the right of free speech throughout their country, on any subject, or whether any American or Danish Dutch person or other person accustomed to free speech who happens to be within reach of attack by a crazy foreign person has to prepare for war just to continue to exercise free speech. On my part, I'm going to continue to comment on public policy based on verifiable facts and reason and logic, even if that seems offensive. I am not going to shrink from saying that people in backward, poorly governed countries that could never have invented the Internet have no right to kill and destroy just because someone in a free country laughs or scorns at their delusions. The people who are destroying diplomatic buildings and killing diplomats or journalists or bombing public buildings visited by random civilians are declining to use thoughtful discussion to show that they are anything other than blights on humankind. Allow me to reemphasize this point. The many participants on HN who criticize Transportation Security Agency "security theater" as a meaningless reduction in the freedom of people who travel to the United States are right on the basic point. If free citizens of free countries can't live in freedom because of fear of terrorists, the terrorists have already won. You and I should be able to speak our minds and express our opinions in the manner of all people in free countries--sometimes agreeing with one another, sometimes disagreeing, but always letting the other guy have his say. To engage in self-censorship because of fear of violent thugs is to be defeated by the thugs. We should also be able to fly freely about the country with no more than strictly necessary security precautions. I want to be able to walk into an airport with my shoes on and walk calmly to an arrival gate to greet arriving passengers there. I used to do that. And I want to be able to carry a Swiss Army knife in an airline carry-on bag. Grandmothers and mothers and children should surely be able to board an airliner unmolested in a free country like the United States. That said, I remember when conditions changed in the United States. I stood on top of the former World Trade Center in New York City twice while traveling with foreign visitors to the United States during my earlier frequent flyer days. Even today, the United States is still second only to France as a country destination for foreign tourists (and rather more of the tourists to France can drive cars or ride trains to France than can many visitors to the United States). So as obnoxious as current TSA security procedures are to me and to many, they are not so obnoxious that people have stopped visiting the United States for fun. Because I remember the peace and freedom I long enjoyed here to welcome visitors to the United States from around the world, I want the leaders and active participants in terrorist networks to identified through constant surveillance and intelligence, and I want terrorists to be attacked relentlessly where they live, so that they have to hide in caves while people all over the world who renounce their goals get to lead civilized, peaceful lives in the Twenty-First Century. I think the United States has been chastened by some of the results of its well documented policies from the 1950s and 1960s of assassinating foreign leaders with which it disagreed. These days the democratic, developed countries agree to win influence in the world mostly through persuasion and demonstration of the benefits of freedom and rule of law and free trade. I think now the United States is much more interested in information openness as a means to make sure that countries all around the world trade peacefully rather than waging war one one another, and I think that is the only long-term way to defeat terrorist networks. The current armed warfare strategy of drone attacks on specific terrorist leaders rather than mass bombing attacks on cities (as in World War II) is a step forward in war-fighting effectiveness and an improvement in reducing civilian casualties. The reactionary movements that use terrorism to stop progress must be destroyed. What really seems to work for this is active intelligence gathering aimed at the terrorist movements themselves. Comments in previous threads have said that Israel succeeds in doing that for the most part. Israel also led the world in making airliner cockpits were secure from hijackers entering them. Certainly we should make sure not to harass citizens or visitors who happen to have the wrong name or the wrong pattern of physical appearance, but identify threats on the basis of more relevant information. (My own children look very central Asian, and when my oldest son grows out his black beard he could readily pass for a terrorist by mere appearance.) Taliban delenda est. Al Qaeda delenda est.
- andyl 14y ago
  Perhaps 'feeling a tiny bit safer' is the whole point. Maybe the intended product of 'security theater' is an emotional response by the flying public - sort of a marketing campaign that generates a increased sense of confidence and well being for air travelers.
- gambiting 14y ago
  Really good post - just a note from myself - I've had to remove my shoes for screening many times while flying out from my native country(Poland) and that wasn't even to the US,but to other EU countries. So this is not something that only TSA does.
  - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
    As do many other airports in European countries, but it all started after 2001. The same is true for the new EU passports with biometric data.
  - taligent 14y ago
    I've flown to over 50 countries and the rules are the same everywhere. The whole TSA uproar is actually more of a reflection of the anti-government, libertarian, personal rights above community rights attitude that uniquely exists within many Americans.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      Really? The whole world drastically changed its security policy in the same way after one event in the US?
    - newman314 14y ago
      No, they are not. Plenty of airports in Asia do not require the removal of shoes. Source: me. I fly a lot too.
  - goodcanadian 14y ago
    And, I have never had to remove my shoes at airports outside of the U.S., including on flights bound for the U.S..
anon987 14y ago
Another political article with no possible worthwhile discussion makes it to the front page. Flagged, and I encourage other readers with appropriate karma to do the same.
ck2 14y ago
Think of the TSA as kinder, gentler war profiteering vs the contractors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Think of how much money they've completely sucked from the economy that can never be returned.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  But look on the bright side - they're providing jobs to the otherwise-virtually-unemployable, if the competence and dedication to work I've seen is indicative of the TSA workforce as a whole.
  - corysama 14y ago
    Hooray for a trillion dollars spent getting thousands of people to do busywork 8 hours a day for years and years. :/
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - miles 14y ago
    It's important to remember, it's easy to create jobs. Let's dig an enormous trench from Omaha, Nebraska to the Duluth, Minnesota using spoons. It'll take thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people; many of them will be women. So we'll have this gender equality that we're worried... When we start worrying about these kinds of things, the creation of jobs per se, we give - we have costs that are often hidden and hard to notice. When you talk about digging a trench with spoons, it's obvious. As we talk about these other things, buying American, doing things in expensive ways - we're going to impoverish ourselves, not make ourselves better off. Econ professor Dr. Russell Roberts on NPR: http://m.npr.org/story/99015346 http://m.npr.org/story/99015346
