To really properly balance this you'd have to compare with a world where the TSA does not exist. But we don't actually have the possibility to compare the two. Chances are (not saying this is the case) that the combined haul of what the TSA found during the last decade would have led to more deaths. Controlled experiments on this scale are unfortunately not possible so in the end it all boils down to what you wish to believe most or what seems to be most reasonable.
In Europe we had a rash of airplane hijackings in the 1970s and 1980s, onsequently there is plenty of institutional experience in how to deal with terrorism and aircraft.
We chose not to plump for the TSA groping squad. Neither should the US.
There were also quite a lot of hijackings in the US during that period. But none of them ended as badly as 9-11, so it's not a terribly meaningful comparison.
I wouldn't say the comparison was meaningless. The blood toll of Entebbe and Landshut was less, but the public impact was enormous.
One must keep the public mood in the back of one's head - this was in 1977, there was a series of attacks by the Red Army Faction, which everyone had thought was dead, and then, just as now, there was the discussion about dragnet surveillance and civil liberties, there was even discussion about the aims of the RAF, perhaps they even had a point.
No, I actually meant that it is the most likely possibility. I'm just not sure, but I take it that if you inspect a few billion air travellers that you occasionally will find something real that may have cost an air traveller to die. The numbers are too vast to discount a few lives lost as a good possibility.
In my opinion the balance is completely lost.
Contrast it with: chances are that if we equipped every passenger airline with a mandatory ER that we would save a few lives. And yet, we don't do this because the economics and the logistics are simply not worth it. (I can't prove that one either way).
OK, I was just confused by your parenthetical. I guess you're saying that you're not certain, but you think that's the most likely.
I am curious as to why you think that's the case, though. The linked article estimates roughly 500 additional deaths per year. It's hard to know what proportion of those to assign to the TSA versus fear of terrorism, of course. But for any reasonable proportion, I think, I just don't see how it works. The TSA would have to be saving hundreds of lives a year for it to be a net gain. In a hypothetical non-TSA world, there'd have to be a couple of terrorist attacks killing everyone on board an airliner each year, or a 9/11-scale attack every few years.
There's no reason, as far as I know, to think that the TSA has prevented anything of the sort. The main reasons for the relative lack of terrorist activity on American airlines in the past decade and change are:
1. Terrorist organizations just aren't that well funded and organized. 9/11 was pretty much a one-off event for them, costing relatively huge amounts of manpower and money.
2. Cockpit doors are reinforced and kept locked, making it hard to take over an airplane.
3. Passengers now know that a hijacking likely means that they will die, so any would-be hijacker is presented with dozens if not hundreds of people who suddenly have nothing left to lose. 9/11 counted on passengers thinking that they would survive the event if they remained docile, and now that this attitude is gone, hijackings are no longer really possible.
I've not seen any evidence that the TSA has stopped any terrorist attacks during its existence, let alone enough to account for hundreds of lives each year.
* I'm just not sure, but I take it that if you inspect a few billion air travellers that you occasionally will find something real that may have cost an air traveller to die.*
The question is: why did nothing like this ever made the national news? There has been the odd instance of someone bringing a knife on an airplane, and that was about it. There have also been several FBI-led entrapments and leadings-on of wannabe terrorists, who could never have caused any damage even if they had wanted to.
What we haven't seen is the TSA preventing an airplance hijacking. My best guess is that these things are rare to begin with, and if there were any plots it was the police that got on top of them, not the TSA ballsack grabbers.
