
Head of T.S.A. Out After Tests Reveal Flaws - matsur
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/us/head-of-tsa-out-after-tests-reveal-flaws.html
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qq66
The king is dead, long live the king.

I used to fly twice a week, and one time one of the screeners shoved a lighter
in my shoe as it was going onto the belt. I started yelling at him and he
turned to me with the "shush" gesture, and whispered that he was testing the
screener to see if he'd catch it.

As a dark-skinned man I did not want to participate in this exercise so I
started loudly shouting "He put a lighter in my shoe, does everyone see this?"
The other passengers in the line murmured their agreement, the "tester" seemed
miffed, and I kept loudly pronouncing the fact that I was not responsible for
the lighter in my shoe.

Sitting six feet away from my loud rant, the screener still missed it.

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rdtsc
The sane reponse should probably be: "TSA doesn't work. It has never stopped a
single red handed bomber in all these years. It has to be reduced and
defunded."

Sadly, the response will probably be an increase in funding, longer lines,
doubling down on groping and more naked pictures.

Over all this time, it has found and took away snow globes, nail clippers,
water bottles, delayed lots of people, xrayed them and so on. Sure it also
provided employment for many, who might have a hard time finding any. All
those things it is has done. But it hasn't done its main job. FBI might have.
Maybe CIA. Passengers, pilots and flight attendants sure did.

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blowski
> It has never stopped a single red handed bomber in all these years.

I doubt that is true, although I haven't seen any evidence either way. I guess
it stops people indirectly, as any would-be terrorist has to be more creative,
and in so doing probably alerts security authorities in other ways.

We all hate airport security, but without hard facts, it's very difficult to
work out what you would use instead of TSA-style security.

~~~
chrismcb
How about nothing? We don't have security getting on a bus, we don't have
security getting on a train, entering a mall, and barely have it entering a
stadium. Why do we need it getting on a plane?

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bottled_poe
Because, compared to those other vehicles, the difference between a plane and
a guided missile is small.

~~~
yardie
A guided missile is a an airframe packed with high explosives designed to
destroy heavily fortified buildings and vehicles. A passenger plane is a
lightweight airframe designed to carry people, cargo, and fuel. Besides the
fact they both fly it is a world of difference.

A passenger plane carrying 1/2 of its fuel capacity damaged the Pentagon. 2
passenger planes carrying 1/2 their fuel capacity obliterated the WTC towers.
This says more about the design of the towers, and resulting engineering
shortcuts, than it does about the planes themselves. .

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bbarn
In the investigation, undercover agents were able to get prohibited items
through security checkpoints in 67 of 70 instances.

I don't understand this. As the majority of the intelligent people I talk to
seem to understand that the TSA is essentially theatre, why seek to prove that
fact to the rest of the population? Are these organizations actually buying
what they're selling?

I guess I just figured all these agents knew they didn't really serve any
practical purpose other than keeping people feeling "better".

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PakG1
I'm not sure what's worse. Assuming that people knowingly and deliberately
work dead-end jobs with no purpose, or assuming that people are too stupid to
not know anything. I remember standing in line to go through baggage checking.
A lady in front of me chatted it up with the TSA worker. She said thank you
for the work, can't imagine how frustrating it must be sometimes. He replied
thank you for appreciating it.

Hanlon's Razor is useful here. I believe most people out there are just trying
to do their job as well as they can and make a living. They aren't thinking
about the bigger picture, and it's easy for many of them to think their jobs
have meaning. In fact, I think that's a requirement for not getting depressed.

No need to demean anyone. Most of the intelligent people I know don't even
know what security theatre is when I discuss it with them. I think people who
have concerns about security theatre are in the minority, judging from my own
sampling. I haven't seen any official studies on the question as to how many
people even understand or have heard of the term security theatre. I would
love to review them if the studies exist.

~~~
vinhboy
I agree with you that for the people hired to carry out these policies, they
are just regular folks who take great pride in doing/having a job.

However, after watching those PBS Frotline documentaries "Top Secret America"
and seeing that Lindsay Graham speech this morning, it's clear to me that many
of the people who head these agencies are paranoid and delusional. I don't
know how they keep amassing so much power and influence.

~~~
anigbrowl
Because a substantial fraction of the population is paranoid and delusional
and actively supports such policies.

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Homunculiheaded
I worked briefly for the federal government and realized that the bureaucratic
system has two primary functions:

1\. accumulate power

2\. diffuse responsibility

Regarding the latter, occasionally the system build up too much responsibility
which needs to be released to maintain stability. This is solved by picking an
individual of power equal to the build up responsibility that needs to be
released and punishing that individual by removal of all their individual
power. Thus the overall system is restored to balance and only the individual,
easily replaced, suffers.

It happened here, and I've seen it happen from the lowest to the highest
levels of power in the government.

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george2023
The idea from start was not whether TSA is capable or not to produce good
results. The idea was to climatize the Americans to the notion of someone
spraying you with harmful x-ray radiation or gropping your private area and
then accept it as normal. America, a nation of idiots, letting the police
state take over their lives on false terrorism stints. That's what at stake
here.