  - javert 14y ago
    Rewarding poverty just results in the breeding of even more poor people. Government "creation" of jobs is not economically sustainable.
zampano 14y ago
My grandma used to work as a TSA screener in Southern California, both before 9/11 (when they were ran by a private organization IIRC) and after. She would regularly have to go take classes because she would miss the dummy guns and grenades they would send through in bags. From what she told me, she was far from the only one who couldn't quite cut it, but she felt bad enough about the repeated failures she requested a transfer into one of the offices instead. The thing that always seemed the most alarming is that they acted like TSA was this new, more secure way to handle security, yet, at least at the airport my grandma worked at, they just moved the same people over to TSA, gave them new uniforms, a raise and then let business continue as usual.
- Evbn 14y ago
  What is extra weird is that the threat objects are all computer vision analyzed and automatically color coded. It's not clear why we have people looking at the images anyway, except to review the positive IDs.
andyl 14y ago
TSA is proposing new rules that allow small knives, ski poles, hockey sticks, lacrosse sticks and pool cues aboard in carry-on luggage. They call this a risk-based approach... But still they hound you to turn off your ipad on takeoff and landing. If the government is using a risk-based approach, this would be the most useful rule to change.
- polyfractal 14y ago
  TSA != FAA
  - andyl 14y ago
    Yeah but they both regulate the flying public. They should talk!
- tlrobinson 14y ago
  Allowing small knives is the most reasonable thing they've done in recent memory. They already allow scissors, which are really just two knives pinned together...
nonamegiven 14y ago
There are 14,000 TSA screeners at Newark Airport alone. (It's in the text in the image of the patdown.)
shn 14y ago
I never believed official statements on 9/11. No body explained how a skyscraper fell on its footprint even though there was no attack on the building. I'm talking about WTC7. Then they said they had to take down that building. Correct me if I'm wrong but it takes weeks to prepare for such demolition. You can't decide in one day and plant explosive and all these happen while you are dealing with a major crisis like 2 commercial airliners hitting towers. All this has been a farce. They wanted to paralyze people scaring with stories. TSA is just another tool to do that. Edit after down votes: What this TSA guys says is correct, it is very difficult to stop any seriously thought security breach. The reason behind existence of TSA as we know it is not what we expect it to do. It is not designed in sprit to do that. That is the reason it renders itself ineffective.
- shn 14y ago
  Keep down voting. Truth hurts. Reply to all down voters. Are you scared to write a reply to what I said? Clicking is easier, and following herd is easier than asking questions with an open mind. Just because you're reading HN does not make you smarter. Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T2_nedORjw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T2_nedORjw
  - triplesec 14y ago
    Independent of the potential truth of your comments, they're entirely off-topic, which is why there's downvoting. And complaining like that won't help you, I' afraid. Being wrong doesn't necessarily get downvotes. contentless or off-topic posts generally do! But then I'm fairly new here, so I stand correctable. My advice: Start a WTC thread with a good link if you think it's really important!
    - shn 14y ago
      I think I did not make myself clear. Fair enough. What I am saying that TSA is not capable of doing the job it is expected to do (due to bad hires or whatever other sloppy execution) because there is not much need for that. This is known by their designers and originators (this is the point I am trying to make), and it is just functioning at the very basic level and most of the time in an irritating way (patting down toddlers, etc.). What happened on 9/11 is known by those circles that is why TSA is not taken seriously. ps. I do not care about down votes. I care about people giving serious thought about what others might have to say. Down voting for me is kind of censorship act. I believe up voting weeds out (pushes bottom) bad comments anyway.
SEJeff 14y ago
"I just caught a terrorist before he got on a plane", said no TSA agent ever. The times this has happened since 9/11 were all local police, FBI, or CIA
- Evbn 14y ago
  Has the FBI? I have only heard of entrapment cases where the threats were FBI agents themselves.
wfunction 14y ago
xkcd gets it right: http://xkcd.com/651/ http://xkcd.com/651/ I never understood why do they ban water bottles but allow laptop batteries through, it's just plain ridiculous.
- ptaipale 14y ago
  Because you can ban water bottles, and sell them in the shop that's after security checks, and that won't turn many people back. But banning laptop batteries would harm business travel really seriously - it would really stop very, very many business travellers.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Naw, the airlines would rent secure batteries at a huge markup.
    - ptaipale 14y ago
      People do want to have their batteries at the destination as well. The typical business traveler would be so severely inconvenienced by this that it would reduce air travel significantly. Note that the water bottle scam isn't really profiting the airlines - it's benefiting the airport operators, in collusion with many national air regulators.
- codex 14y ago
  An iPad 2 battery contains about 90 kilojoules of energy. This is equivalent to about 20g of TNT, which is only 1/3 of the TNT used in a WWII-era "pineapple" hand grenade. However, the real reason one can bring a laptop battery on a plane is because no terrorist has tried to use it yet. They would probably need multiple batteries: after the "shoe bomber" attack, the government determined that as little as 50g of PETN could bring down a plane, which is equivalent to 80+g of TNT, which is four iPad 2 batteries. Even then, it would be necessary to deliver that energy in a very small amount of time, which may not be possible rapidly enough with lithium-ion; they can burn, but can they explode quickly enough, with all of their energy? The TSA aays they have studied the issue, and the answer is no [1], they "cannot be used as an explosive and are not a security threat in personal carry-on quantities." [1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2010-08-16-airlinebatteries16_CV_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2010-...
danielschonfeld 14y ago
http://1.usa.gov/Yju9G6 http://1.usa.gov/Yju9G6 Please help shut this show down
- taligent 14y ago
  You actually think it would be better to put it in the hands of private companies ? Wow.
  - mpyne 14y ago
    Many people still seriously believe that Medicare would be more efficient in the hands of private profit-seeking companies, so I'm not surprised at all about this.
  - smsm42 14y ago
