TSA's Head of Security 'Removed' from Office | Hacker News Reader

TSA's Head of Security 'Removed' from Office

npr.org

161 pointsjs2162 comments

One of the most irritating aspects of the TSA inefficiencies is that they know the demand at each airport in advance. Because all airlines submit passenger information to the TSA as its booked (often months or weeks in advance), the TSA can shift resources.

While I'm all for blaming the TSA, the head of the TSA's union was on NPR this morning and pointed out that Congress diverted funds collected from the "9/11 Tax" (per-ticket fixed fee used to fund TSA) to other parts of the government budget. The union is requesting emergency funding for 8,000 additional TSOs, which would only bring it back to 2011 staffing levels.

There are quite a few other issues at play as well. The TSA has the highest turnover rate of any government agency. This is, in large part, due to the fact that they're mostly part-time and underpaid. Their public image isn't respected either.

I do think we should replace/get rid of the TSA, but the neo-conservative method of government excision where you cut off the cash flow and wait for everyone to get pissed off ("starve the beast") is incredibly unpopular. But thats exactly whats happening.

I'm not sure that's even in play here. Neo-conservatives talk about "small government" but it's mostly lip service, especially when it comes to anything related to the military/industrial/espionage/security/prison complex. Cutting the budget for the TSA doesn't sound in harmony with the normal neo-con agenda.

Here's what the Tea party website has to say:

http://teaparty.org/tsa-misconduct-highest-levels-160893/

There are many other articles on conservative channels ripping the TSA as a big government boondoggle.

Note that teaparty.org is definitely not "the Tea Party website." It is just one of many Tea Party organizations, and not a major one. The Tea Party is a decentralized movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement#Composition

It's really not lip service.

The budget sequestration deal in 2011 resulted in 10% across the board cuts in 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_budget_sequestra...

Likewise, if you look at how Congressional Republicans responded to the Obama Administration's request for funding for Zika research you'll see the same thing. The answer was both "no" and "why don't you divert research funds from Ebola to Zika research if you want it so badly" (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/05/16/congr... )

Budgets have been cut. Not in ways anyone would ever want, but to say that they're not have an impact is not correct.

Those weren't neocons driving those cuts (neocons position in the Republican Party -- and thus national politics -- peaked under Bush and rapidly receded after he left office.)

One point of correction is that neocons are in both major US political parties and are know chiefly by their [chicken-]hawk-ish foreign policy.

There are few, if any, neoconservatives in the Democratic Party (there are hawkish neoliberal internationalists in both parties, though, and the distinctions between those and neoconservatives are fairly fine.)

Hillary is a neocon.

Just a nit: The management technique you're talking about is called "attrition". I think it's ideologically neutral. Either way: "starve the beast" isn't a neocon position; Grover Norquist isn't a neoconservative.

Neoconservatism is primarily about activist foreign policy, something that sets them apart from traditional conservatism, where isolationism is a more prominent strain of thought.

This is not a small thing: Starve the beast is emphatically a right-wing tactic, and well known one at that. To call it ideologically neutral w/r/t government is blatantly wrong.

Whether it's technically neoconservative or not is a red herring. (Neoconservative being just one subset of the overall conservative movement.)

Starve-the-beast is certainly a conservative strategy! RIF through attrition, though, is a general management technique.

"Starve the beast" refers to cutting government revenue to force tougher decisions about which departments to reduce or eliminate.

I agree, like I said, it's just a nit.

Fair distinction!

The traditional definition of a neo con (pre GW Bush) is an ex leftist in the 50s/60s who moved to the right. There are domestic and foreign policy neo cons. The foreign policy sorta overshadowed the domestic side during the Bush years. I.e a conservative being a liberal who was mugged by reality, broken windows, Norman Podohertz's notorious 'my negro problem and ours' essay, etc.

you make a very good point but I still think the TSA can adapt and survive if they stop the security theater bullshit and figure out a much faster screening process requiring less staff. Unless I am missing something, that is what they are being asked to do

Every time government (or union) incompetence comes to light, they call for more funding (or pay).

>the neo-conservative method of government

The only use the word "neo-conservative" has anymore is to identify people who only know political buzzwords.

> Congress diverted funds collected from the "9/11 Tax" (per-ticket fixed fee used to fund TSA) to other parts of the government budget. The union is requesting emergency funding for 8,000 additional TSOs, which would only bring it back to 2011 staffing levels.

There is a good chance they are deliberately trying to cause long delays so media will get outraged, and then they can say "it is because of not enough funding, we need more money, call your Congressperson".

Remember the "sequestration" a year or two back, how they started closing parks, while still spending billions on defense and other things that public would have little involvement in. This could be something similar.

This is called the Washington Monument Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome

It is a common tactic governments employ to spur the people to accepting higher taxes.

