The craziest part of the TSA is that if you compare the number+demographics of the people they employ (60,000 employees requiring only a high school diploma equivalent!) against the repeatedly demonstrated lack of any kind of effectiveness in their own testing, it becomes very quickly obvious that the whole thing is just a tax-funded wealth redistribution program (jobs! paid by the US government! for basically anyone!) built to pass under the radar of anti-socially-minded people unable to stomach the idea of giving money to poor people without demanding that they do pointless labor for its own sake in return.
Actually, the labor is worse than pointless. The travel productivity cost to society is astronomical. Like, literally everyone would be better off if the TSA paid people to just stay home and do absolutely nothing at all. The current employees would have their time back, the travelers would have their time back, and travel security would be no worse in any statistically meaningful sense. But the US has a huge contingent of people fundamentally opposed to doing things like this even when it would make literally everything better for literally everyone.
The effectiveness of a security program cannot solely be measured by penetration tests under controlled circumstances.
Aspects of deterrence and standardization required by the program fundamentally changes the threat actors’ calculus.
This is the very fundamentals of mixed strategy calculations in game theory.
While this is true, the method of 11 September 2001 worked for less than two hours. It is effectively impossible to hijack an airplane now, because the passengers will assume that they're dead either way and will do anything they can to stop you. You can still blow them up a la Lockerbie, but that's about it.
I really don't see a meaningful reason for most of "security screening" anymore. It just slows things down.
True, and even two hours maybe pushing it. The crash in PA on 9/11 was a direct result of passengers attacking the cockpit after they found out what happened to the other planes.
It might be worth doing some reading on the actual events of that day. For example, "being shot down by a fighter jet" wasn't an option; the fighters weren't armed when they were put up in the sky. The pilots in them went up knowing that if a plane needed to be taken out, they were going to be using themselves to do it. And none of that is to mention the passengers the parent comment was referring to, who made the conscious, heroic decision that their plane wasn't going to be used as a weapon like two previous ones had been, whatever the cost.
I don't mean to assume bad faith, but this was, at best, a throwaway comment that minimized the bravery and sacrifice of a lot of good people. Either way, I'd like to recommend you educate yourself a bit more. The Wikipedia page has some excellent detail, and if narrative structure is your thing, the book The Only Plane In The Sky is a masterpiece on the subject.
From the government itself? You can listen to unclassified / declassified 9/11-related communications (all over YouTube) and literally hear the conversations happening. The pilots have done interviews. There’s really no questioning it. It’s part of the US being woefully unprepared for 9/11 because it was so left of field. All evidence points to a lot of brave people doing their absolute best, working within a system that didn’t know how to handle the circumstance. That includes not being prepared to take down a commercial airliner at short notice, because why the hell would anyone ever need to do that!? (no sarcasm intended).
Truth, the primary impact was the ability to arbitrarily inflate the cost of soft goods dramatically inside the terminal.
It's such a good racket Hudson News...a little news stand company inside a few dozen terminals was able to go public on the NYSE...
The public perception that security is "doing it's job" is non-existent since everyone knows it's at best a jobs program and in practice another group of people measurably stealing travellers things.
I was going to suggest comparing it to other developed countries' practices vs their rate of high profile terrorist attacks, but then I realized it correlates the other way. Spain and Italy hustle you through an old-school metal detector, but going into Israel I thought I was about to be beaten down with a rubber truncheon when I forgot the piece of paper I had in my pocket.
China’s is surprisingly easy. Just a metal detector and an X ray of your carry on. Didn’t even take my shoes off.
Singapore’s is the best. The security is right at the gate so the timing is a lot more predictable and you don’t have to worry about missing your flight.
China’s is done as you’re transiting. My luggage was sniffed, my hands wiped for explosive residue, and I was x-rayed, all without having to stop for more than a few seconds.
Israel’s methods are incredibly interesting and something that you just wouldn’t get away with in the US. I say this as a non-American non-US-resident, which I think is important because my comment sounds like American exceptionalism.
A common analogy is to think about traffic lights.
If you run a penetration test, asking an individual to run a red light. You will achieve near 100% success.
However, when the traffic lights change actors’ behaviors to stop (at some probability such that it results in less collisions), most actors will stop according to the traffic lights.
That's not a good analogy at all. The incentives and motivations are completely different. Many drivers would at one point or another consider running a red light in order to save some time. I don't think you can say the same about passengers wanting to hijack a flight.