    If the only change would be privatization, of course it won't work. If the change would be to let the airlines design proper security measures and implement them using professionals - then it might work.
brownbat 14y ago
"Exactly two things have made airline travel safer since 9/11: reinforcement of cockpit doors, and passengers who now know that they may have to fight back." "Airline Security a Waste of Cash," Schneier, 2005: http://www.schneier.com/essay-096.html http://www.schneier.com/essay-096.html Schneier goes on to claim that everything else is security theater. I'm open to the idea that there's something else out there that's helpful (though I couldn't name it off the top of my head). But we should definitely apply steady pressure towards the demilitarization of the airports so this cruft doesn't stay entrenched forever.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  Claiming the TSA agents at the airport are the first line of defense is idiotic thinking. If the bad guys get that far then everything else has failed. They are the last line, and not a very good one. (Bad guys can try multiple times, and use multiple people - they just need one to get through while the TSA needs to stop every single one.) The other thing/something else is good old fashioned police work and intelligence to discover/prevent the plots before they reach the stage of people at the airport. The TSA could never be perfect - consider the example of prisons where there are essentially no rights, lots of searching, controlled access etc. Things still get through. And even if they stopped everything getting on planes, they are still reacting to a tactic which has repeatedly been the problem. The bad guys can just blow up queues at the airport, or a mall, or a stadium, or a highway. There is no shortage of targets or methods that will instil fear. (Good old fashioned police work and intelligence should be tactic agnostic.) The reality is that not that many people actually want to be bad guys, and a US policy of not giving people reasons would be a good one.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Oh we have old fashioned police work too-- where the FBI finds am mentally retarded person, hands him a fake bomb, and then arrests him, and holds a self congratulatory press conference.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
The TSA is a discussion proof issue. Their mission is to make all transportation safe -- which is prima facie insane. When we have a political discussion about any other government agency, there are usually some kind of stats we can judge our expenditures against. Need more police? Maybe so. What's the crime rate look like. Need increased defense spending? I don't know. What's the defense spend of other countries. And so on. [Insert long discussion here about whether such metrics are useful or just BS, but the point is that there are numbers, sorta] With the TSA, we're protecting them from something not happening that's only ever happened once in our history. If we spend 100 Billion over the next ten years and there are no attacks, was that money well spent? Who knows? Maybe we should spend twice that, or half that. I'm not even going to go into the civil liberties problem. From a funding discussion alone, there's simply no way to know if we have "not enough", "just right", or "too much" And so we end up with this kabuki theater, where we pay untrained people to go through the motions of looking like they might be doing something useful. Politicians have a tendency to create issues that only have one side to them. So we have "Mothers Against Drunk Drivers" -- anybody know people in favor of drunk drivers? Or people in favor of "clean water" -- is there a political group actively lobbying for dirty water? We create these edge cases where the way the issues are framed, reasonable discussion becomes impossible. This is the case with the TSA. The TSA needs to be abolished. Immediately.
- betterunix 14y ago
  "When we have a political discussion about any other government agency, there are usually some kind of stats we can judge our expenditures against" Usually those stats are ignored. You brought up good examples: "Need more police? Maybe so. What's the crime rate look like" More like, "I can be tough on crime, so let me fund more cops!" The crime rate has been declining lately, but the police are more powerful than ever before. Paramilitary teams are routinely used to serve search-and-arrest warrants, the police can recycle the proceeds of seized property into their own budgets, and there are more and more ways for us to become criminals with each passing year. "Need increased defense spending? I don't know. What's the defense spend of other countries" Once upon a time, we only spent substantial money on the military when we were in a state of war. Then we began to panic over the USSR's military might, so we created a standing army. Now there is no USSR and we have the most powerful and well-funded military on Earth. Despite the changes in other countries' military sizes and budgets, our standing army faces more budget cuts from failures to compromise on the domestic budget than any sort of quantitative comparison with other countries. The thing about the executive branch is that it is constantly trying to get more power, and the legislative branch is constantly giving more power to the executive. The old protections against executive abuses are being eroded, and new ways for the executive to act without democratic process are being created. Declare drugs to be illegal without consulting Congress? Sure. Shoot and kill American citizens hundreds of miles from any battlefield? Of course! Expanded the military presence in countries that never threatened or attacked us? Why wait for Congress on anything? The only politicians who are even trying to stop this are outsiders, libertarians and the far-left whose ideas are nowhere near the mainstream. "With the TSA, we're protecting them from something not happening that's only ever happened once in our history." The issue here is that there was never actually a problem for the TSA to address. America does not have an ongoing problem with terrorist attacks; every few years we see one very determined attacker manage to cause a lot of destruction, and otherwise we go on with our lives oblivious to the numerous ways we can be attacked. Other countries are not so fortunate: they have to deal with terrorists attacking garbage cans, buses, markets, etc. They can judge their policies by reductions in such attacks. Bruce Schneier has a good point: instead of an agency meant to secure transportation against rare and unpredictable attacks, we should fund an agency meant to make transportation generally safer. We have lots of car accidents each year; once upon a time, we addressed that by mandating seatbelts as a standard feature. Why not continue to develop safer cars? If we are no longer creative enough to do that, why not spend the money on making alternative modes of transportation easier, cheaper, and more available? We can determine the success of such a policy by the reduction in vehicle-related injuries and deaths.
asmithmd1 14y ago
What would you guess we pay per screening? Guess again - higher. TSA Budget in 2011: $8.1 Billion [1] US air travelers in 2011: 730 million [2] Cost per screening $11.09 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Adminis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Adminis [2] http://www.nbcnews.com/travel/number-air-passengers-increased-2011-523879 http://www.nbcnews.com/travel/number-air-passengers-increase...
- brown9-2 14y ago
