A Sensible Fix For TSA Security Lines
askthepilot.com
askthepilot.com
Eliminate the TSA and replace them with nothing. Cockpit doors are now reinforced, so the worst thing someone could do is blow up a plane, and if all you want to do is blow up a hundred people or so, you don't need to be on a plane to do it.
Agreed: replace it with nothing, or close to nothing.
>Deploy more TSA staff overseas — in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America ...
Restructuring an agency(and removing the positions) is different from replacing people, though. I'm sure there's something that could be done.
Intelligence clearance = access to classified information.
There is a reason we had security on airplanes before 9/11. We aren't willing to accept this risk.
Plus airplanes are a carnage and terror multiplier. A bomb that could take down a plane would do less damage on the ground. And people are irrationally fearful of flying. One 737 blown up every 3 months would still make flying less risky than driving, but it would send the airline industry into a tailspin and TSA would come back stronger than ever.
But I think you're actually right about this; my original argument ignored human psychology to an extent that makes it nonsensical. Actual threats are important, but so are perceived threats. It's not entirely irrational to protect against the things we fear the most, even if those aren't actually the most likely things to kill us.
This also comes up a lot in arguments about city living. I know a lot of people for whom urban living is frightening to an extent that is not supportable by crime statistics. But so what? If they were to move to the city, they'd be constantly afraid. That matters. Rational or not, their perception greatly impacts their quality of life. And if you want those people to move back from the suburbs, then you need to address their concerns.
There is a reason, after all, that airplanes are such an attractive target for those who'd like to cause terror.
For the 0.01% who still will not fly... let them stay on the ground.
Take a lot of those Someones with a perception of rampant terrorists and security failures, you get a substantial group of people reacting to a false reality. And though false it may be, these Someones still vote, pay taxes and fly (or not) on those planes.
We don't really have the option to ignore them.
There is no need to ignore them, just make sure their voice matches their proportion of the population.
Like the airplane that was downed because a passenger felt threatened by a math professor solving equations? I'm sorry but catering to ignorance is not the way forward. We have real problems as a society, let's not solve imaginary ones.
There is no similar dynamic for cancer or car accidents.
>This also comes up a lot in arguments about city living ... is frightening to an extent that is not supportable by crime statistics.
The (other) problem with the "cities are statistically safe" argument is: you have to account for the presence of countermeasures.
Sure, the crime rate is about the same ... but that's only because of a) much denser police presence, b) locking up your stuff a lot more securely, c) being a lot more distrusting of strangers.
If you fail to keep up these measures, your fear of crime will be totally justified!
(You can think of it as being the opposite argument of "hospitals must be unsafe because so many people die there".)
PS: Hospitals are dangerous even for healthy people. Much like how trench warfare lead to the 1918 pandemic which killed between 50 and 100 million. Simply being around those with a compromised immune system represents a risk.
There is enormous support for terrorism and they have a lot of recruits. If they found something that worked, and nothing changed to make it stop working, you can bet they'd double down.
>PS: Hospitals are dangerous even for healthy people. Much like how trench warfare lead to the 1918 pandemic which killed between 50 and 100 million. Simply being around those with a compromised immune system represents a risk.
I'm aware, and yes, there's a tradeoff between the benefit of the hospital vs the risk of picking up something even worse. Point taken. But if you have a gunshot wound, you should probably go to a hospital. It would be a severe error of logic to say, "most gunshot deaths are in a hospital, so if I have a gunshot wound, I should stay away from a hospital" -- because that figure is an artifact of dumping a disproportionate fraction of living victims there.
It's likewise wrong to say, "cities are safe, look how the crime rate is the same as the suburbs" -- there is much more risk, they just work harder to control it.
The absolute threat is just not that high.
It's not a refutation to point to zero rampup after a failed attack.
Airplanes are such an attractive target for those who'd like to cause terror, because they're a favorite setting of terrorists - those in the media and government who sensationalize tragedies for their own benefit. These hucksters are the essential problem, and they need to be shunned, disempowered, and repudiated.
While some people do stop living in cities out of fear, obviously most people do not, because otherwise they would not be cities. You could argue that the government needs to come in in a very heavy-handed way and say in order to assuage the fear of the minority, we must pat down everyone that lives in the city hourly and check for weapons. But we don't do that, because it is irrational and unnecessary, and people will take the amount of risk that they feel is comfortable. We trust people to figure that out for themselves.
