Why has Congress not shut it down? I don't think anybody really likes the TSA, so I can't imagine there'd be too much opposition to a bill abolishing them. It affects so many people you could probably get elected just on this issue alone.
Good luck finding someone who wants to be the anti-airport-security candidate.
Even though you have to take it as a fact that the status quo is a powerful force in politics, it seems like there is room for someone who wants to get elected on a populist platform to make this a banner issue.
Yes. By some counts that group would include the majority of Americans. Personally, I've heard the words, "it makes me feel safer" come out of the mouths of what appear to be otherwise competent adult humans.
This is why no one will back off the light pollution from Chicago's streetlights. If you're the alderman who made that street dimmer at night, and someone gets murderered there, your career is over forever.
I can't see Congress abolishing the TSA. Just bringing up the idea will give a representative's opponents tons of ammunition to paint them as "soft on terror" and endangering Americans. People are fearful of this stuff. To the extent that people dislike the TSA, it's only because they're more annoying and slow than necessary, not because people think the whole concept is bad. If a member of Congress could come up with a way to improve the TSA then I imagine that would pass pretty easily, but of course that's a harder job.
But what about the alternatives? In this day and age it's just not thinkable to let people enter a plane without a security check. So you need some entity performing it.
I think one factor on providing successful and to the passenger acceptable (they will never be pleasant) security checks is adequate funding and employing adequately compensated professionals.
It's weird that my wait time on any European airport I ever use is literally always below 10 minutes and usually much less than that. And it's not that checks are less thorough around here.
It really just seems to be a funding issue.
Why is it 'unthinkable' to let people enter a plane without a security check? We let people get on a bus without a security check. If you're worried specifically about someone taking over the plane and crashing it into a building, you can protect the pilots separately from the people.
International flights are a little different, because someone already needs to verify a passport. Even there, I don't think the security checks are actually necessary.
I'm definitely opposed to classifying this as a 'funding issue' and giving the TSA even more money.
Air travel is in that sense special that you and up to 500 of your fellow passengers are in a metal tube in 12'000 metres height, which makes it conceptually a bit different from a bus, or even a train.
Cockpit doors are already re-inforced, but the cockpit is not the only sensitive part of a plane when a passenger wants to cause mayhem with a high powered rifle, or a - pistol.
In addition I, for one, prefer to take a flight without a bunch of open carry zealots believing that they have a god given rigth to take their guns everywhere and which would surely wind up armed on commercial flights.
But again, we seem to have a completely different opinion here and I have no urge to try to convince you why I don't think it's a good idea to abolish security checks for flights.
There's still room for disagreement even after all of these, though.
What was essentially added was prohibitions to take a nail clipper onto a plane (which, of course is utterly ludicrous), the rules regarding liquids and the whole cowboy attitude (apparently mostly in the US).
Reinforcing the cockpit doors was actually one of the better ideas. Unless, that is, you have a psychotic, suicidal first officer. But that's a whole different story and anyway couldn't have been caught by airport security.
The TSA was created solely to transfer liability from the airlines to the government in order to prevent the airlines from being sued into oblivion after 9/11. As nice side effects, it trains the population to accept the trappings of the police state and to disregard the sanctity of the 4th Amendment while proliferating bureaucracy.
But the main purpose is corporate welfare for commercial passenger aviation.
Airports are generally productions of municipal governments and badly mismanaged, money-losing construction projects. I don't anticipate county-managed security programs being any less awful than federally-managed security programs.
Few would suggest that. But the security measure that were in place in the US prior to 9-11 took far less time and cost much less, and in my opinion provided a similar level of security.
> And it's not that checks are less thorough around [any European airport ].
Really? Do they require you to remove shoes and belts, plus all items (even scraps of paper) from your pockets? Do they require you to stand motionless, hands raised for 1-2 mins to be scanned by a millimeter wave or backscatter x-ray machine or submit to a 15 min careful patdown and swabbing?
> It really just seems to be a funding issue.
I disagree -- I think it is largely an issue of what security measures they choose to utilize.
> Really? Do they require you to remove shoes and belts, plus all items (even scraps of paper) from your pockets? Do they require you to stand motionless, hands raised for 1-2 mins to be scanned by a millimeter wave or backscatter x-ray machine or submit to a 15 min careful patdown and swabbing?
"Intrusive" is not the same thing as "thorough". You are describing how intrusive the US measures are. How thorough the measures are depends on their effectiveness at actually detecting what they set out to detect (all the information that has come out about the tests of the US system in that regard have shown that, while intrusive, it is absolutely not thorough.)
The alternative is returning the responsibility and the accountability to the industry. The nationalization of air travel security wasn't done to improve security, it was to done to save the airlines by removing the potential drag of liability for future security incidents from them by nationalizing a function for which they had been responsible.
This hasn't improved security, but it has meant that the screening process is now provided by a cost-insensitive bureaucracy with the excuse of national security to avoid transparency and accountability.