The bit about money is nonsense. The TSA was given more money than it requested for 2016:

> "The agency charged with overseeing security at the nation's airports was given a $7.4 billion budget, which was $211 million more than it had in 2015 and $93 million more than was requested."

http://www.klobuchar.senate.gov/public/2016/3/relief-at-msp-...

Can we just get rid of the TSA?

Current estimates are that hundreds of people die each year in car accidents because they chose to drive rather than deal with TSA lines. This means that every few years the TSA manages to inflict more casualties than 9/11 did. In addition to inconvenience, economic inefficiency, and a demonstrably ineffective screening process that weapons can easily get through. (As many have shown.)

Security theater is a dangerously bad idea no matter how you look at it. Can we do something saner?

how do they estimate this stuff?

Post/pre 9-11 I think

You estimate from survey data how many more people are taking several hundred mile road trips instead of flying, then apply known traffic fatality statistics how many wound up dead from that decision.

See https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/excess_automo... for a reference.

This is naive. Why would you assume the same number of successful attacks on air travel would occur without the security?

You can't argue that the current system hasn't done well, it has performed fantastically, based on the number of successful attacks within the US.

That said, they need a lot more screeners, and to be much more polite. And get rid of incompetent management.

I think it's a safe assumption, because if the TSA actually found a terrorist through its screening process they would parade this achievement in front of every news organization it could.

On the other hand, there have been numerous documented cases where people have deliberately snuck banned items through the TSA security checks.

Of course, you had to qualify statement that the TSA "has performed fantastically" with the number of _successful_ attacks. There have been terrorists that have attempted attacks, such as the underwear bomber and the shoe bomber, but those were all stopped by the passengers. To me, this should have warranted a congratulations to our fellow citizens for being vigilant - and maybe even a relaxation of some of the rules. As you know, the opposite occurred, and now we have to take our shoes off and can only take small amounts of liquid. Who's being naive?

By that logic, I've done a fantastic job getting the sun to rise every morning. Where is my taxpayer money?

How many attacks were stopped by the TSA? Directly: 0. Hell, they're 0/2 on known attempts (the Shoe Bomber in 2001 and Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in 2009), both thwarted instead by passengers and crew.

Indirectly? (E.g., how many attacks weren't planned because of the TSA that would have been planned and executed otherwise?) Very hard to say. Have law enforcement officials seen an uptick in other terror channels that would indicate terrorist plots are avoiding air travel?

Are any would-be terrorists abandoning their terror plans altogether because of the TSA? Surely not. So all the TSA is doing is shifting attacks from air travel to other channels. That's a net zero.

And finally, at what cost?

Shifting attacks from one method to another is not necessarily useless. If what would have been the most effective method is reduced in its effectiveness, and as a result, another less effective method becomes the most effective one, and the used one, that reduces the effectiveness of attacks.

That wording was convoluted.

What I mean is,

if they would have done plane attacks because of plane attacks working best for them, then making plane attacks not work as well, and therefore making them shift to something else, means that whatever they are doing for attacks wouldn't work as well for attacks as the plane attacks would have, which is a benefit.

That's not to say that the TSA is beneficial, or that it does really reduce the effectiveness of adversaries.

I'm just saying that, assuming that it is true that adversaries shift their attacks from air travel to other methods as a result of the TSA , that would suggest that adversaries are restricted by the TSA , and made somewhat less effective (assuming that adversaries weren't overestimating the effectiveness of air travel attacks originally).

Fair point.

I think we're both struggling with how to quantify the value of deterrence, and how to model (mentally or otherwise) things like "effectiveness shifting". It's hard! But I think we're notoriously bad as human being and a populace at having real conversations about cost-benefit analysis.

Zero successful attacks. Bottom line.

No one here is familiar with the concept of "deterrence", apparently.

How many attacks were there pre-9/11 (and thus TSA)?

We went quite a good long while without it and things were fine. This is fear-mongering bullshit, used to line pockets of politicians and lobbyists, pure and simple.

I don't see how anyone can claim otherwise when the guy in charge of "Homeland Security" (a name that sounds a bit too much like things you'd read about in fascist countries like the former USSR or one of the Axis powers, but I'm getting off script) at the time starts installing x-ray scanners and... OH LOOK AT THAT he has a huge ownership stake in the company that makes them.

And really the best way to "get rid of incompetent management" would be to shut it down. Otherwise it'll just be a revolving door of incompetent managers.

I've got this tiger repelling rock to sell you. Only $2B per year!

Add up the hours spent by people waiting in security lines and divide by the number of hours in an average life. How many person lives have been wasted by this bullshit?

Let's not forget that every single warrantless search is a violation of the 4th amendment. Every. Single. One.

Yet we let them do this, because they're holding our ability to move freely about the country hostage.

> Current estimates are that hundreds of people die each year in car accidents because they chose to drive rather than deal with TSA lines. This means that every few years the TSA manages to inflict more casualties than 9/11 did.