With airplanes, before the doors were reinforced, the planes could be used as a weapon against people who weren't even flying. That represents an externality. That is a place for the government to come in and say "this is too dangerous to others who cannot protect themselves against this weapon by voting with their wallet". The people who are on the plane, however, can choose to pay a premium to fly on an airline with more stringent security procedures. If people care enough, they will do that. If they don't, they won't, and they should be allowed to make that determination for themselves.
If I don't see terrorism on my flights as a risk, I shouldn't have to socialize those who do. And alternatively, if I do see terrorism as a risk, I damn sure want better security procedures than what the TSA has on offer, and if there were a private market for better secured planes, I don't doubt for a second that it would be substantially safer than what the TSA is able to provide.
"You could argue that the government needs to come in in a very heavy-handed way and say in order to assuage the fear of the minority, we must pat down everyone that lives in the city hourly and check for weapons. But we don't do that, because it is irrational and unnecessary, and people will take the amount of risk that they feel is comfortable. We trust people to figure that out for themselves."
The reality in most large metros in the U.S. is that the core city competes with its suburbs for resources, the largest of which is people. The region I live in has 2.8 million people, only 300k of which live in the (widely-abandoned) anchor city that gives the region its name. Yes, people are figuring it out for themselves, to the benefit of some interests and the detriment of others. "Let the people figure it out" isn't very useful advice to the losers in that battle.
As for the exploding aircraft, as you seem to imply, airports and airlines have a vested interest in preventing that from happening. But unlike the TSA, they also have an interest in efficiency and happy travelers. And they're spending customer money rather than federal tax dollars.
So I'm for no government security, if that's not what the GP meant. But I doubt the airlines really want that, since it opens them up for liability if something were to happen.
I don't think that is true. Maybe the threat of kamikaze hijackings was behind some of the push, but it is far from the only reason.
Plus TSA isn't all that different from the old private security guard system we used have have pre-911. The extra screenings are entirely related to specific bomb--not hijacking--threats. Shoes off? because of the shoe bomber. No liquids because of the liquid bomb plot.
However, my point wasn't whether the TSA was created specifically for one type of attack, but that it was created for a problem that 90% solved to begin with and the remaining 10% could have been filled with government serving as intelligence and advisor (e.g. requiring airlines to reinforce cockpit doors, or informing them of specific plots or new techniques to defend against); which, of course, it was failing to do pre-9/11, but that's a separate problem also not solved by the TSA.
Sure, statistically more people die in car accidents. True. But each one of us has some measure of control over that. We all believe (even if erroneously) that we can avoid this because we control the wheel, and we can choose to pay close attention to the road and make good decisions and we trust in our own ability to avoid an accident.
In a plane, there is nothing we can do but pray. The outcome is in the hands of pilot and we can do nothing. And that's what's terrifying: not statistics, but helplessness.
Indeed, when I get in the car as a passenger with a young driver who I haven't driven with before, my misgivings are definitely greater than those I have getting on a plane. Same principle.
Of course, it is possible that most of them are correct. I would love to see data on the distribution of driving skill; perhaps most people are reasonably good or great drivers, but the presence of a small percentage of catastrophically bad drivers skews the average.
I know that when I think "drivers are horrible around here" I tend to be thinking of the ones that did something inconsiderate/dangerous/bafflingly stupid, not the vast majority who seem to get by just fine. And of the people with whom I've ridden, almost all of them drive fine, but I've got a couple of friends who I hesitate to get in the car with.
I, myself, have been hit head-on twice on a motorcycle in the last 10 years.
The first time I was lucky, had a split-second of warning, and managed to escape any major injuries.
The last time, on 2013-10-13, I ended up with two broken wrists, a broken leg, and numerous contusions, scrapes, and scratches (initially, they also thought my ankle and nose were broke). It was four months before I could walk normally (the first three I couldn't walk at all). Because of how my arms were wrapped up (from my fingertips to the upper bicep), I couldn't bend them at my elbows and couldn't even wipe my ass for the first two afterwards. After the surgeries on my wrist, I was at least able to do that. I wasn't allowed to lift anything over one pound for the first six weeks.