  Honestly I'm not sure if I should be surprised at how high the cost is, or how low it is. I can't tell if $11 per passenger is ridiculous or not. How do we put this cost in context?
  - saraid216 14y ago
    $11.09 sounds pretty reasonable to me, but like parent, I don't know what to compare it to. It doesn't even seem like "cost per screening" is a useful metric. What does it mean? What's the problem with it? The issue with the TSA is that it's spending billions at all to no apparent effect. No one cares about its efficiency at doing nothing.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    It is 2-10% of a ticket price, for no benefit.
- Samuel_Michon 14y ago
  I guessed twice as high, and the number of US air travellers you cited doesn't even account for foreign airlines flying in and out of US airports. $8.1 billion is a lot of course, and I find the TSA to be a useless bunch, but compared to the defense budget, this is a steal. It's also providing work to 47,000 Transportation Security Officers, most of whom would otherwise be unemployed if the article is to be believed.
  - wereHamster 14y ago
    8.1B USD / 47k employees -> a salary of about 172k. That's pretty good unemployment benefits.
mejackreed 14y ago
Makes me feel great as I read this about ready to take off from DCA!
don_draper 14y ago
I hate flying in large part to the security process. Imagine the boost to the economy if flying was easier. Think of all the people that would fly more often.
- Evbn 14y ago
  OTOH, air travel is an environmental nuisance. Still, In would rather have a pollution tax go to conservation and cleanup, instead of hassling passengers.
SippinLean 14y ago
Posting tabloids on HN?!
joering2 14y ago
Its a perfect show, on could say. In its core, its like "hey, Americans are scared because of some idiot put a bomb in his shoe [1], lets take advantage and use their tax-dollar money to make them _feel_ safer. They won't refuse because they are scared and when you scare, most seem to submit. But its just a show. Twice on occasion I have seen TSA agents coming back from lunch and passing security just by flashing badge even if the scanner went off. Well, we have internal affair departments in cia, fbi, police for a good reason. If there is remotely a chance (there is) one of those good TSA guys turn bad, then we are all screwed. [1] Let's not speculate whether he was CIA operative or at least drugged idiot who submitted.
- superuser2 14y ago
  It gets better. My summer employer used to do IT for the local airport. After passing background checks, most of the staff were issued badges/prox cards that let them pass through into a restricted area, walk under the checkpoint, and reemerge in the terminal.
- Evbn 14y ago
  A chance? Most airport crime is.... Theft committed by TSA employees.
codex 14y ago
I don't think this TSA screener understands that the TSA does not need perfection to be effective. The purpose of the TSA is not to catch every piece of contraband; it is to reduce "aircraft attacks" [EDIT: by aircraft attacks, I maan "attacks against the airplane itself," that is, bombings capable of bringing down the plane. Hijackings are not really feasible anymore]. For that purpose, it does not have to be 100% effective, or even 95% effective, or even 90% effective; it just has to raise the apparent level of difficulty high enough such that: a) An attack looks like it will take so much effort that the terrorist is no longer interested (terrorists are lazy, too) or capable. Attack frequency is inversely proportional to effort involved. If all a terrorist had to do to down a plane is click on a link in a web-browser, we would see catastrophes daily; if the sophistication of the attack is such that it takes months of training, the frequency drops by orders and orders of magnitude. b) It forces a terrorist to get help from other terrorists; while a solo terrorist is hard to detect in advance, terrorist networks and their communications are routinely infiltrated by law enforcement and intelligence. In this respect, pat-downs and body scanners force terrorists to up their game, which, in turn, discourages attacks from ever taking place. The Israelis also use this method [1] but they apply it more selectively based on the background of the passenger, which saves resources and, while politically difficult, is a much better approach. [1] "At Ben-Gurion, some passengers have been searched so thoroughly that they have had to walk through the terminals, the gates and up to the doors of their planes with no handbags, wallets or even shoes." http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2010/11/tsa_alternatives_israeli_airpo.html http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2010/11/tsa_alterna...
- betterunix 14y ago
  "The purpose of the TSA is not to catch every piece of contraband; it is to reduce aircraft attacks." Here I was, thinking that the security checkpoint was a measure to make everyone feel safer. Thanks for clearing that one up! "An attack looks like it will take so much effort that the terrorist is no longer interested (terrorists are lazy, too) or capable" Except that you can buy or obtain all the things needed to kill people on an airplane on the other side of the security check. You can buy glass, you can get knives from restaurants, etc. The fact that you get a security check long before you are anywhere near an airplane leaves a lot of room for an attacker, even a solo terrorist who is not particularly creative. Note that the Israeli approach involves walking up to the door of an airplane without any carry-ons or shoes. Profiling is needed to determine who is even worth the attention (if they did that to everyone, there would be riots). Meanwhile, the TSA will let you bring a pocket knife onto a plane, which is more than enough to kill people. The real difference today is not that terrorists have a harder time bringing weapons onto planes, but that passengers and crew do not believe they will survive a hijacking. People will now fight back. The locked cockpit doors -- locked from the inside -- help a lot too. Any security beyond explosives detection is pointless, and you could have that sort of security right at the departure gates. I personally doubt that the TSA checkpoints were ever meant to keep us secure. The Bush administration just needed to reassure people that we would have better security than we did beforehand, in a visible and easy-to-understand way. Now the agency is huge and no politician can afford to void against checkpoints, just in case a clever terrorist manages to hijack a plane (or perhaps shoot it down with a surface-to-air missile; people would probably blame lax airport security in that case too). It also helps that so many contracts are awarded for building the TSA's equipment, and that the TSA has substantially weakened Americans' ideas about civil rights (and what mainstream politician will complain about such things?).
anigbrowl 14y ago
Earlier this week the TSA announced a loosening of restrictions on carry-on items, which seems to have earned them absolutely no kudos at all with the people who are in the habit of calling for more sensible policies, but which is garnering opposition from airlines, since the burden of elevated risk falls disproportionately on airline cabin crew. EDIT: here's a link that I forgot to include http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/delta-joins-protest-over-tsa-knife-carrying-author/nWnPX/ http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/delta-joins-protest-ove...