I don't have a link, but at one point, someone did the math on the backscatter machines (the ones that emitted ionizing radiation, which have since been replaced) and the number of people going through them and concluded that statistically, the TSA will kill more people through scanner-induced cancer than the hijackers did on 9/11.

Do we actually have numbers on this? Last I heard, the scanners were never externally audited, so we have no idea how much radiation they are using

I believe those were the old machines (the ones made by Michael Chertoff's company), which are no longer in use. I have heard they might be at smaller airports, but I haven't seen them in a long time.

No tally should forget the effective lives and productivity lost because people now have to get to the airport so early, either. Millions of people surrendering millions of extra hours every day = entire lifespans wasted because you have to get there so early to make sure the TSA doesn't cause you to miss your flight.

The airport security in most of the American airports I've seen in the last few years is just a complete shambles in terms of efficiency. It takes forever in comparison to most of the busy European airports I've been through. And I doubt the security is any better. For example, London Gatwick has a really fast system where they have a set of packing bays before you get to the scanners/pat downs. This massively reduces delays caused by someone in the queue ahead of you faffing around putting their stuff into trays. It's like no-one is even bothering to think about that kind of stuff in American airports. Or maybe it's just for international travellers?

Domestic travelers too. Congress wouldn't care as much if newspapers weren't reporting record wait times ahead of the summer travel months. It's a mess. And they'll pretend they've done something by firing this guy and not allocating any more funds (Or let airports charge more..) Its not going to be free.

the key here is that more than one person is filling their tray at a time. so if one person is taking their time, other people can jump past them. obviously it helps to have motivated and efficient operators, but in my experience, it's almost always some dithering idiot that holds things up. as as we all know, serial processing of a queue is not efficient when you end up waiting on IO :)

I fly frequently through a limited set of airports.

I rarely see the millimeter scanner at less than max throughput.

That said I regularly do what I can to slow things down, and sometimes take the pat down in favor of hassling the staff.

Attrition is damned right. The TSA scam is awful, and I hope we can get rid of it soon.

My personal experience is just the opposite. I always see the nudie scanners languishing for 30 seconds or more between people. The delay seems to be the baggage x-ray.

If that's true, then some other things fit neatly into place. The airline escalation of baggage check fees has driven people to carrying more stuff. That, in turn, means that more stuff needs to go through the x-ray conveyor, which slows down that process.

To be fair, some people were only carrying more things because they didn't want their stuff stolen out of their checked baggage, or for it to be otherwise lost in transit.

Stealing stuff right out of the security checkpoint ought to make those folks think twice, right?

I made the switch to carry-on only last year for all my travel. Too much waiting around at baggage claim, too much risk of luggage being lost (especially with transfers), etc. Checked baggage fees weren't the motivator, as most carriers allow one piece for free and I've never needed more than that.

With cameras, laptops, and other expensive items, I have to carry on at least one bag regardless. Now, it's one or two bags (roller luggage, plus laptop case, usually).

Some airports used to have an Expert/Casual/Family lane distinction but I haven't seen that in years

LAX and has a family lane. I think SFO does, although I last flew through there 4-5 years ago, so it might have changed.

Oh come on that's absurd. I fly weekly across the EU and few are very good and always more inconsistent than most USA airports. I'd kill for precheck in the UK.

The danger of the TSA is that the employees truly believe they are doing good and important work. The brainwashing is so strong that it almost reaches a religious level.

I flew through Charlotte a few weeks ago and got stuck at TSA (the sniffer threw up a bright red "EXPLOSIVES DETECTED!" banner, upon which the other passengers at the checkpoint started giving me dirty looks and edging away... Thanks for that, TSA. You'd think it'd say something like "ERROR 5930" instead...).

There were hundreds of people at the checkpoint, TSA was moving very slowly. Someone else's laptop got flagged, they asked why, and the TSA staffer said "the molecular weight of the laptop was off". She (rightly) said that didn't make sense, complained that they'd made her miss her flight, and said "I work for the government, we're on the same side, but WTF?".

Response to her was "don't you want to be safe?" followed by a good five minutes of the entire TSA staff mocking her after she'd gone. They mocked her for saying she worked for the government, saying "if she worked for the government she'd know that already" (ignoring for a moment that their explanation was massively incorrect, why would a non-TSA staffer know anything about the spectrophotometer workings?) etc.

Meanwhile, when they get tested, they miss 95% of test weapons/bombs. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-u...

A TSA employee was whining about a lack of pay increases to me recently. I smiled, then turned to my friend and started discussing how naive they are and the negligible amount of value these people provide to society. She turned beet red and didn't say another word.

I've been to the DMV yesterday. You wait in line for 40 minutes in the sun just to get a number and then wait some more. Once you get a number, you're counted in the official wait time statistics published on their website, so the extra 40 minutes are shaved off for free. Who ever though it was going to be different when the TSA was created?