I now have a titanium rod ("intermedullary nail") from my right hip to my knee, two steel plates in my left wrist, and one steel plate in my right wrist.
My life was forever changed -- and I was the equivalent of a helpless baby for almost three months -- all because an 18-year-old kid was texting on his phone and made a left turn in front of me at an intersection.
I hope your wife's wrists eventually stop giving her pain. Mine is sporadic and intermittent but will likely never go away completely, so they tell me.
If I really wanted to threaten someone, I think the metal pen in my bag would be more of a threat than a tiny multi-tool knife that would probably fold back and cut my own finger if I tried to use it as a weapon.
I had an interesting encounter with a TSA agent. He flagged my bag because I had 10 notebooks in there ( I took them with me to read over my notes over a couple of years back ). He thought it was strange. So I told him, yeah, it is programming stuff. He said he likes programming, and would like to do it again sometime, asked what languages a popular these days (he knew about C++ only). I told him to try Python for example.
At first I was annoyed at him for bothering me over stupid notebooks, it was ridiculous. But then felt kind of sorry. Here he is, thinking he wants to develop software, yet he has to flag down bags and look for shampoo bottles, notebooks, multi-tools sift through people's dirty laundry and so on.
I agree with the author's thesis that if it costs flyers 10x the effort to fly than it does the evil doers to do evil, then the evil doers are winning that battle. And the existing practices are due for a new look over. But not sure that eliminating them completely will achieve what you want.
Passing out from lack of oxygen is dangerous.
This is why medically induced hypothermia is sometimes used on heart attack patients, so that the brain doesn't swell up and kill itself after normal oxygenated blood circulation is restored.
So let's not casually mess around with air passengers' oxygen supply, mmkay? It would almost be better to just flood the passenger cabin with vaporized marijuana extract. The risk there is that someone might stage a fake attack just to turn the plane into a giant bong.
We know the "no O2" method is very rarely needed, simply from observed statistics.
We know that O2 masks come down more regularly than that. Such stories are not hard to find. Here's a list: http://www.avherald.com/h?search_term=Cabin+pressure&opt=256... . Looks like a few dozen per year.
If there were a switch like you suggest, what is the probability that it will engage by accident, and prevent the masks from otherwise deploying as they should?
Your father thinks that blacking-out is similar to the movies, in that there are fast acting tranqs and other things that will 'knock out' a person and then they wake up with a headache. Anesthesiologists take at a minimum about 12 years of training before they touch a patient, even for 'low risk' dental procedures. Trying to black out a plane full of highly agitated people until the pilots can land or 'do something' about terrorists in the act is a total fantasy and may cause more deaths from false alarms and faulty wiring than the terrorists would have caused.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choking_game [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_hypoxia
The interesting thing for me, reading the comments is that my actual comment (that if security costs 10x to defend and 1x to perpetrate, then the system will by definition fail) has no feedback. I think about ways to "even" the cost on these things. Biometric security is one (although it too has its issues). Using something like Clear[2] at an air port to insure people are who they say they are, and having vetted that person via other mechanisms prior to their flight, seems more efficient and harder to subvert than the current system. It converts the problem from "150 unknown actors are getting on a plane" to "150 known actors are getting on a plane." Does it make it difficult enough for the attackers? They have to forge biometrics and disguise the actual flight they are taking. Not sure if it completely levels the field but it raises the cost for the attacker.
[1] He also thinks that every state should allow and encourage people to carry hand guns so that "crooks and crazy people would think twice."
[2] See http://clearme.com basically at signup biometrics and other data are used to confirm identity and to take a picture. When you arrive at the airport your boarding pass is scanned (an presumably validated) and the operator gets a picture of what you should look like given your biometrics. So if you steal someone else's fingerprints you don't look like them.
That's only if you have an infinite supply of evil doers. The cost in operational experience and manpower can deplete the number of operatives that can pull off a complicated attack.
I sure as hell wouldn't fly if this was going on now.
The real problem is that we aren't allowed to profile.
Because we can't focus on a specific subset of travelers that are suspicious (based on data or behavior), everyone is treated as a threat and we get long lines as a result.
We can learn a lot from Israel:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-wagner/what-israeli-air...