86 points by spking 14y ago

The article wraps up with, "Anyone boarding an aircraft should feel maybe only a teeny tiny bit safer than if there were no TSA at all." Well, yes. The TSA has not improved the security of airline passengers in the United States to any demonstrable degree. I remember a more innocent time almost three decades ago when my work involved frequent flying, such that I have been to most major airports in the United States repeatedly and have logged weeks above 30,000 feet of altitude. I have a photograph from those days showing me seated at the controls of a commercial airliner, which the crew of the airliner took after I boarded a flight early in the boarding process. In those days a business traveler could sit down to pose for a snapshot inside the aircraft cockpit, with the crew having no concerns about a person who was not an airline employee being there. That's the carefree ease of flying in the United States I remember from the beginning of my adulthood. Years ago I wrote here on Hacker News, in response to one of the recurring complaints about airport security procedures, "Hear. Hear. I was just on flights out of town over the weekend, and it occurred to me that the terrorists have won by making air travel so inconvenient and annoying for every American who ever flies domestically. 'Maybe Secure Flight is a good use of our money; maybe it isn't. But let's have debates like that in the open, as part of the budget process, where it belongs.' This is the general answer for review of current security procedures: we should check whether they are worthwhile for the amount of improved security they promise to provide." About one year ago another participant, who came to the United States from another country, wrote, It's also the only place that made me take my shoes off before the metal detector, which I found quite humiliating This appears to have been one of the calculations of the terrorist group that put up the shoe bomber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_shoe_bomb_plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_shoe_bomb_plot to trying his failed attempt to blow up an airplane with a bomb hidden in his shoe. Some of the co-religionists of some of those terrorists consider it extremely degrading to be bare-footed in certain situations deemed to be "holy" situations (I know this from being told this by a friend who had newly converted to Islam when I was overseas in 1984), and thus they have probably been glad to humiliate Americans as Americans have reacted to the failed shoe bomb plot. My proposal is that United States airport security give up on requesting passengers to remove shoes. Yeah, maybe have chemical sensing devices at airports to screen for bombs on shoes, but let us all wear our shoes onto airplanes and throughout the insides of airports. The screening procedures at present appear to be an overreaction to the actual risk of a shoe bomb destroying a passenger airplane, especially in view of other countries not having the same screening procedure for airline passengers. I've summed up my response to past incidents of terrorism directed at people from civilized countries overseas or civilians in civilized countries this way: it's important for all of us to remember the basic issue here. The basic issue is whether people in free countries, like most readers of Hacker News, are going to be able to enjoy the right of free speech throughout their country, on any subject, or whether any American or Danish Dutch person or other person accustomed to free speech who happens to be within reach of attack by a crazy foreign person has to prepare for war just to continue to exercise free speech. On my part, I'm going to continue to comment on public policy based on verifiable facts and reason and logic, even if that seems offensive. I am not going to shrink from saying that people in backward, poorly governed countries that could never have invented the Internet have no right to kill and destroy just because someone in a free country laughs or scorns at their delusions. The people who are destroying diplomatic buildings and killing diplomats or journalists or bombing public buildings visited by random civilians are declining to use thoughtful discussion to show that they are anything other than blights on humankind. Allow me to reemphasize this point. The many participants on HN who criticize Transportation Security Agency "security theater" as a meaningless reduction in the freedom of people who travel to the United States are right on the basic point. If free citizens of free countries can't live in freedom because of fear of terrorists, the terrorists have already won. You and I should be able to speak our minds and express our opinions in the manner of all people in free countries--sometimes agreeing with one another, sometimes disagreeing, but always letting the other guy have his say. To engage in self-censorship because of fear of violent thugs is to be defeated by the thugs. We should also be able to fly freely about the country with no more than strictly necessary security precautions. I want to be able to walk into an airport with my shoes on and walk calmly to an arrival gate to greet arriving passengers there. I used to do that. And I want to be able to carry a Swiss Army knife in an airline carry-on bag. Grandmothers and mothers and children should surely be able to board an airliner unmolested in a free country like the United States. That said, I remember when conditions changed in the United States. I stood on top of the former World Trade Center in New York City twice while traveling with foreign visitors to the United States during my earlier frequent flyer days. Even today, the United States is still second only to France as a country destination for foreign tourists (and rather more of the tourists to France can drive cars or ride trains to France than can many visitors to the United States). So as obnoxious as current TSA security procedures are to me and to many, they are not so obnoxious that people have stopped visiting the United States for fun. Because I remember the peace and freedom I long enjoyed here to welcome visitors to the United States from around the world, I want the leaders and active participants in terrorist networks to identified through constant surveillance and intelligence, and I want terrorists to be attacked relentlessly where they live, so that they have to hide in caves while people all over the world who renounce their goals get to lead civilized, peaceful lives in the Twenty-First Century. I think the United States has been chastened by some of the results of its well documented policies from the 1950s and 1960s of assassinating foreign leaders with which it disagreed. These days the democratic, developed countries agree to win influence in the world mostly through persuasion and demonstration of the benefits of freedom and rule of law and free trade. I think now the United States is much more interested in information openness as a means to make sure that countries all around the world trade peacefully rather than waging war one one another, and I think that is the only long-term way to defeat terrorist networks. The current armed warfare strategy of drone attacks on specific terrorist leaders rather than mass bombing attacks on cities (as in World War II) is a step forward in war-fighting effectiveness and an improvement in reducing civilian casualties. The reactionary movements that use terrorism to stop progress must be destroyed. What really seems to work for this is active intelligence gathering aimed at the terrorist movements themselves. Comments in previous threads have said that Israel succeeds in doing that for the most part. Israel also led the world in making airliner cockpits were secure from hijackers entering them. Certainly we should make sure not to harass citizens or visitors who happen to have the wrong name or the wrong pattern of physical appearance, but identify threats on the basis of more relevant information. (My own children look very central Asian, and when my oldest son grows out his black beard he could readily pass for a terrorist by mere appearance.) Taliban delenda est. Al Qaeda delenda est.

andyl 14y ago
Perhaps 'feeling a tiny bit safer' is the whole point. Maybe the intended product of 'security theater' is an emotional response by the flying public - sort of a marketing campaign that generates a increased sense of confidence and well being for air travelers.
gambiting 14y ago
Really good post - just a note from myself - I've had to remove my shoes for screening many times while flying out from my native country(Poland) and that wasn't even to the US,but to other EU countries. So this is not something that only TSA does.
- Samuel_Michon 14y ago
  As do many other airports in European countries, but it all started after 2001. The same is true for the new EU passports with biometric data.
- taligent 14y ago
  I've flown to over 50 countries and the rules are the same everywhere. The whole TSA uproar is actually more of a reflection of the anti-government, libertarian, personal rights above community rights attitude that uniquely exists within many Americans.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Really? The whole world drastically changed its security policy in the same way after one event in the US?
  - newman314 14y ago
    No, they are not. Plenty of airports in Asia do not require the removal of shoes. Source: me. I fly a lot too.
- goodcanadian 14y ago
  And, I have never had to remove my shoes at airports outside of the U.S., including on flights bound for the U.S..

anon987 14y ago

Another political article with no possible worthwhile discussion makes it to the front page. Flagged, and I encourage other readers with appropriate karma to do the same.

ck2 14y ago

Think of the TSA as kinder, gentler war profiteering vs the contractors of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Think of how much money they've completely sucked from the economy that can never be returned.

