

Things the TSA doesn't want you to see - diminish
http://www.elliott.org/blog/5-things-the-tsa-doesnt-want-you-to-see/

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crusso
The thing I love about the TSA is that their record of failure is so
numerically concrete.

FTA: “The experience to date is 50,000 false positives and 16 known terrorists
not flagged,” says Thomson. “No known terrorists have ever been flagged.”

That's some pretty obvious and epic fail on the part of the Agency. Why hasn't
it been eliminated or reformed by now?

Government's inability to allow its ideas to fail, or at very least its
inability to pivot toward success is so disheartening. This has really been on
my mind a lot today. I watched "Waiting for Superman" last night and I can't
get the images of the poor kids just looking for a decent public education out
of my mind. The crimes against humanity perpetrated upon us with our own tax
dollars should really be prosecuted with all vigor.

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mcantelon
>That's some pretty obvious and epic fail on the part of the Agency. Why
hasn't it been eliminated or reformed by now?

My guess is the TSA's long-term purpose is not to prevent terrorism, but to
provide the federal government with a means of visibly asserting authority
over the travel of citizens (and the opportunity to intervene in the travel of
dissidents). Otherwise it makes little sense.

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crusso
I'm a bit cynical, but I don't think that it's anything quite that sinister.
The TSA is just another agency that gives budget dollars and a corresponding
amount of power to the bureaucrats and government representatives who run it
and a lot of contract dollars to the crony companies that supply it.

Because Americans are so terrified of "terrorism", they don't even have to
prove efficacy of their methods in order to continue existing.

It's a whole lot of easy money for a bunch of pigs with their snouts in the
trough.

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vacri
I was visiting friends near the Mexican border in Arizona and we passed by a
compound with literally hundreds of parked border patrol vehicles. I was
amazed and said "In order to staff these, they must have thousands of field
agents", to which the reply was "they have nothing of the sort - that compound
is simply there for the TV cameras, to show 'how serious' they are about
border patrol. Very few of those vehicles ever get driven"

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pyre
Note: I've never seen anything of the sort near the US-Canada border, but
Canadians illegally sneaking into the country isn't as big of an issue (or as
large of a political hot-button) as Mexican illegal immigrants.

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dsr_
Things the TSA doesn't want you to see: this site.

(Sorry, couldn't resist... or access.)

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sp332
Try this (you can't see the videos in this version though)
<https://www.readability.com/articles/bleqmeer>

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ck2
cache
[http://google.com/search?q=cache:www.elliott.org/blog/5-thin...](http://google.com/search?q=cache:www.elliott.org/blog/5-things-
the-tsa-doesnt-want-you-to-see/)

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joejohnson
Off topic: can you edit the title to "Things the TSA doesn't want you to see"?
This is the preferred format for titles beginning with a number:
<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

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rhizome
Thank you for informing us that this is just an "X Things..." post without
having to visit the link. ;)