They probably have more terrorist threats than anyone else in the world and have prevented nearly all attacks without the long lines. Mostly through a combination of profiling and hiring specially trained agents instead of $10/hour rent-a-cops to handle security. There's a reason why European Airports are targeted for attack, even though Israel is the main target.
At some point we need to make a choice: political correctness or safety.
If you want to profile, ignore political correctness and do it based on something other than race, religion, or national origin.
That's an extreme example, but if you agree that we don't need to look at old white ladies, then we both agree that profiling is preferable. All that's left to discuss are the boundaries.
And what else is the intention of profiling except to create a good enough "heuristic"? Let's strive for a better heuristic please.
Let's look at the terror watch list: I can bet 9/10 people on the list are from similar middle eastern countries, similar skin color and are from the same or similar religion.
Profiling based on this information isn't profiling based on any of these things, but based on risk factors and previous history.
The problem is that you can't even profile based on obvious history without also being accused of profiling based on religion or skin color.
This is what I'm talking about when I refer to 'political correctness'. Suspicious people can't be singled out without the PC police coming out in full force.
"ignore political correctness and do it based on something other than race, religion, or national origin."
I wish the terrorists bombing planes and killing innocent people were from different countries with different religions, but it's just not reality.
So why, I asked, are we still allowed to board airplanes at Ben-Gurion International Airport with bottles and tubes of liquid brought from home, while in Heathrow or JFK they confiscate our face cream and toothpaste? "Oh, that's simple," he answered matter of factly. "We use racial profiling, they don't." read more: http://www.haaretz.com/in-israel-racial-profiling-doesn-t-wa...
> If the choice is between random searching and profiling, then random searching is a more effective security countermeasure. But Dunn is correct above when he says that there are some enormous trade-offs in liberty. And I don't think we're getting very much security in return.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/searching_bag...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/profiling.htm...
You may say it doesn't 'increase safety', but Israel is a great example of it working. The attacks, hijacks, and deaths have nose dived to nearly 0. They have a hybrid system that involves both random checking and profiling.
I'm not saying we should lock up anyone that fits a specific racial profile. The problem is that when we use data and risk assessment to question specific people that may be suspicious, it's seen as racist if the person is anything but white.
The two articles you linked mention hijackers that happened pre-911. I don't think people are hijacking planes and diverting them to central america nor do we have IRA militants bombing planes.
We need a hybrid system between random checking and profiling. Random checks work so far, but will not help with long lines because everyone needs to be checked equally.
To reduce long lines, we either need to scale-back security (which is a bad idea) or use information and data to make the process more efficient (IE: profiling).
Some profiling is a good thing, but we can't completely rely on it.
The US has so much more diversity in population and enemies that profiling would be less effective, more annoying/discriminatory, because the "us/them" divide is less clear here.
The vast majority of airline related attacks against Israel were not perpetrated by Arabs, and the only one on Israeli soil was executed by a Japanese.
While I'm sure Israel's profiling metrics do take in ethnicity by all accounts it has little to no weight and metrics based on past attacks, your behavior and more importantly your general background and travel history play a much bigger role.
But that said the US can't adopt the Israeli approach, the security check at Ben Gurion might look fast but it's because they have more security staff than JFK and a 3 (4 if you count the fact that Israeli security gets the passenger manifest before any flight takes place) layered security screening that starts way before you even reach the terminal.
Israel's approach can work in the US and everywhere else but it would cost billions to implement and bloat the size of the TSA to rival the size of the US Armed forces, the TSA is already about twice the size if not bigger than the FBI, it's bigger than the CIA and NSA combined but it's not even remotely big enough to do the same thing Israel does given number of passengers US airports handle each year.
About 5 years ago when I was living in Israel I've had an encounter with airport security myself I flew out to Amsterdam for a project, the project was canceled but as the flight was at 4am and the news arrived over the weekend I wasn't notified until I've actually landed.
So I didn't even leave the airport I just went to the KLM counter and booked a flight that left 3 hours later. When I landed 3 security agents were waiting for me at the door of the aircraft they had my details and they pulled me aside and questioned me about why did i book the flight last moment and why did i book the flight one way and some other details and it took me about 15 min to clear everything up.
To me this shows that they get notifications of last minute changes to the passenger lists as well as flag anyone who buys a one way ticket, both combined with potentially the fact that I flew out less than 12 hours before I got back probably raised enough red flags to come and question me immediately.