I've been driving for 26 years in 6 different states and hardly ever have had any kind of serious wait.

Yeah, ironically DMV wait times are for people who aren't patient enough to wait for a low-traffic period of time, or to find a DMV that isn't busy.

In CA you can make an appointment. I made one and was in and out in 20 minutes.

But appointments are available only two weeks from now. Sometimes people have urgent issues that they cannot prepare for two weeks ahead. And even if it's their own fault, why should they be punished for it?

Waiting for a service isn't punishment.

Get in line at the DMV before they open! My local DMV opens at 8:00a and I got in line at 7:10a. By 8:20a, I was done and out the door.

This is stupid. The last time I was at the CA DMV, I made an appointment ahead of time, only to have to take a number when I got there. What was the point of making the appointment if I still have to take a number? WTF? I sat there waiting for 20 minutes, despite having a set appointment time. That's not helpful.

They have a separate number/letter for appointments. For example, if you are there for DL issues without an appointment you get letter G and have to wait hours. If you have an appointment then you get letter B and you wait 20 minutes. How is waiting 20 minutes bad?

In many states you can book an appointment ahead of time on their website. No waiting necessary.

I've noticed that at McDonald's in the past (though not recently). A time would start as soon as the employee starts on your order, and stops once you're given your change. The five minutes I waited getting up to the counter is ignored, as is the 1-2 minutes waiting for my order to be assembled. So I've spent 7-8 minutes waiting, and the POS machine is insulting me with the display "service time 40 seconds".

Things will be faster soon, once the robots arrive: http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/05/mcdonalds-ex-ceo-15h...

The most galling aspect is the $90,000 bonus, broken up into $10,000 increments to escape scrutiny.

Who is running the TSA circus?

Is that what you call a structured bonus?

More like an array of bonuses.

A 'tranched' bonus.

It's the Old French (and contemporary MBA speak) word for sliced.

I find this ridiculous. TSA employs 55k people and has budged $8B. Sure its director should be pay reasonably.

At the same time Yahoo CEO gets over $150M and people applaud it.

I get private versus public organization difference, but TSA is bigger than Yahoo.

Reasonable pay is fine, but why would he receive a bonus when the organization is not performing well? Furthermore, why would that bonus be paid explicitly in a surreptitious way?

He should be paid reasonably, but he shouldn't be given bonuses for underperforming.

The most ridiculous thing is that you'd think it was surprise when these people show up at the airport - it's not as if all these people had bought tickets days in advance with a time that indicated when they were going to show up

Lets be honest, every damn supervisor and management position within the TSA airport security apparatus should be on those lines until its fixed.

Got to love the stories where the TSA backdoor lobbies the Congress to prevent reform.

I predict that security problems will be solved at airports once they fire the rest of the TSA.

Let's close down the TSA instead. Use intelligent profiling and random searches instead of universal scanning. Let anyone go to the gates, not just ticket holders. Allow liquids, yogurt containers, etc. Allow knives. Allow people to "congregate" near the front lavatory.

Try it for one year and I can almost guarantee, flights will be every bit as secure. Security theatre is not security.

has the TSA stopped a single credible plot since it started doing all this theatre?

They boast of all the knives and guns they've confiscated. I wonder though, whether we'd not be more secure if everyone carried guns on board. A hijacker wouldn't stand a chance. Of course, there might also be some bloody air rage incidents as well. But at the same time, maybe people would act more civil if everyone around them is packing, or at least the flight attendants....

Maybe this is the movies I've watched, but isn't firing a gun structurally dangerous to the airplane?

Considering one plane flew and successfully landed with half the top missing, I think movies might exaggerate the risk a bit. Shocking, I know...

The plane you're referencing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243

And no, folks, "half the top missing" isn't hyperbole.

Not structurally, but you might hit something important.

I can't imagine there's anything "important" enough that would bring down the whole plane with one shot. I mean, sure you might kill a person or two, but pretty much every system is double- or triple-redundant, even the pilot(s).

What about the issue of depressurizing the cabin?

That's not a structural issue.

Not to get too chatty but, myth busters had an episode on plane cabin decompression. The gun didn't have much effect. Granted, the plane wasn't moving

https://youtu.be/Fi1_1l7M8FA

Edit: better link

Oh, a shoot out by multiple panicked passengers on a packed, pressurised plane. Sure, real safe.

Not to mention it only takes one dimwit to not store his gun safely and accidentally fire it and someone (or everyone) dies.

I've never understood this argument that if everyone has guns then everyone is safer.

> Oh, a shoot out by multiple panicked passengers on a packed, pressurised plane. Sure, real safeYou

You actually used to be able to travel with firearms on planes (edit: as carry-on). And the above never occurred afaik.