pavel_lishin 14y ago
But look on the bright side - they're providing jobs to the otherwise-virtually-unemployable, if the competence and dedication to work I've seen is indicative of the TSA workforce as a whole.
- corysama 14y ago
  Hooray for a trillion dollars spent getting thousands of people to do busywork 8 hours a day for years and years. :/
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- miles 14y ago
  It's important to remember, it's easy to create jobs. Let's dig an enormous trench from Omaha, Nebraska to the Duluth, Minnesota using spoons. It'll take thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people; many of them will be women. So we'll have this gender equality that we're worried... When we start worrying about these kinds of things, the creation of jobs per se, we give - we have costs that are often hidden and hard to notice. When you talk about digging a trench with spoons, it's obvious. As we talk about these other things, buying American, doing things in expensive ways - we're going to impoverish ourselves, not make ourselves better off. Econ professor Dr. Russell Roberts on NPR: http://m.npr.org/story/99015346 http://m.npr.org/story/99015346
- javert 14y ago
  Rewarding poverty just results in the breeding of even more poor people. Government "creation" of jobs is not economically sustainable.

zampano 14y ago

My grandma used to work as a TSA screener in Southern California, both before 9/11 (when they were ran by a private organization IIRC) and after. She would regularly have to go take classes because she would miss the dummy guns and grenades they would send through in bags. From what she told me, she was far from the only one who couldn't quite cut it, but she felt bad enough about the repeated failures she requested a transfer into one of the offices instead. The thing that always seemed the most alarming is that they acted like TSA was this new, more secure way to handle security, yet, at least at the airport my grandma worked at, they just moved the same people over to TSA, gave them new uniforms, a raise and then let business continue as usual.

Evbn 14y ago
What is extra weird is that the threat objects are all computer vision analyzed and automatically color coded. It's not clear why we have people looking at the images anyway, except to review the positive IDs.

andyl 14y ago

TSA is proposing new rules that allow small knives, ski poles, hockey sticks, lacrosse sticks and pool cues aboard in carry-on luggage. They call this a risk-based approach... But still they hound you to turn off your ipad on takeoff and landing. If the government is using a risk-based approach, this would be the most useful rule to change.

polyfractal 14y ago
TSA != FAA
- andyl 14y ago
  Yeah but they both regulate the flying public. They should talk!
tlrobinson 14y ago
Allowing small knives is the most reasonable thing they've done in recent memory. They already allow scissors, which are really just two knives pinned together...

nonamegiven 14y ago

There are 14,000 TSA screeners at Newark Airport alone. (It's in the text in the image of the patdown.)

shn 14y ago

I never believed official statements on 9/11. No body explained how a skyscraper fell on its footprint even though there was no attack on the building. I'm talking about WTC7. Then they said they had to take down that building. Correct me if I'm wrong but it takes weeks to prepare for such demolition. You can't decide in one day and plant explosive and all these happen while you are dealing with a major crisis like 2 commercial airliners hitting towers. All this has been a farce. They wanted to paralyze people scaring with stories. TSA is just another tool to do that. Edit after down votes: What this TSA guys says is correct, it is very difficult to stop any seriously thought security breach. The reason behind existence of TSA as we know it is not what we expect it to do. It is not designed in sprit to do that. That is the reason it renders itself ineffective.

shn 14y ago
Keep down voting. Truth hurts. Reply to all down voters. Are you scared to write a reply to what I said? Clicking is easier, and following herd is easier than asking questions with an open mind. Just because you're reading HN does not make you smarter. Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T2_nedORjw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T2_nedORjw
- triplesec 14y ago
  Independent of the potential truth of your comments, they're entirely off-topic, which is why there's downvoting. And complaining like that won't help you, I' afraid. Being wrong doesn't necessarily get downvotes. contentless or off-topic posts generally do! But then I'm fairly new here, so I stand correctable. My advice: Start a WTC thread with a good link if you think it's really important!
  - shn 14y ago
    I think I did not make myself clear. Fair enough. What I am saying that TSA is not capable of doing the job it is expected to do (due to bad hires or whatever other sloppy execution) because there is not much need for that. This is known by their designers and originators (this is the point I am trying to make), and it is just functioning at the very basic level and most of the time in an irritating way (patting down toddlers, etc.). What happened on 9/11 is known by those circles that is why TSA is not taken seriously. ps. I do not care about down votes. I care about people giving serious thought about what others might have to say. Down voting for me is kind of censorship act. I believe up voting weeds out (pushes bottom) bad comments anyway.

SEJeff 14y ago

"I just caught a terrorist before he got on a plane", said no TSA agent ever. The times this has happened since 9/11 were all local police, FBI, or CIA

Evbn 14y ago
Has the FBI? I have only heard of entrapment cases where the threats were FBI agents themselves.

wfunction 14y ago

xkcd gets it right: http://xkcd.com/651/ http://xkcd.com/651/ I never understood why do they ban water bottles but allow laptop batteries through, it's just plain ridiculous.

ptaipale 14y ago
Because you can ban water bottles, and sell them in the shop that's after security checks, and that won't turn many people back. But banning laptop batteries would harm business travel really seriously - it would really stop very, very many business travellers.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Naw, the airlines would rent secure batteries at a huge markup.
  - ptaipale 14y ago
    People do want to have their batteries at the destination as well. The typical business traveler would be so severely inconvenienced by this that it would reduce air travel significantly. Note that the water bottle scam isn't really profiting the airlines - it's benefiting the airport operators, in collusion with many national air regulators.
codex 14y ago
An iPad 2 battery contains about 90 kilojoules of energy. This is equivalent to about 20g of TNT, which is only 1/3 of the TNT used in a WWII-era "pineapple" hand grenade. However, the real reason one can bring a laptop battery on a plane is because no terrorist has tried to use it yet. They would probably need multiple batteries: after the "shoe bomber" attack, the government determined that as little as 50g of PETN could bring down a plane, which is equivalent to 80+g of TNT, which is four iPad 2 batteries. Even then, it would be necessary to deliver that energy in a very small amount of time, which may not be possible rapidly enough with lithium-ion; they can burn, but can they explode quickly enough, with all of their energy? The TSA aays they have studied the issue, and the answer is no [1], they "cannot be used as an explosive and are not a security threat in personal carry-on quantities." [1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2010-08-16-airlinebatteries16_CV_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2010-...