And on the opposite side of the stupid-examples spectrum: any tech company that hasn't had a computer security breach should fire their security team. All they're doing is spending a lot of money to make their developer's lives a lot harder.
Anyone with clean floors should fire their janitors.
Etc...
Those don't mean every security spend is worthwhile and justified; but Simpsons quotes also don't mean that no security spend has any effect.
Do you believe there aren’t people who wish to use air travel for nefarious purposes?
Do you believe that none of those people are factoring in the presence of identity checks, x-rays, backscatters, bomb dogs, and metal detectors into their risk/reward calculation or the techniques by which they’d commit nefarious acts?
They're probably factoring in strengthened cockpit doors and passengers' willingness to fight back, because those actually work. The rest is security theater.
As fewer people need to be employed to keep going with society's actual work, we're going to see more of these jobs programs. Our culture is obsessed with this idea that "a living" must be earned through toil, despite civilization requiring less and less toil year after year. You're absolutely right. It would be better for everyone if the TSA simply pay these employees to do nothing, but handing money to people is politically impossible, unless those "people" are banks and Too Big To Fail Businesses.
The demographic cliff happens before the fall in number of required jobs, because location specific manual labor and infrastructure maintenance has not been automated, and may be out 50 or so years due to robotics cost.
Just look at the number of help wanted signs in the US.
It’s not clear what you mean by “our culture” but humans in general struggle to have meaningful lives without feeling like they are contributing.
The Native populations in America and Iceland have some of the worst suicide rates because their cultures way of producing goods and food was supplanted by government benefits.
But there’s no need for them to contribute. The meaningful contributions they make are not going to be compensated, and their compensation is unrelated to labor. The jobs are pointless.
Perhaps, I’m just pointing out that government free cash to hang around and do whatever isn’t an actual solution for 95% of the people. Most aren’t artists/makers oppressed by their jobs.
> But the US has a huge contingent of people fundamentally opposed to doing things like this even when it would make literally everything better for literally everyone.
I don't think this is why your idea won't happen. I've talked to many people over the years who are genuinely worried about terrorists and they believe that the TSA protects them. You can cite all the statistics in the world to them, and it won't matter. They are not rational on this topic. They will view "get rid of the TSA" as a huge negative impact to their safety, and will vehemently oppose it with or without the paying agents to stay home.
I do think that paying people to stay home instead of doing make-work is relatively unpopular in the US, so that doesn't help. But the biggest problem you will face is just that people don't want to get rid of the TSA no matter how you do it. The TSA is very unpopular in tech/geek circles (and for good reason), but I've found it to be quite popular with normies.
The TSA stats show that they found 6,542 firearms in carry-on luggage at US airports last year. [0] This seems to undermine the argument that they are ineffective, unless you think those weapons should have been been allowed on aircraft.
How many crimes were prevented? Thousands of guns per year were accidentally or ignorantly (or even defiantly, but nothing happened) brought on board before 9/11, too.
The TSA makes rules and then enforces them. Their ability to enforce their own rules doesn't make them effective.
Hijackings have been reduced since 9/11 but were always thousands fewer than the number of guns confiscated in the United States alone.
The most significant safety improvements (to the pilots' door, new training, changed passenger willingness to fight, revamped air marshal program) do not involve the TSA, at least not the 'retail' side to which most passengers are exposed.
I'm still waiting for numbers that back up the claim that thousands of guns were brought on board without being used for hijackings. The 9/11 hijackers did not actually use guns. [0] Checks for guns date back to the early 70s. Presumably they didn't use guns because they were afraid they might be detected.
Not sure what else you are looking for. The original stat about the number of guns confiscated (that would otherwise be brought on airplanes) comes from the TSA earlier in the thread.
Yeah, people leave things in their carry-ons they should have checked all the time. They don’t pay attention to the guidelines and put it in their checked bag with a little sticker because they wanna save their $50. I actually do think every single one of the guns the TSA caught, if allowed on the aircraft, would have proceeded to their final destination with their passenger without incident.
Not to be judgemental, but I don't think of Spirit Airlines' passengers as wealthy. A short haul flight costs < $200, or less than a PlayStation 5, so their customers aren't, like, destitute, but that's a long way from being wealthy.