You still can, in checked luggage.

So if it never occurred, then what was the point of carrying the guns?

Same reason as carrying your other personal possessions--to get them from point A to point B.

Except the OP posited we'd all be safer if everyone carried guns on a plane. If it was to merely transport them and they aren't used, I'm just unclear how it makes anyone more or less safer?

>But at the same time, maybe people would act more civil if everyone around them is packing

I think it's more likely someone would start shooting the passenger next to them for "taking too much space."

Or being a scary looking academic type:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11648758

- http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/16/southwest-air...

Yes, the obvious takeaway from all those knives and guns? For decades folks have been bringing all that stuff on airplanes and there never was a 9-11. Never was an inflight shooting as far as I know.

By reporting this stuff they're actually making the case of how totally useless they are -- and how pointless and misguided the "find the weapon" school of security theater is.

It seems it is merely incredibly rare.

This guy shot the pilots:

http://murderpedia.org/male.B/b/burke-david.htm

This guy stabbed one pilot to death before he was subdued:

http://murderpedia.org/male.N/n/nishizawa-yuji.htm

The stabbing occurred after he reported the security flaw he used to get the knife on board the plane. Previously checked baggage could be picked up after passing through security for another flight. He was able to simply take the knife out of a bag he had checked on a previous flight.

There was also a guy that planted a bomb in order to kill his wife.

I'm guessing the number of weapons on U.S. planes that get by security run into the thousands every year. And before all the checks, probably the tens or hundreds of thousands per year.

Looks extremely rare. I mean really, really extremely rare. Handful of examples and roughly 9 million U.S. airline flights last year[1]

It'd be interesting to run some comparative statistics. I bet the odds show that you're safer with a plane full of gun owners, having their guns in holsters and loaded, than you are spending the same amount of time in each of those gun owners' homes.

[1] http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/acts

I think we can work this out.

Everyone in the USA has the right to bear arms, and a lot of them do. Result: huge murder rate.

Everyone in the rest of the world does not have the right to carry guns around the place. Result: much smaller murder rate.

I think we can infer that if everyone could take guns on planes then we'd have more people shooting guns on planes and hence more death on planes.

Going from that to stopping people from carrying pocket knives on planes is the bit that I think is suspect logic.

> Everyone in the USA has the right to bear arms, and a lot of them do. Result: huge murder rate.

The rate of murders committed by folks legally carrying guns is low; the rate of murders committed by Americans using weapons other than firearms is high. It's almost as though Americans in general are more violent than people in many other parts of the world.

murders committed per legally owned firearm vs murders committed by illegally owned firearm, and probably the same for legal/illegal owners is another stat you should take into account...

I had to re-read that twice before I got the meaning... I was thinking "hang on, so everyone carries guns but knife murders are up? what?" but what I think you're saying is that law-abiding people don't shoot people. Well, duh...

There's this really straightforward clear correlation between number of guns and amount of gun violence. Everyone else in the world gets this. Americans don't for some reason. I'm always curious why Americans don't get this. Y'all seem perfectly intelligent and reasonable otherwise.

> what I think you're saying is that law-abiding people don't shoot people. Well, duh...

No, OP complains that in the U.S. 'everyone' can carry firearms legally (not actually true: felons, wife-beaters, citizens of New Jersey & similar folks are prohibited from carrying firearms) and thus we have a high murder rate. I pointed out that the issue is not the legal right, since the folks committing the murders are not, for the most part, legally armed.

> I'm always curious why Americans don't get this.

There's this really straightforward clear correlation between arms-bearing and liberty (viz.: an unarmed man is fundamentally not free). Americans seem to get this; many other folks don't for some reason. I'm always curious why not.

because I'm happy to give up my freedom to carry a gun in return for the knowledge that other people are similarly unarmed and therefore unable to shoot me.

It's what we do in a polite society; restrict our freedoms to respect the rights of others. I don't play music loudly on public transport for the same reason.

How about the knowledge that other people know that you are unarmed, and therefore are free to attack you with fists or knives without fear of you shooting them?

This is not idle rhetoric. Britain has much lower gun violence statistics than the US, but higher total violence statistics.

The murder rates, weapons used, and ethnicities of murderers and victims are well documented; see the FBI's own statistics (bjs.gov) for the details.

In summary, most law abiding gun owners in the U.S. don't commit homicide. Among whites, guns are most likely to be used for suicide.

Among blacks, guns are most likely to be used for homicide, and most of their victims are also black. In fact out of about 11,000 gun homicides per year, over 6000 are black-on-black shootings, mostly males 16-39, mostly urban ghetto gang members. Thus, less than 1% of the U.S. population commits over half the gun homicides (Hispanics have the next largest share).