danielschonfeld 14y ago

http://1.usa.gov/Yju9G6 http://1.usa.gov/Yju9G6 Please help shut this show down

taligent 14y ago
You actually think it would be better to put it in the hands of private companies ? Wow.
- mpyne 14y ago
  Many people still seriously believe that Medicare would be more efficient in the hands of private profit-seeking companies, so I'm not surprised at all about this.
- smsm42 14y ago
  If the only change would be privatization, of course it won't work. If the change would be to let the airlines design proper security measures and implement them using professionals - then it might work.

brownbat 14y ago

"Exactly two things have made airline travel safer since 9/11: reinforcement of cockpit doors, and passengers who now know that they may have to fight back." "Airline Security a Waste of Cash," Schneier, 2005: http://www.schneier.com/essay-096.html http://www.schneier.com/essay-096.html Schneier goes on to claim that everything else is security theater. I'm open to the idea that there's something else out there that's helpful (though I couldn't name it off the top of my head). But we should definitely apply steady pressure towards the demilitarization of the airports so this cruft doesn't stay entrenched forever.

rogerbinns 14y ago
Claiming the TSA agents at the airport are the first line of defense is idiotic thinking. If the bad guys get that far then everything else has failed. They are the last line, and not a very good one. (Bad guys can try multiple times, and use multiple people - they just need one to get through while the TSA needs to stop every single one.) The other thing/something else is good old fashioned police work and intelligence to discover/prevent the plots before they reach the stage of people at the airport. The TSA could never be perfect - consider the example of prisons where there are essentially no rights, lots of searching, controlled access etc. Things still get through. And even if they stopped everything getting on planes, they are still reacting to a tactic which has repeatedly been the problem. The bad guys can just blow up queues at the airport, or a mall, or a stadium, or a highway. There is no shortage of targets or methods that will instil fear. (Good old fashioned police work and intelligence should be tactic agnostic.) The reality is that not that many people actually want to be bad guys, and a US policy of not giving people reasons would be a good one.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Oh we have old fashioned police work too-- where the FBI finds am mentally retarded person, hands him a fake bomb, and then arrests him, and holds a self congratulatory press conference.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

The TSA is a discussion proof issue. Their mission is to make all transportation safe -- which is prima facie insane. When we have a political discussion about any other government agency, there are usually some kind of stats we can judge our expenditures against. Need more police? Maybe so. What's the crime rate look like. Need increased defense spending? I don't know. What's the defense spend of other countries. And so on. [Insert long discussion here about whether such metrics are useful or just BS, but the point is that there are numbers, sorta] With the TSA, we're protecting them from something not happening that's only ever happened once in our history. If we spend 100 Billion over the next ten years and there are no attacks, was that money well spent? Who knows? Maybe we should spend twice that, or half that. I'm not even going to go into the civil liberties problem. From a funding discussion alone, there's simply no way to know if we have "not enough", "just right", or "too much" And so we end up with this kabuki theater, where we pay untrained people to go through the motions of looking like they might be doing something useful. Politicians have a tendency to create issues that only have one side to them. So we have "Mothers Against Drunk Drivers" -- anybody know people in favor of drunk drivers? Or people in favor of "clean water" -- is there a political group actively lobbying for dirty water? We create these edge cases where the way the issues are framed, reasonable discussion becomes impossible. This is the case with the TSA. The TSA needs to be abolished. Immediately.

betterunix 14y ago
"When we have a political discussion about any other government agency, there are usually some kind of stats we can judge our expenditures against" Usually those stats are ignored. You brought up good examples: "Need more police? Maybe so. What's the crime rate look like" More like, "I can be tough on crime, so let me fund more cops!" The crime rate has been declining lately, but the police are more powerful than ever before. Paramilitary teams are routinely used to serve search-and-arrest warrants, the police can recycle the proceeds of seized property into their own budgets, and there are more and more ways for us to become criminals with each passing year. "Need increased defense spending? I don't know. What's the defense spend of other countries" Once upon a time, we only spent substantial money on the military when we were in a state of war. Then we began to panic over the USSR's military might, so we created a standing army. Now there is no USSR and we have the most powerful and well-funded military on Earth. Despite the changes in other countries' military sizes and budgets, our standing army faces more budget cuts from failures to compromise on the domestic budget than any sort of quantitative comparison with other countries. The thing about the executive branch is that it is constantly trying to get more power, and the legislative branch is constantly giving more power to the executive. The old protections against executive abuses are being eroded, and new ways for the executive to act without democratic process are being created. Declare drugs to be illegal without consulting Congress? Sure. Shoot and kill American citizens hundreds of miles from any battlefield? Of course! Expanded the military presence in countries that never threatened or attacked us? Why wait for Congress on anything? The only politicians who are even trying to stop this are outsiders, libertarians and the far-left whose ideas are nowhere near the mainstream. "With the TSA, we're protecting them from something not happening that's only ever happened once in our history." The issue here is that there was never actually a problem for the TSA to address. America does not have an ongoing problem with terrorist attacks; every few years we see one very determined attacker manage to cause a lot of destruction, and otherwise we go on with our lives oblivious to the numerous ways we can be attacked. Other countries are not so fortunate: they have to deal with terrorists attacking garbage cans, buses, markets, etc. They can judge their policies by reductions in such attacks. Bruce Schneier has a good point: instead of an agency meant to secure transportation against rare and unpredictable attacks, we should fund an agency meant to make transportation generally safer. We have lots of car accidents each year; once upon a time, we addressed that by mandating seatbelts as a standard feature. Why not continue to develop safer cars? If we are no longer creative enough to do that, why not spend the money on making alternative modes of transportation easier, cheaper, and more available? We can determine the success of such a policy by the reduction in vehicle-related injuries and deaths.

asmithmd1 14y ago

What would you guess we pay per screening? Guess again - higher. TSA Budget in 2011: $8.1 Billion [1] US air travelers in 2011: 730 million [2] Cost per screening $11.09 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Adminis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Adminis [2] http://www.nbcnews.com/travel/number-air-passengers-increased-2011-523879 http://www.nbcnews.com/travel/number-air-passengers-increase...