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MarkPNeyer
remember, folks:

\- all of the FBI forensic hair matches of the past two decades were faked

\- none of the NSA programs they claim keep us safe have been shown to stop a
single terrorist attack

\- no executives from the large banks that laundered billions money for
mexican drug lords or conspired to rig LIBOR and exchange rates, and plead
guilty, went to jail or faced criminal charges

\- you are more likely to drown in your bathtub than be killed by a terrorist

please stop taking the federal government seriously until they stop with all
this nonsense

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geuis
Can I just point out that we have definitive proof here of a giant
organization that has never worked, AND NOTHING BAD HAS HAPPENED. So now
they're going into CYA mode and all it will do is make traveling in the U.S.
an even worse experience than it has been for 14 years.

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louwrentius
You might argue that the existence of TSA is basically a partial victory of
the terrorists.

Although no people are killed, the financial damage done and the suffering
inflicted on our population is gigantic.

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danieltillett
_Mr. Johnson said that numbers like the security failure rate in the new
report “never look good out of context,”_

What possible context could make a failure rate of over 95% look good?

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swagmeister
Several times, I have accidentally left prohibited items in my bag. I was only
stopped once, and that was in the Cleveland airport where they proudly display
every interesting weapon they have confiscated on the wall next to the
checkpoint. They stole an expensive knife from me after a short interrogation
(I guess to determine the degree of intent) and let me through the checkpoint.
I think Peter Thiel had a bit about the TSA where he explained it as "security
theater" that makes people feel safe, while any sophisticated actor could
easily get through the checkpoints. I have to agree given my own experience
with forgetting that lighters and knives are in my bag

~~~
furyg3
I also never really understood the 'throw it away' (or stealing) mentality. If
you forget to pull your laptop or iPad out of your bag, they lecture you and
run it through again. If you leave a small pocketknife on your keyring, or you
forget to put your cologne in the plastic bag, the seize it and throw it away.
It seems to me like the proper thing to do is delay you slightly (to encourage
you to comply to the instructions next time - just like they do with laptops)
but allow you to put your cologne in a bag, finish your orange juice, or pay a
small fee to mail your restricted item back home.

It would be incredibly easy to have some flat-rate boxes and charge 2x what
the post office charges. Given how many items they confiscate it's probably a
decent revenue source!

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cowsandmilk
> pay a small fee to mail your restricted item back home.

At least 22 airports have this (including Cleveland).

[http://www.airportmailers.com/airportlist.php](http://www.airportmailers.com/airportlist.php)

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DanielBMarkham
Missed items 95% of the time. Wow. How much money, time, and heartache have we
all gone through? How much of a smudge on our national reputation as a free
country? And all for a 95% false negative rate?

Political systems of people exist for political reasons. So, of course, if the
entire effort looks useless, it can't be that the effort itself is idiotic.
Nope. The real crime here is that somebody made us look bad. In a political
system, this is the ultimate crime.

So we fire the head honcho and bring in a new one. Cue up lots of speeches
about how seriously we take all of this and how some new regime will make a
huge difference over the last one.

The TSA needs to be abolished. Immediately. There are viable and reasonable
replacement options. Even if you don't care about the money and prestige we've
lost, we can't keep sinking money down a hole on security theater when the
hole is endless.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Even if you don't care about the money and prestige we've lost, we can't
> keep sinking money down a hole on security theater when the hole is endless.

Sure we can. It's a terrible idea, but our capacity to produce more value to
sink into the hole is also endless.

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cgearhart
So...we fire the guy who's been on the job for 6 months? He just started in
January. [http://www.tsa.gov/about-tsa/melvin-
carraway](http://www.tsa.gov/about-tsa/melvin-carraway)

His predecessor left in October 2014 after serving in the post since 2010.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/tsa-director-who-
tighte...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/tsa-director-who-tightened-
airport-security-is-stepping-down.html)

I guess someone had to take the fall here, but it makes the whole thing seem
even more farcical to fire _this_ guy.

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ethana
And they will still confiscate your toothpaste and Listerine
because...terrorism.

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mark_l_watson
I liked the airport security in India. Everyone was searched quickly and
efficiently and your luggage did not get on the airplane until you identified
it as you got on the plane.

Would it cost too much to do this in the USA?

I always find the TSA employees to be polite and I don't blame the
shortcomings of TSA on the people working at the airports. They just need
better procedures, and that is a TSA Corporation issue.

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Plosaurus
Example of how different countries are: A plane was hijacked in local flight
in New Zealand a couple of years ago. Somebody called for tighter airport
security and the prime minister said something along the lines of "if you
wanted to kill a couple of dozen people you could hijack a bus, so no, there's
no need to increase security"

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nfriedly
A couple years back, TSA found a multitool that I had forgotten about. The
funny part is that I was on the second leg of my flight - they completely
missed it the first time and only found it at all because I was switching
airlines and had to go through security a second time.

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ck2
Good luck flying the holiday season this year if they ramp things up in
response to this.

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FlaceBook
"We're horrible at our job, but if you give us a few billion more dollars and
let us force people to remove their underwear at checkpoints, we promise to do
better!"

