EDIT: I have TSA Pre via DHS/CBP Global Entry, as does my wife. There should be no reason for us to go through a body scanner if the TSA and DHS believe their background check and fingerprinting are effective.
Opting out was practically encouraged last time I went via EWR - the woman doing the pat-downs seemed to be on training to do them, so they were funneling people to her rather than the scanners.
I see argument in some comments that the risk to a pregnant woman may not be so large (I have no idea), but there are many people with medical devices who could be seriously harmed by a mandatory policy.
If device manufacturers are so clear that the devices are not designed to be subjected to EMF from these scanners, will the TSA be replacing devices and compensating people ?
The security theater just got officially dangerous (ok, more dangerous than before).
The general concept of security in layers is perfectly reasonable because no measure can be 100% effective. Combining a few 99% effective measures can get you acceptably close. We do the same thing in cybersecurity.
That said, the TSA is still dumb because of how arbitrary and unfair the requirements can be.
The TSA is basically just building a 50 foot fencepost in the middle of nowhere and pretending people need to climb it instead of walking around.
/s
Thank you, TSA, for protecting us from making small and minor mistakes!
Background checks ( of the TSA's depth ) don't reveal if a candidate is susceptible to blackmail or coercion, so physical checks are always a good idea.
After all it's not who you are but what you possess that constitutes a threat.
So what is the point of pre-"clearance"? Revenue, I suspect.
Then why have a background check if it's ineffective?
1 check - x% effective.
2 checks - (x + y)% effective.
n checks - (x + y + ...[n times]) % effective.
That's the issue with security theater.
I'm not sure why people here keep referring to everything as security theater, to be honest.
Yes, for the purpose of "protecting American at large", it's approximately that.
And it's very simple to see too! The most effective way to prevent airplane terror is to stop everyone from traveling, are we gonna be safer thank to that, even disregard all the downsides of not being to travel? You know the bad guy can just plot their scheme elsewhere, right? What's next? Millimeters scanner at Taylor Swift concert?
Also, since this is HN, I believe your maths is incorrect. The effective rate is (100 - (100-x)(100-y)(100-z)...)%
Further, it's theatric because the many of the "dangerous" items have no obvious malicious use, and the rules are totally arbitrary. I can't bring knitting gear on an airplane, but my small pocket knife is totally fine (according to official rules, though some airport security agents will disagree).
Finally, any attempt at plane hijacking nowadays will cause passengers to fight for their life to prevent it. Prior to 9/11 people would just sit still and wait to land in Cuba or whatever, but now people associate hijacking with flying into a building and will act thereafter.
It could actually be safer to allow knives and similar "weapons" that can't penetrate the plane body, so people have a chance to defend themselves when some terrorist inevitably smuggles aboard a handgun and starts shooting.
There are a lot of "weapons" you could take based on the Tools category [1].
[0] https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/prohibited-ite... [1] https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/prohibited-ite...
0.000007656967% of the time they did something. In reality it's half of that. In reality of actual danger being present it's even lower than half of that. I'm talking near 7.6e^-8 in rarity.
The odds of being stuck by lightning is higher than the TSA ensuring anyone's safety.
[0] http://blog.tsa.gov/2015/01/tsa-2014-year-in-review.html
I'm Canadian, but I have a similar story. I was travelling with my mother, and my backpack was swabbed and X-Rayed at security. No problems. It wasn't until I got home and was unpacking that I realized I had a bottle of aerosol nitroglycerine (!) in my carry-on! My mother's got a heart condition and I was carrying around a spare canister just in case something happened.
Disclaimer: I'm not a nutjob. I completely understand the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. I simply don't believe enough research has gone into terahertz imaging, and don't believe I'll have any recourse against the US government (based on their track record) in the event its proven to have negative health effects in the future.
The idea that the TSA has the "Right" to do what it does, but that expecting the US government to obey the law makes you a "nut job" is what's really nuts.
They aren't releasing the data for when these machines are audited for safety/compliance. https://www.oig.dhs.gov/assets/Mgmt/2015/OIG_15-86_May15.pdf
When our child was born in 2002, there was a lot of 'buzz' about the dangers of vaccinations. Most of it we were quickly able to filter out, but there was a body of research that had strong correlations between lower incidents of a whole variety of early childhood problems in '1st world' countries that didn't vaccinate as early and aggressively as the United States, such as Japan and some part of northern Europe.
We decided to not vaccinate until our son was five years old, an age when he was getting into more crowded social situations. And he has been current ever since.
We weren't 100% convinced that the broad spectrum and very early age vaccinations in the United States were a problem, but we weren't convinced otherwise. At the same time, we knew that vaccinations are an absolutely critical part of modern society.
Like you, we made some conservative BUT WELL REASONED decisions regarding our child.
That kind of middle of the road thinking needs to be way more commonplace.
Sorry for totally hijacking your post. :)
You're exercising really terrible risk assessment, arguably even worse than the TSA's own.
So you've explicitly supported this totalitarian theatre. It's never too late to apologize.