On that flight my carry on was searched after I landed and I was notified that my checked in baggage was not put on the flight and will be delivered to me later that day or the day after.
My personal theory is that they've suspected that I went to another airport that might have been compromised to get something that could be used in an attack at Ben Gurion.
The airline security is definitely top notch but the entire intelligence apparatus behind it won't be sustainable on any larger scale. The TSA can't afford hire 200,000 agents, the TSA can't afford to hire agents from elite military units and US intelligence and the TSA can't afford to have a college degree as a requirement for all but the most entry level jobs which them selves would require a hefty LEO/Military service background, and I don't think that running a background check on virtually every passenger in the US would be doable on both practical and legal grounds.
Bruce Schneier's proposal is essentially do 0 profiling and do entirely random enhanced screening to minimize the potential for exploiting profiling.
https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-trouble-with-profili...
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2012/05/to_profile_...
Concern: Real randomness gives you streaks, which may cause unanticipated clogs and delays in the process. On the other hand, an "smoothed" system means attackers would try to slip in right after a "random" check occurs for an innocent.
True, but you could just tweak the odds down a bit once a streak hits a certain number if you've demonstrably slowed the line down (and turn them back up once the clog has been cleared).
The devil's really in the details, particularly around how queues/buffers for travelers are handled and the basis used for doing the randomness. For example, randomly choosing check/don't-check per passenger is different than randomly choosing a passenger from the line whenever a searcher is free.
But the point here isn't that this specific policy is terrible, but that any such type of policies are ineffective, much like the author says about the liquid bans and whatnot.
'Most of this is good security advice. This is not: "certain travelers, at TSA spotters’ discretion, [should] be exempt from screening altogether." In security, that sort of middle-ground is dumb: either the barrier should exist or it should not; if it should exist we should not have a habit of whisking people through it. Perhaps you think that there should be a barrier which checks carry-on luggage for guns: your security expectation is that nobody should have a gun on the plane. Suppose a terrorist wants to violate this expectation and get on a plane with a gun. First, he's going to print fake boarding passes to test the security line. There is no gun; he's just going through security, going to the restroom on the other side, then coming back out. He wants to know who is pulled out and whisked through -- perhaps light-skinned women, perhaps pilots, perhaps people in suits. He will then make this pilgrimage in a pilot's uniform, or inviting a female terrorist as his accomplice, perhaps even dressing her as a flight attendant. Maybe he will find that sympathetic screeners always cave to a disheveled suited man with a story, "I slept in, I have a really important business meeting, my flight leaves in ten minutes, can you help me?" If he finds any reliable mechanism to be whisked through the line, it's game over. He only has one shot to bring the gun through the screening, but he has unlimited tries to figure out what will make him look respectable enough to get that free pass.'
When I was in London, I met a woman whose job was basically to hang around at Heathrow Airport and make note of "suspicious-looking individuals". She would make small talk and ask them if they needed help or directions.
She also told me they catch a surprising number of North Korean spies.
The security procedures aren't' about logic they are more like a set of rituals that we have developed: kind of a collective superstition.
Ask most people on the street if we could just scale security procedures back to 1970s levels and they will feel uncomfortable and probably tell you that the security is needed today.[1]
Ironically, because the ritual is a difficult trial, it may increase our belief in its protective power.
[1] Similar to how they may feel uncomfortable letting kids play on the street even though stranger child abduction has been declining for decades.
I don't eat in airport restaurants that often, and when I do, it's just a public one, not an exclusive lounge. But I haven't seen a sharp metal knife in the airport for since 2001. I've seen plastic knives and rounded metal butter knives, but those should also be allowed through security.
And then, there's this: http://terminalcornucopia.com/
I'm not defending the arbitrary rules. I'm just saying that I went through a similar exercise with different results.
In my part of the world, their idea of "security" for the glass bottles you can buy at the airport shops is to seal them in a "security" bag made of...clear plastic. The only thing that clear-plastic (zip-locked even) bag would stop is spillage.
Anyway, like I said in a sibling comment, I'm not defending the asinine rules, just saying I actually found very few items that would/should have been stopped by TSA when I went through a similar exercise.
