
Former TSA screener says the job does little to keep fliers safe - spking
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/confessions_of_tsa_agent_we_re_bunch_OhxHeGd0RR9UVGzfypjnLO
======
DanielBMarkham
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
"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.

------
brownbat
"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>

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
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
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.

------
zampano
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
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.

------
ck2
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
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
Hooray for a trillion dollars spent getting thousands of people to do busywork
8 hours a day for years and years. :/

------
codex
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_alterna...](http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2010/11/tsa_alternatives_israeli_airpo.html)

~~~
betterunix
"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?).

~~~
codex
I should clarify that I think the TSA wants to prevent airline _bombings_
(that is, loss of a plane) above all else. Hijackings are much more difficult
than they were before 9/11, even if the terrorists were in a group and allowed
some weapons. I don't think the TSA is, or should be, focusing on hijackings.
AFAIK, since 9/11 there have been no more hijacking attempts, but several
bombing attempts.

~~~
betterunix
"I should clarify that I think the TSA wants to prevent airline bombings (that
is, loss of a plane) above all else."

I have my doubts about that as well. I would think that the lack of K-9 teams
near departure gates is a good sign that bombings are not the concern of the
TSA when it comes to airport security. Bombings are probably a concern
somewhere, but the security checkpoints do not seem to do much when it comes
to stopping a bomb plot.

Keep in mind that private planes are exempt from the security checks. If a
terrorist wanted to blow up a commercial plane, what would stop them from
chartering a private jet, bringing bombs on board, and then ramming their
explosive-laden plane into an airliner mid-flight? Why even bother doing it in
flight? A terrorist might just roll their chartered jet into a fully-loaded
passenger plane on the runway, and blow up a plane in front of a crowd of
people.

Perhaps there is some other procedure in place to ensure that no bombs can
make it past the numerous ways that people and vehicles can enter an airport
without going through a security checkpoint. If that is the case, what is the
purpose of the checkpoint? Why not just apply whatever techniques prevent
terrorists from ramming private jets into airliners to the rest of the
airport, and let us keep our rights intact?

It is also worth pointing out that there are lots of other bombing targets
that are not being bombed, despite a _complete_ lack of security. Anyone can
bring large packages onto the NYC subways without any harassment or scanning,
yet those trains (which are packed with hundreds of people during the rush
hour) have not been blown up. A truck full of explosives could easily drive
onto a major bridge. Yet despite these clear vulnerabilities, and despite the
fact that other countries see such attacks and more, we rarely have them here.
Are airlines really more special targets for bombers than urban transit
systems?

~~~
anigbrowl
As has been pointed out before, an explosion in an airport would be bad but
the damage would be pretty localized and everyone knows where the airport is,
there are lots of emergency facilities in palace because they always have to
be prepared for the possibility of crash landings or other accidental
disaster.

An explosion in the air, or abuse of the plane as a missile as happened on
9-11, is a much bigger problem because the potential destructive radius is
much larger and the area of incidence much less predictable. The costs of that
happening in a city center in 2001 were staggering; likewise, consider the
economic impact of an airliner plunging into or blowing up over a nuclear
power station, which might result in less actual destruction but far more
severe public panic and economic disruption.

~~~
betterunix
I pointed this out elsewhere, but a rush hour subway train in New York City
carries over two thousand people (and that is assuming that the train is not
over capacity), nearly as many as were killed in the September 11th attack.
One well-timed, powerful bomb could kill almost everyone on such a train, and
if it were detonated while a second train was passing by even more people
would be killed. These trains travel over major bridges and under important
buildings; the damage of such an attack could be enormous.

It has not happened yet, and hopefully it never will happen. The bomb itself
would probably be difficult to procure and transport to New York City without
being detected by an intelligence agency. What we can say is this: body
scanners, luggage X-rays, and shoe removal have done nothing to prevent such
an attack, because no such measures are in place.

~~~
anigbrowl
Such bombings as you describe have taken place in London, Madrid, and arguably
Japan, to cite just a few. They certainly cause a lot of damage, but you can
harden fixed infrastructure and to some extent this has already been done,
since subway/rail operators already deal with the risk of switching failure
and train collision. Train derailments and collisions are themselves powerful
events, given the mass and momentum of a fast-moving train, and of course
collisions involving freight trains carry additional risks because of chemical
spills and so forth. I think it's unlikely that any sort of portable bomb
would do the sort of damage you have in mind, because even commuter train
carriages are engineered with the possibility of a collision in mind. Although
terrorist incidents of this kind have been very destructive where they've
occurred, the fact is that the damage is relatively contained, and because
it's an elevated risk environment (due to the possibility of accidents) there
are robust safety and rescue protocols already in place.

As an example of the difference, consider the Oklahoma city truck bomb had
explosive force equivalent to 5 kilotons of TNT, involved 13 barrels of
explosive, and other materials, requiring a small box truck to transport. It
did horrendous damage, but in terms of pure destructive force it wrecked about
1/3 of a 9-story building. The two plane impacts on the WTC, by contrast,
caused the total collapse of two 80-story skyscrapers. There was lots of
ancillary damage in both cases, but I stand by my arguments that it's harder
to predict where an attack from the air will occur and that the destructive
potential is typically larger in the case of a successful attack, because of
the extra mass, speed, and height inputs.

------
asmithmd1
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>

[2] [http://www.nbcnews.com/travel/number-air-passengers-
increase...](http://www.nbcnews.com/travel/number-air-passengers-
increased-2011-523879)

~~~
brown9-2
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
$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.

------
wfunction
xkcd gets it right: <http://xkcd.com/651/>

I never understood why do they ban water bottles but allow laptop batteries
through, it's just plain ridiculous.

~~~
codex
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-...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/travel/2010-08-16-airlinebatteries16_CV_N.htm)

~~~
wfunction
> "Can they explode quickly enough...?"

Explosion? Starting a fire isn't enough?

~~~
codex
Given that the TSA allows common lighters and matches to be taken on board,
apparently not. I think aircraft cabins are designed to be "fire resistant"
(for obvious reasons) though I'd be surprised if they were fireproof.

~~~
wfunction
But then why don't they allow water bottles? Is a flammable liquid worse than
a flammable solid like Lithium?

------
SEJeff
"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
Has the FBI? I have only heard of entrapment cases where the threats were FBI
agents themselves.

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

------
anigbrowl
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-
ove...](http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/delta-joins-protest-over-tsa-
knife-carrying-author/nWnPX/)

------
tokenadult
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>

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.

~~~
gambiting
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.

~~~
taligent
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.

~~~
newman314
No, they are not. Plenty of airports in Asia do not require the removal of
shoes.

Source: me. I fly a lot too.

------
danielschonfeld
<http://1.usa.gov/Yju9G6>

Please help shut this show down

~~~
taligent
You actually think it would be better to put it in the hands of private
companies ?

Wow.

~~~
mpyne
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.

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

------
joering2
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
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.

------
anon987
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.

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

------
SippinLean
Posting tabloids on HN?!

------
andyl
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
TSA != FAA

~~~
andyl
Yeah but they both regulate the flying public. They should talk!

------
shn
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
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>

~~~
triplesec
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
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.

