
TSA: Fail - vamsee
http://gmancasefile.blogspot.in/2012/01/tsa-fail.html
======
verelo
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" :-(

~~~
jambo
There are actually two groups you don't like: the ones who greet you when you
enter the USA are Customs & Border Protection agents. They have a lot of
power. The TSA employees are the folks in blue shirts who screen you &/ frisk
you once you're inside the US & trying to fly. As an always-clean-shaven-when-
flying US citizen, I have never had the displeasure of being treated poorly by
CBP, though I know (and regret) it's par for the course for non-citizens.

~~~
smsm42
I am not a citizen, but I crossed into the US many times, and never had any
trouble with CBP. But I know they do have a lot of power and I can totally
believe some of them can't deal with it, especially when suitably provoked or
think they are. Unfortunately it is very hard to estimate the extent of the
problem based on third-party anecdotal evidence.

~~~
HalibetLector
There is no consistency across border crossing sites. I spent most of my life
living on the Ontario/NY border and I can say for sure that I've never had a
problem at the border crossing at the Thousand Islands Bridge. Everybody
there, from both sides, are nice and polite. The Niagara Falls crossing is a
decidedly worse experience.

------
afterburner
"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
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.

------
DanielBMarkham
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>)

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
Great post, I do however much prefer the quote,

"If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, order more tunnel"

------
dsr_
TL;DR: Bruce Schneier is still right.

~~~
willvarfar
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
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
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.

------
tptacek
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
DON'T YOU DARE SAY THAT ABOUT RON PAUL

~~~
jbooth
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.

------
noonespecial
_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.

------
tnuc
I disagree, he missed a vital point.

TSA: Success

The worlds most expensive security theater. Making you feel safer for your
troubles.

~~~
mahyarm
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?

~~~
daeken
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).

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

------
richardlblair
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.

~~~
InclinedPlane
This happens ALL THE TIME. I accidentally boarded a plane (through SEATAC) in
2007 with this knife in my pocket: [http://www.amazon.com/Gerber-45860-Ranger-
Serrated-Knife/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Gerber-45860-Ranger-Serrated-
Knife/dp/B000670CRS)

~~~
richardlblair
With an item like that there is no real excuse for them to miss it. There is
no mistaking that as something else. It is clearly a knife. It just proves the
whole thing is "Security Theatre".

~~~
InclinedPlane
It was in my pocket. I walked through a metal detector. It was just a matter
of the detector not being calibrated correctly or not being set to an
adequately high sensitivity setting. That such things are possible is a
testament to the uselessness of the system, if they can't manage to promulgate
standards and procedures sufficient for the proper operation of a metal
detector what hope is there that any other equipment is being operated
correctly?

------
doug1001
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."

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

------
morsch
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.

~~~
Duff
You need to consider what threat you are defending against.

Before credit cards were popular, it was common for aircraft passengers to be
armed with handguns and carrying a lot of cash -- yet there were few
incidents. Think about that.

An organization planning an operation against any nation-state relays on
secrecy and anonymity to function, period. That is what random screenings will
help combat.

The current TSA regime is really trying to stop crazy people. I believe there
is some documentation to establish that they are somewhat successful at that
too. The problem with the TSA approach is that they are too big to be
competent at what they do, and the near universal contempt that they are held
in hurts that mission -- even deranged people hunk the TSA is dumb.

~~~
Joeri
You don't stop crazy people by strip-searching them. You stop them by asking
them questions to detect the crazy ones. The TSA focuses on the mechanism
instead of the person, and that never works. There's a reason israel's
airports are safe from terrorism, and it's not because of fancy body scanners.

~~~
Duff
True. The problem with that approach in the US is that our laws demand an
"objective" approach to dealing with this stuff. We don't trust police to make
subjective decisions.

------
maeon3
There needs to be a webapp that grades airports for hassle index. So we can
steer our dollars away from them.

~~~
bdunbar
_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
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
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.

------
Matt_Mickiewicz
But won't somebody please think of the children!

~~~
Darkstar
They already did. That's why they started patting them down.

------
orblivion
"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.

------
ot
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".

~~~
jasonkolb
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
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
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.

~~~
btn
I'm not sure if it's intentional, but there was a Simpsons parallel in "Much
Apu About Nothing":

    
    
      [Later, a full-force Bear Patrol is on watch.  Homer watches proudly.]
    
      Homer: Not a bear in sight.  The Bear Patrol must be working like a 
             charm.
       Lisa: That's spacious reasoning, Dad.
      Homer: Thank you, dear.
       Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
      Homer: Oh, how does it work?
       Lisa: It doesn't work.
      Homer: Uh-huh.
       Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
      Homer: Uh-huh.
       Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
              [Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
      Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
              [Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]
    

<http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F20.html>

~~~
swombat
This story archetype is centuries old.

------
bostond
"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
After reading the same paragraph, I think he is the type we need leading the
TSA

------
joelmichael
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-
Bo...](http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/02/TSA-Body-Scanner-
Image.jpg)

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.

~~~
javajosh
> Does he really think potential terrorists or criminals are going to hijack a
> plane using toothbrushes or popsicle sticks?

Yes. Actually there's an interesting connection with a recent HN article about
how space missions are being severely hampered by an irrational aversion to
the risk of loss of human life. In the same way, someone with a sharpened
stick holding it at the throat of an innocent woman could very well lead to
the hijacking of a plane because the people in the situation may very well
consider doing "anything" to save that one life. Hollywood, and all that.

> Nobody likes waiting in line or taking off their shoes.

This is one reason why you may deserve some downvoting - this is a classic
straw-man argument, and minimizes the true root of the problem: we have a
vast, faceless beauracracy that seriously messes with millions of Americans
(and foreigners!) for no good purpose. This is a serious problem, and
minimizing it like this won't earn you any influence.

P.S. I disagree with the parent comment, and yet I upvoted it because it is
cogently argued, if wrong.

~~~
joeyh
Holding sharp objects at someone's throat was a tactic that worked for only
part of one day (on 9/11). Try it now and there will be one passenger with a
cut throat, and an entire plane swarming you.

~~~
javajosh
I agree with you, and that they should really just let pocket knives on planes
since they are an equivalent threat to a toothbrush and 5 minutes of
modification.