If you look at the incentive structures, the results aren't surprising though:
Starbucks: longer lines => people go elsewhere => less revenue (daily)
TSA: longer lines => traveler complaints => more funding (yearly)
Ever been through security in Frankfurt? Lots of lanes, plenty of staff and in general highly efficient and very quick.
Also, if all those bottles of liquid are worth being confiscated because they contain harmful chemicals, they are also to be disposed of by personel in hazmat with proper EPA considerations, namely audit, analysis and documentation. It would be fun to see a lawsuit along those lines.
The extraordinarily stupid part is where they hypothetically confiscate such a liquid, and then they let the person go.
The liquid ban itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but if you grant their IMO faulty assumptions (that liquid bombs are a big threat), the way they carry it out is actually pretty reasonable.
I think the liquid ban is pretty silly, but that's because the whole idea of a liquid bomb seems to be unworkable, and there are better ways to handle this stuff. The fact that confiscated liquids are handled so casually is not actually an argument against the ban.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl...
I'm sure he did that when he first started, but being berated on a daily basis ("Are you calling me a liar?!") probably made him decide that his current method is the path of least resistance.
I really can't imagine this going well at all. Isn't this basically telling your employees that they should discriminate based on some nebulous thing?
I can't remember the name of it, but some years back there a was a film (or possibly a TV drama) about a Chechen-American jihadi -- pale-skinned, blue-eyed and red-haired.
How do the american people make this a reality? What steps can be taken to motivate our political leaders to support such a change?
As of right now, it seems like political suicide for anyone to politically support such a thing, as they would surely be painted as a terrorist sympathizer or some such.
Right now the wife and I are in the market for a new toddler-hauler. I want to buy two-years used, and ideally American, but I cannot get over the fact that only a handful of recent models, none American, get a "good" rating in the new IIHS small-offset crash tests. I know that a Ford made in 2015 is perfectly safe, but I'm going to spend a bunch more money on a new 2016 Honda because I'm irrational.
They don't want to make it a reality. You want to make it a reality, I want to make it a reality, but the majority of your friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens don't.
As of right now, it seems like political suicide for anyone to politically support such a thing
See? Answered your own question. If the majority of Americans felt as you do, it wouldn't be political suicide.
Eventually someone who wants to be elected will grab on to the idea and make it a tenet of their platform.
This is how anything ends in government that can't be proven (by proven I mean with loss of lives or some other very serious consequence, not simply proven ineffective) to be more harm than good.
A close second job was building a behemoth Government Agency to funnel money, direct contracts (to supporters), and lastly supply jobs for those people who were probably otherwise more difficult to employ.
Now I don't know about you, but I would call that a win-win situation.
... not that I'm suggesting this as a solution; rather, it illustrates the lack of security created by the current system.
Without the possibility to use the hijacked plane to take hostages to a friendly destination, or to use the plane as a missle, it's no more attractive as a target than any other public space.
Right now, the TSA is kept alive by a large group of people who benefit from beefy government contracts. These powerful people are quite capable of trotting out one bogeyman after another to challenge any TSA rollback proposal. They will twist the opinion of everyone that matters until one of two things happens: either nothing, or a new program that requires handing even more money to their select businesses. They are clearly not interested in actually making things better.
People love to focus on one thing, the presidency, while ignoring the fact that there are many positions of power in the world. It matters what kind of people we have in all of those positions. You can’t dismantle something like the TSA until enough people are in enough positions of power to make it happen.
I wonder if flipping the economics (fee for carry-on, checked bags are free) might help without any changes to the actual security procedures.
Families going on vacation usually have checked luggage anyway (because they have a lot more stuff than they could possibly carry on) while business travelers, who would typically expense any fees, hate to check luggage because of the extra time.
>perception that checked bags are mishandled, lost, or slow down your travel time
All accurate perceptions, especially the latter two. I'd add that having luggage checked also makes it much harder to do re-routings or flight changes when there are problems.
[EDIT: I'd also add that many (most?) business travelers already have fee waivers on checked luggage for various reasons, but they still rarely check luggage.]
What I do wish able-bodied travelers would dispense with is roll-aboards which IMO are responsible for a lot of overhead space issues.
This leaves open the possibility of people carrying drugs or something aboard planes. But that's not really a threat to passengers.
I was through security in less than a minute.
I suppose a bunch of hungover people aren't a convincing security threat.