I really don't understand the sentiment of "literally everyone would be better off if the TSA paid people to just stay home and do absolutely nothing at all". I can understand sentiments like the TSA is inefficient, or bloated, or wasteful, but does literally nothing?
Do you really think things would be better if we had no xray scanners for luggage or full body scanners for people? Someone needs to run those machines, and thats the job of the TSA. How can you say we would be better off without those?
If you can't access the cockpit, what are you going to do with either of those? You can kill a passenger, but you can already go out and kill someone before anybody reacts. Most people choose not to do that for some reason.
Also you can pay money for TSA pre-check of CLEAR for faster security clearance. So those who have money to pay for those services are less impacted by TSA bloat.
If my goal was to get something dangerous on board. Why wouldn't I put the people in that group... It seems insane not absolutely everyone is subjected to same level scrutiny each and every time.
It's not so much a contingent of people fundamentally opposed to doing things like this, as it is people in power having a nice chunk of $ for contractors to milk with 0 inconvenience to them as they fly private.
Of course they would (much more free time to do actually productive tasks!) unless you’re assuming they will be losing the “dignity of work” or something like that.
My question is, why do people only worry about poor people not having the dignity of work? Shouldn’t we be more worried about all the children of the rich who will never need to earn a living? Shouldn’t we make them all do labor, for the good of their own souls?
If they were capable of doing actually productive tasks, they would get a job somewhere other than the TSA. It’s more a question of structure and routine than “dignity of work”, and the type of person who can have structure and routine in their life without a job has enough agency that they wouldn’t be working for the TSA either.
> Shouldn’t we be more worried about all the children of the rich who will never need to earn a living?
We should be worried about those people because they tend to die from drug abuse much more frequently than the general population. The same is true for washed up celebrities and lottery winners. In fact, this is something that rich people tend to worry about a lot in regard to their own children.
> If they were capable of doing actually productive tasks, they would get a job somewhere other than the TSA
This statement seems bonkers to me. People work at the TSA because they need money. Anybody who can hold down a job at the TSA would be entirely capable of doing many productive tasks that may not be remunerative, such as child care, elder care, care for the disabled, any number of home/landscape maintenance tasks, home construction, etc. Not to mention all of the activities that people do to add value to their lives and those around them: contributing the community, making art/music, etc.
> Anybody who can hold down a job at the TSA would be entirely capable of doing many productive tasks that may not be remunerative, such as child care, elder care, care for the disabled, any number of home/landscape maintenance tasks, home construction, etc.
Everyone pretty much assumed the children of the rich will be spoiled and entitled drags on society. But unless you’re proposing to prevent parents from spending their own money on their children, rich children are irrelevant.
I love how you put it. As born and raised in a communist eastern European country I can attest to how accurately it depicts the inefficiencies and absurdities of centrally planned economy. Seeing this kind of nonsense flourishing in the US of A is irony of the highest order.
> Like, literally everyone would be better off if the TSA paid people to just stay home and do absolutely nothing at all.
We would also all be better off if we lived in a socialist utopia where everyone helps each other, free housing, free food, unlimited transportation, no money, no jobs, no rich employers, no corporations, no war, famine, etc.
But all of that is as likely to happen as an American population giving poor people money to live just because there aren't any jobs that will hire them where they live with their qualifications.
So instead we do the hack of a welfare program disguised as a valuable civic service and eat the larger cost to the economy. Every politician knows it's a welfare program, and they love it, because they don't have to call it one.
The key comment is at the end of course. A random TSA officer may decide it’s not allowed. Probably better not.
One of my main peeves—aside from the general which I mostly avoid with TSA Pre—is a hiking pole which I often want to use at a random destination I’ll just use carryon for. But it’s not allowed in carryon.
I have a camera tripod[0] with detachable legs, allowing you to use it as a monopod. The thing's incredibly sturdy, and the monopod could easily be used as a hiking pole. Similarly, maybe there's a way to DIY a tripod out of hiking poles?
The rules really are ridiculous. You aren't allowed to bring a clear bottle of water, but you are allowed to bring fish in your carry on. Freeze that water, or put a fish in that bottle of water, and it is allowed, because you're transporting live fish! I was going through a checkpoint a few weeks ago and forgot a filled, reusable water bottle in my backpack. Instead of just letting me dump the bottle out and proceed, the TSA handler made me go to the back of the line and go through the entire checkpoint, body scanner etc again. If I had just brought a fish with me, I could have avoided the whole thing.