If you control for the unfortunate murder rates in the ghetto areas, actually the per capita gun violence in the U.S. is almost the same as Canada and western Europe, maybe 1% higher but certainly not warranting the kind of stereotyping that inevitably accompanies any discussion about gun crime in America. Except for a few neighborhoods, most American cities today are as safe as, or actually safer than those of Europe.

You can argue with some validity that guns are too easy for gangs to obtain, but that's really separate from what we're talking about here which is lawful carry.

Your reasoning is not accurate. When you allow honest citizens to defend themselves, crime rates drop.

"Statistics show that in these states the crime rate fell (or did not rise) after the right-to-carry law became active (as of July, 2006)."

http://www.gunfacts.info/gun-control-myths/concealed-carry/

Listen to what you're saying here. Crime rates drop because people are scared that they might get shot. That's literally the implication of that statement.

You're saying that the best response to crime is for people to shoot each other. Not better policing or a better criminal justice system, but random gun battles.

Is it any wonder that the murder rate so much higher in the USA than in other similarly-developed countries?

"you pissed me off. That's practically a crime. I should shoot you now. Oh look I'm carrying a gun. bang"

You're assuming that all honest people want to naturally kill other people when they're mad at them. If that were the case, crime rates would be astronomically high regardless if guns existed or not. If person A gets mad at person B and desires to kill them, they'll find a way to kill them. If they don't have a gun, then they'll use a knife, or a bat. Hell, they'll use their bare hands if they have to.

Honest people don't kill other people unless they feel their own lives are threatened. Criminals by definition do not follow the law, so by outlawing guns, only outlaws will have guns. What you effectively do is remove the gun from the honest person desiring to protect themselves, and arm the criminal with bad intent. The honest person is left defenseless.

Case in point: "Shooting incidents in London have almost doubled compared with the same period last year, prompting grave concerns that gun crime in some areas is out of control." [0]

Aren't guns illegal in England? How are people then getting shot, by guns, in a city where guns are illegal? Again, because criminals by definition don't follow the law and will find a way to get a gun regardless.

[0]: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/nov/03/london-gun-crime-s...

I'm all for gun rights but allowing firearms on airplanes would be a disaster. Just to start with, if you allow firearms a group of hijackers could ostensibly open fire on the cockpit and kill the pilots before any other passenger could neutralize them. You'd be depending on more passengers having guns than hijackers, which would be completely down to luck.

Secondly, you'd have a bunch of incidents of idiots pulling their gun when they shouldn't have, which would lead to avoidable injuries, deaths, panic, etc.

TSA should screen for firearms with metal detectors and xray machines, its just all of the removing the shoes, body scans, laptop scans, banning liquids, and understaffing that are a problem.

No.

They stop about 10 handguns a week. They don't say, and it's hard to know, how many guns they don't stop.

I think none of those gun owners had plans to use the gun at an airport or on a flight.

There's small amounts of evidence that "terrorists" moved to different approaches - the Inkjet cargo bombs, for example.

> They don't say, and it's hard to know, how many guns they don't stop.

95%. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-u...

For fucks sake, that link talks only about internal testing, which tells you nothing about the actual failure rate of real world people smuggling guns onto aircraft.

I would think that it would be something one could take into account when coming up with an estimate.

I'd be very interested to know why you think that makes a difference. These tests were run during normal checkpoint operation, with normal screeners.

Even if they used some internal knowledge, everyone here should know the adages about security through obscurity. TSA checkpoints are clearly enormously vulnerable if they can get through 95% of the time.

How would we know? How would we know how many actions haven't happened due to the perps being dissuaded by the security measures?

Good point. How do we prove negatives in other areas?

I guess we could experiment. Suspend checks and see how many planes get blown up. If it's none, then de-fund the TSA. If it's more than none then sack whoever thought this stupid idea up.

Can we also bring water bottles ? Water bottles do NOT explode, even by throwing them really hard on the ground, I'm pretty positive about that.

You forgot to add dry ice. Then they explode when they hit the ground.

I agree with you 100% on security theater, but you have to be careful with "intelligent profiling." Remember that if it involves singling somebody out by race, gender, religion, etc., it's almost certainly unconstitutional in the US.

by intelligent profiling, I mean more the way the Israelis do it: psychological profiling, looking for telltale signs of nervousness/guilt etc., ranking people by profession/origin/appearance, and randomly singling people out for more extensive scrutiny (but not so random as to nab the 80-year-old grandmother in a wheelchair).

Israeli airport profiling also uses religious and ethnic or national origin. When I've heard people endorse it as a good model for the U.S. in the past, I thought they were often saying they wished U.S. airport screening would use those things.

But that kind of profiling involves human judgement in a qualitative way, which is not very popular in the US.

Instead, we prefer to use metrics, which we can mesure, aggregate and compile in neat reports. But metrics are a projection of a multidimensional situation onto a few dimensions, and hoping we picked the correct projection.

I'm all for collecting stats but I wish that was just a tool used in addition to a broader qualitative approach.