brown9-2 14y ago
Honestly I'm not sure if I should be surprised at how high the cost is, or how low it is. I can't tell if $11 per passenger is ridiculous or not. How do we put this cost in context?
- saraid216 14y ago
  $11.09 sounds pretty reasonable to me, but like parent, I don't know what to compare it to. It doesn't even seem like "cost per screening" is a useful metric. What does it mean? What's the problem with it? The issue with the TSA is that it's spending billions at all to no apparent effect. No one cares about its efficiency at doing nothing.
- Evbn 14y ago
  It is 2-10% of a ticket price, for no benefit.
Samuel_Michon 14y ago
I guessed twice as high, and the number of US air travellers you cited doesn't even account for foreign airlines flying in and out of US airports. $8.1 billion is a lot of course, and I find the TSA to be a useless bunch, but compared to the defense budget, this is a steal. It's also providing work to 47,000 Transportation Security Officers, most of whom would otherwise be unemployed if the article is to be believed.
- wereHamster 14y ago
  8.1B USD / 47k employees -> a salary of about 172k. That's pretty good unemployment benefits.

mejackreed 14y ago

Makes me feel great as I read this about ready to take off from DCA!

don_draper 14y ago

I hate flying in large part to the security process. Imagine the boost to the economy if flying was easier. Think of all the people that would fly more often.

Evbn 14y ago
OTOH, air travel is an environmental nuisance. Still, In would rather have a pollution tax go to conservation and cleanup, instead of hassling passengers.

SippinLean 14y ago

Posting tabloids on HN?!

joering2 14y ago

Its a perfect show, on could say. In its core, its like "hey, Americans are scared because of some idiot put a bomb in his shoe [1], lets take advantage and use their tax-dollar money to make them _feel_ safer. They won't refuse because they are scared and when you scare, most seem to submit. But its just a show. Twice on occasion I have seen TSA agents coming back from lunch and passing security just by flashing badge even if the scanner went off. Well, we have internal affair departments in cia, fbi, police for a good reason. If there is remotely a chance (there is) one of those good TSA guys turn bad, then we are all screwed. [1] Let's not speculate whether he was CIA operative or at least drugged idiot who submitted.

superuser2 14y ago
It gets better. My summer employer used to do IT for the local airport. After passing background checks, most of the staff were issued badges/prox cards that let them pass through into a restricted area, walk under the checkpoint, and reemerge in the terminal.
Evbn 14y ago
A chance? Most airport crime is.... Theft committed by TSA employees.

codex 14y ago

I don't think this TSA screener understands that the TSA does not need perfection to be effective. The purpose of the TSA is not to catch every piece of contraband; it is to reduce "aircraft attacks" [EDIT: by aircraft attacks, I maan "attacks against the airplane itself," that is, bombings capable of bringing down the plane. Hijackings are not really feasible anymore]. For that purpose, it does not have to be 100% effective, or even 95% effective, or even 90% effective; it just has to raise the apparent level of difficulty high enough such that: a) An attack looks like it will take so much effort that the terrorist is no longer interested (terrorists are lazy, too) or capable. Attack frequency is inversely proportional to effort involved. If all a terrorist had to do to down a plane is click on a link in a web-browser, we would see catastrophes daily; if the sophistication of the attack is such that it takes months of training, the frequency drops by orders and orders of magnitude. b) It forces a terrorist to get help from other terrorists; while a solo terrorist is hard to detect in advance, terrorist networks and their communications are routinely infiltrated by law enforcement and intelligence. In this respect, pat-downs and body scanners force terrorists to up their game, which, in turn, discourages attacks from ever taking place. The Israelis also use this method [1] but they apply it more selectively based on the background of the passenger, which saves resources and, while politically difficult, is a much better approach. [1] "At Ben-Gurion, some passengers have been searched so thoroughly that they have had to walk through the terminals, the gates and up to the doors of their planes with no handbags, wallets or even shoes." http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2010/11/tsa_alternatives_israeli_airpo.html http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2010/11/tsa_alterna...

betterunix 14y ago
"The purpose of the TSA is not to catch every piece of contraband; it is to reduce aircraft attacks." Here I was, thinking that the security checkpoint was a measure to make everyone feel safer. Thanks for clearing that one up! "An attack looks like it will take so much effort that the terrorist is no longer interested (terrorists are lazy, too) or capable" Except that you can buy or obtain all the things needed to kill people on an airplane on the other side of the security check. You can buy glass, you can get knives from restaurants, etc. The fact that you get a security check long before you are anywhere near an airplane leaves a lot of room for an attacker, even a solo terrorist who is not particularly creative. Note that the Israeli approach involves walking up to the door of an airplane without any carry-ons or shoes. Profiling is needed to determine who is even worth the attention (if they did that to everyone, there would be riots). Meanwhile, the TSA will let you bring a pocket knife onto a plane, which is more than enough to kill people. The real difference today is not that terrorists have a harder time bringing weapons onto planes, but that passengers and crew do not believe they will survive a hijacking. People will now fight back. The locked cockpit doors -- locked from the inside -- help a lot too. Any security beyond explosives detection is pointless, and you could have that sort of security right at the departure gates. I personally doubt that the TSA checkpoints were ever meant to keep us secure. The Bush administration just needed to reassure people that we would have better security than we did beforehand, in a visible and easy-to-understand way. Now the agency is huge and no politician can afford to void against checkpoints, just in case a clever terrorist manages to hijack a plane (or perhaps shoot it down with a surface-to-air missile; people would probably blame lax airport security in that case too). It also helps that so many contracts are awarded for building the TSA's equipment, and that the TSA has substantially weakened Americans' ideas about civil rights (and what mainstream politician will complain about such things?).

anigbrowl 14y ago

Earlier this week the TSA announced a loosening of restrictions on carry-on items, which seems to have earned them absolutely no kudos at all with the people who are in the habit of calling for more sensible policies, but which is garnering opposition from airlines, since the burden of elevated risk falls disproportionately on airline cabin crew. EDIT: here's a link that I forgot to include http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/delta-joins-protest-over-tsa-knife-carrying-author/nWnPX/ http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/delta-joins-protest-ove...