Fish are allowed in small bottles of water (though filled "water" bottles are not) because the presence of a living fish in the liquid is a pretty clear indicator that the liquid in the bottle is water, and not something else like explosives.
I actually have a walking stick with a removable end knob that exposes a tripod screw. However I assume I wouldn’t convince any TSA agent that the item in question was not in fact a walking stick. (Also not sure it gets short enough to fit in carryon.
Since the final decision rests with the TSA officer.. maybe.. just maybe you can sweet talk them and they'll allow it since it is _just_ a hiking pole.
I was once bringing foam nunchucks to my partner. They were foam, as in pool noodle foam, and they were used for training.
I was blocked and told I'd have to check the bag. I did and missed the flight, so my partner picked up the bag (free shipping!) and I stayed home that weekend.
The TSA is such a joke. The fact that they can't even make determinations without leaving the, "The final decision rests with the TSA officer on whether an item is allowed through the checkpoint" disclaimer shows it's all pretend, made up bull.
Or it shows how insanely hard it is to make a flowchart to deal with actual reality. Here, try this: https://novehiclesinthepark.com/
Then imagine a rule set as complicated as “all rules required to ensure safe air travel” being redteamed by a population of a billion people with incentives varying from “personal convenience” to “fly into an occupied skyscraper” to “move ten pounds of cocaine.”
Now make that rule set enforceable by tens of thousands of people in a time and cost-effective manner.
Deferring a lot of authority to a somewhat sensible person on the ground is the only plausible approach.
> from “personal convenience” to “fly into an occupied skyscraper” to “move ten pounds of cocaine.”
The TSAs job shouldn’t be preventing drug trafficking. What’s next? They check everything with serial numbers to ensure no stolen goods are being carried?
I don’t think the TSA does try to prevent drug trafficking, but I do suspect that you cannot (and should not be able to) just stuff a suitcase full of cocaine and walk it through the Precheck line.
At a certain point that’s a legitimate safety issue.
You’ve touched on my issue with it - it’s an American organisation in America. Yet the TSA bullshit is contagious annf other countries have subscribed. It also makes things like passing through the US painful.
Yeah I guess the sensible thing for every other western nation would’ve been to watch the innovation of “plane hijackers are now both murderous and suicidal” and not make some changes to their security regime.
Also, yeah, air travel is a global system. Are you proposing that we just let people fly from other countries with no security infrastructure to the US? And your view is that this somehow makes sense?
My issue is mainly that the security crap is applied when there is no connection to the US occurring.
If that poor security theatre stayed within US borders it would be more palatable to us outsiders, then we could make adjustments for that and carry on.
It’s so goofy when foreigners think the US is forcing other countries to do x y z things, like “have airport security.”
Your airports have security because your leaders learned the same things on 9/11 that the US did. The threat landscape changed immensely. Hijackings were not super uncommon, but they were never that dangerous because it’s hard to do much damage without killing yourself too.
What 9/11 revealed is that there are actually people who can be convinced to fly themselves into buildings on loaded aircraft, and yes I do think “there will be bomb dogs” and “there will be X-rays” etc are factored into bad actors’ thinking about how to commit bad actions.
Or, you know, I suppose you could think that there were only 19 people in the whole wide world who would’ve possibly done what they did and luckily we got rid of them all in one day.
Seems wishful to me though, given that we see thematically similar attacks on a weekly basis throughout the Muslim world. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Huh somehow one of the closest US security allies, Five Eyes member NZ, isn’t subjugated by US security apparatus whims… almost like it has nothing to do with the US deciding other nations’ security regimes.
Yes there are dozens of suicide attacks per year, and yes they are overwhelmingly throughout the Muslim world (not merely the Middle East).
Security’s role is twofold: deterrence and prevention. You have no way of knowing what the deterrent effects are, which is why I asked if you’re of the belief that there were only 19 people willing to do what happened on 9/11 and we just happened to get rid of them all on the same day.
I appear to misinterpreted what you said. Your initial comment appeared to me to be a reference to flying a hijacked plane into a building and that isn’t happening that often.
Suicide attacks in general are common. Never talked about in the same context is the lone angry man with a gun as that is somehow that is unsolvable in the US.
Fascinating how the TSA overreach and ineffectiveness is somehow required, yet the terror inflicted by the domestic problem of gunmen is not able to be addressed. Is it not terrorism?