> ranking people by profession/origin/appearance

So a white computer programmer from Seattle might be "safer" than a brown janitor from Dearborn?

And right there is your discrimination lawsuit. No government agency wants to expose themselves to that kind of challenge, even if they might win.

Hell, just roll things back to how they were before 9/11. I think it makes sense to have metal detectors, but we don't need to be taking clothes off or going through x-ray machines

Security has been privatized at a few airports, like San Francisco and Kansas City. How does security screening effectiveness, efficiency, and cost compare at those two airports relative to all other TSA-operated US airport security? I haven't seen any side by side comparisons -- does anyone know if any reputable journalists or researchers have tried to compare?

Comparisons with the Kansas City airport will probably mislead. It has a very different architecture than most other airports: it's aggressively anti-hub. That is to say, although it nominally has three terminals, each of those effectively has four or five separate secured areas.

This actually works fairly well for trips starting or ending in Kansas City, not least because it means that no security wait will reach the ridiculous lengths you see in many other airports. It also means that screening personnel have to operate 15 different security lines rather than two or three. That may be why TSA left?

Congress cut the TSA budget 15% at the same time there is a 15% increase in traffic.

Sure, blame 'that guy'.

Yeah, and given how badly it seems to be run then it sounds like it had been a complete disaster!

Good start! Only 85% to go!

Eliminate the TSA and give the $8B to Nasa. A much better investment.

The TSA provides value, security theater has its place.

Keep the sheeple thinking that something is being done while providing low wage jobs for what is being promoted as critical safety personnel? Orwell would just look at this, shrug and say "I was trying to say..."

You've lost when you start saying words like "sheeple" and "Orwell" in these conversations, you realize that right?

I took zentiggr's comment to be sarcastic with a hint of truth. I don't think his choice to use "sheeple"¹ or bring up Orwell detracts from his point.

¹ And let's be realistic, anyone who thinks the TSA actually improves security is basically just listening to what the TSA itself says. As mentioned in this thread, the TSA 1) hasn't stopped known terrorist attacks and 2) isn't hard to sneak weapons past. Blindly listening to the TSA saying they're important for security is, well, sheeplish.

How is calling me "sheeplish" helpful for this conversation?

The goal of the TSA is to create security theater, and that goal is effective at preventing terrorists from even attempting to attack airports. It's difficult to prove this, of course, because how does one measure a terror cell's internal and secretive planning?

You don't get to collect data on the targets terrorists don't attack, because they... well, they don't attack them! It's intellectually dishonest to claim 1), because of this.

As for 2), this is absolutely true, but why do you think the TSA's goal is to be functionally effective? It'd be nice, obviously, but like I said in my original comment, there is value in security theater.

The head of the FBI once said that there's simply no stopping a terrorist once he has his weapon on premises. The point of the TSA is to provide a false front line for terrorists to misidentify as the significant hurdle in executing an attack, and they do that successfully. The reality is, the world's police catch terrorists before they act, the vast majority of the time.

It'd be great if the TSA were effective, and it's via shitty management that they're not, this is unmistakable. But the mere presence of the TSA at US airports is an effective misdirection, because it provides what people call "security theater", and while most folks consider security theater useless, they're wrong. It has value.

It's usually the person who says "You've lost" and mistakenly references Godwin who has lost (all hope).

If you're more concerned with the form of the response than the content...

> How is calling me "sheeplish" helpful for this conversation?

You're the one calling yourself sheeple so you can act hurt. The parent used it as a broad descriptor of anyone who just believes what they're told.

It wasn't directed at you so how is you falling on your victim card helping the conversation?

> The goal of the TSA is to create security theater,

I doubt you'd get any agreement with that. From them, the politicians, the taxpayers, or real security experts.

> and that goal is effective at preventing terrorists from even attempting to attack airports. It's difficult to prove this, of course [...]

There's literally no reason to suspect that it works. Theater fails in all contexts because only one person needs to realize it's fake and point that out.

> while most folks consider security theater useless, they're wrong. It has value.

Negative value. It reduces vigilance where it's truly needed.

I don't think breaking up my comment into little contextless chunks is doing this conversation any favors.

Okay. How many man-hours does it cost in wasted time? Is its supposed "value" worth that?

source? http://www.klobuchar.senate.gov/public/2016/3/relief-at-msp-... says that they got more money than they requested this year

~850 million US-based passenger * flights per year

~15 minutes in TSA waiting per passenger per flight

~80 years in a life

850,000,000 passengers per year * 15 minutes = 12,750,000,000 minutes of passenger time per year ≈ 24,241 years of passenger time per year

24,241 years of passenger time per year / 80 years per life ≈ 303 passenger lives per year.

The TSA effectively kills ~300 people per year just by wasting our time.

Same thing happened to me with a video camera.