Do you believe the TSA is effective? The Department of Homeland Security don’t.
What on earth are you on about? Is this just “USA has problems argh argh”?
The reason the gun issue is hard to solve is extremely, extremely obvious. The early designers of our country wrote specific words on a particularly important document. Agree or disagree with those words or think they should be changed or whatever you want, the “why” of it being difficult to fix is self-evident to anyone who can read English though.
Huh… DHS says TSA fails 95% of penetration tests.
Let’s try two interpretations:
1) DHS thinks TSA is “ineffective” (your interpretation) and yet continues to commit $9B+ per year to it for… no reason? Because they don’t have other programs to fund instead? To soothe the public while simultaneously publishing the 95% figure?
2) DHS views TSA as one component of a risk-based “defense in depth” strategy and thinks its contributions to that overall system, despite failing most actual penetration tests, is worth $9B+ per year.
You know if you got over the “USA stupid bad mean” the world would be a lot more interpretable.
> Your airports have security because your leaders learned the same things on 9/11 that the US did.
I have to imagine that politics and power plays also contributed to these changes, as they did with the creation of Homeland Security, the apparent changes in surveillance, the uptick in militarization of police forces, the apparent changes in our attitudes toward incarceration, interrogation, and torture of suspected terrorists, and so on.
When irrationality takes over, people want to feel safe more than they care about being safe. So, as a politician, if I want to achieve and maintain a high approval rating, I must attend to people's beliefs more than I must attend to their needs.
Thus, if other world leaders enact hardline policies and I am a leader in a country where my constituents are innumerate, illiterate, ignorant, or civically uninvolved, then following the lead of a strongman country is a shortcut to achieving my political ends. And in these cases, if other world leaders make these changes and I choose to do nothing, even if doing nothing is the right course of action, I should probably expect my approval rating to drop.
> Thus, if other world leaders enact hardline policies and I am a leader in a country where my constituents are innumerate, illiterate, ignorant, or civically uninvolved,
And I suppose this is meant to describe pretty much every European and Asian country?
They have pretty clearly outlined on their website, and in airports, for years that weapons--even toy versions of weapons--are not permitted in carry-on baggage.
A lightsaber is not a real weapon, thus, the TSA allows lightsaber toys in carryons. (Note: this assumes the lightsaber is plastic. TSA agents are treated to assume metal rod-shaped objects as batons or similar, so metal lightsabers generally can't be in carry-on.)
Sounds reasonable to me. You don't want people bringing fake weapons onboard that they can use to threaten people onboard with to comply with their demands, regardless of whether they could actually cause damage or not.
I had a buddy fly international out of the US just two weeks ago and TSA made him check his lightsaber and wouldnt let him carry it on. Of course the airline lost it though...
This website is surprisingly useful. Recently I had to decide whether I could bring my ezpass transponder on the plane, and a quick search revealed a similar page answering exactly that question. Compare that to flying in Europe where afaik most airports won't have such detailed lists of ok/not ok items, to say nothing of the national differences.
*Unless it’s not, who knows what we decide at the last minute and then your bag is already checked and now you’re at the TSA line backing everything up because we make shit up on the fly.
It should just say checked bags only and nip it in the bud. And don’t get me started on the TSA and their rubber rules with guns.
They have to have this policy. You can come up with a weaponizeable design for almost any object you can think of e.g. a toy lightsaber with a heavy metal hilt the is basically usable as a club. You have to give agents the discretion to say "yeah, that's not coming on a plane"
Exactly. My mother-in-law is an avid golfer and had a temporary condition requiring the use of a cane. Friends of hers got her a driver (the largest golf club), modified to have a bent handle and some rubber on the head to serve as a cane.
She was surprised to find that the TSA wouldn't let her through security carrying what most would agree is effectively both a golf club (not allowed) and a cane (allowed). (I was surprised that she was surprised.)
The surprising bit is that anyone would think there was room to swing a golf club. I can’t even stand up on a plane, and I sure as hell can’t sit properly.
Actually, the labor is worse than pointless. The travel productivity cost to society is astronomical. Like, literally everyone would be better off if the TSA paid people to just stay home and do absolutely nothing at all. The current employees would have their time back, the travelers would have their time back, and travel security would be no worse in any statistically meaningful sense. But the US has a huge contingent of people fundamentally opposed to doing things like this even when it would make literally everything better for literally everyone.
So here we are.