Tea Party conservatives are not necessarily neo-cons.

Wasn't the Tea Party movement started because of their disgust with neo-cons?

The movement coalesced around the bank bailouts. There was growing dissatisfaction with the Bush neo-cons, more around economic policies then foreign invasions (I would characterize the Tea Party as confident in American power, but ambivalent to slightly negative on foreign invasions.) I imagine that those who identified with the Tea Party are now disgusted with the neo-cons, but I don't believe there was a clear (or at least well articulated) aversion to them at the beginning.

No, it was started because a Black Guy got into the White House. Don't fool yourself, the Tea Party is simply a racist reaction to non-White person being in the White House. Budget wise, Bush was much worse than Obama and there was no Tea Party telling him not to invade Iraq and blow 2 trillion dollars on pointless wars. The Tea Party only came about when Obama took office.

Ex post hoc ergo propter hoc.

This is absolutely false. The Tea Party coalesced after the bank bailouts.

Really?

http://www.britannica.com/topic/Tea-Party-movement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement

There might have been some reactions to the Bush Bailouts, but what is the Tea Party does not come into being until Obama is sworn in.

Don't fool yourself, if Obama was White, there would be no Tea Party.

The original tea party was a Ron Paul (2007 pre Obama) movement. Unfortunalty it was co-opted by the Fox News tea party.

I think you thinking of his R-EVOL-ution (backwards LOVE) campaign, which is definitely unrelated to the Tea Party.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11761501 and marked it off-topic.

Can't believe I am saying this but whatever Israel does in their airports, do it here and problem solved.

In fact whatever company does it in Israel should be hired to do it here, if it is a government thing, borrow their people to train ours, we give them enough for that loan.

Why can't you believe you're saying this? Many others have also suggested it.

I remember reading that a former head of Israel's airport security told Homeland Security that he could smuggle a bomb through American airport security, and he offered to show them how. I don't know whether they ever took him up on it.

They have one international airport; you can use different moves when you don't have to scale.

They have broad social consciousness of active attack. Most Americans do not experience terrorism as a realistic threat.

Others differences in the acceptability and prediction strength of profiling based on apparent race and sex also matter. In short, we've tried and their model doesn't port over cleanly.

The way Israel achieves their efficacy is blatant racial profiling. I've been to Israel several times, and because I am a white Jewish American, I have no problems. If I had brown skin, or was Muslim, or wasn't from the US, there's a good chance I'd just not be let in.

Now, it works extremely well. Can't deny that. And it's legal under Israeli law. But it would be blatantly illegal here.

Israeli profiling is far more sophisticated than "blatant racial profiling" as the above commenter baselessly claims.

For one thing, many Jews in Israel are of Middle Eastern origin and appear identical to Muslim Arabs. The Israelis use several layers of profiling: a preliminary sweep as you are checking in, which assigns you a particular "risk level" based on your country of origin, profession, behavior, and other details (probably if you're wearing Muslim attire, that's taken into account as well).

You then have to undergo several more levels of scrutiny from very well educated, highly intelligent and intensely trained specialists. They can and will frisk, pat down, and strip search if needed. They can open all of your luggage and check every inch of it if they're suspicious. Or they can wave you through if they're satisfied of your innocence.

Here's one journalist's impression of the Israeli system:

http://www.businessinsider.com/israels-ben-gurion-airport-se...

For the Americans to adopt the Israeli system would mean recruiting some very sharp cookies, training them very well and compensating them commensurately. The U.S. government's track record of such achievements is not that great, unfortunately. Certain groups like the Navy SEALs, certainly, but to hire, say, 100,000 such people to operate the 5,000+ airports in the U.S. is dauntingly beyond reasonable contemplation.

EDIT: also worth mentioning that Israel is 20% Muslim. They wouldn't just "not let in" Muslims; on the contrary, they have to accommodate many different ethnicities and religions every day. It's an extremely diverse country.

Your own article contradicts your suggestion that my claim is "baseless."

> As Lia Tarachansky wrote back in 2010 for Mondoweiss, while a one rating "is awesome," a six indicates that "you're f-----." It appears to be reserved for Palestinians, Muslims, and hostile internationals.

Palestinians and Muslims? That's ethnic and religious profiling, and together I think you could call it racial as well. And yes, Israeli Arabs are citizens of Israel with allegedly the same level of rights and responsibilities as any other, but they too face significant systemic discrimination (although not as far as leaving/entering the country is concerned, as far as I know).

But your main point - that the Israeli system is complex and intelligent - is true. It IS a complex, thought-out, professional system. It does work better than that of the US. That doesn't mean it is suited for the United States, or that it doesn't involve discrimination of a kind that would be illegal in the US.

I do not begrudge Israel its system. I believe it is necessary for the country's safety, though I don't like it very much. I just don't think it can or should work here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11760549 and marked it off-topic.

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