When Republicans are shaping policy, they tend to target air travel.
The article states that the system gets false denials as much as 1 out of 25 times... 4% is a very high error rate. For DIA alone that would average out to almost ~6,700 false denials a day. And that's not accounting for people who have been miscategorized in the system by the threat detection algorithm. It's another level of worry and potential headache associated with air travel.
Before 9/11, you could arrive at an airport 20 minutes before your flight was supposed to take off and still make it. After 9/11, to get on a plane you had to let the government take a nude picture of you, get a dose of radiation, and expect security lines to take 2 hours or more.
The hassle of flying made the comparative cost of driving places less because there was so much hassle associated with it.
And that's the basis my theory, the government is trying to dissuade people from flying in favor of burning through oil by artificially increasing its cost. Not to mention, like always, lining the pockets of the contractors in what is likely another no-bid scenario.
When 9/11 happened, public resources were poured into buying a bunch of nude body scanners that nobody wanted, were unvetted for long-term safety, and were literally useless for many types of weapons. But the measures were successful at making flying a nightmare.
Now the goal is to pour public resources into broadening the scope of no-fly list and implement a broken computer vision system to figure out who to ground? And for what? Has there been an upswing in terrorists hijacking planes domestically lately that we're responding to?
To my knowledge there have been 0 incidents of air travel terrorism in the US since 9/11.
It seems like the Republicans just like to make air travel as miserable as possible to convince the average American to choose to road trip in the face of cheap and quick air travel to justify their oil interests.
And with people as irresponsible as the ones who put in the Rapiscan machines in charge of evaluating threat levels it seem like a recipe for disaster (unless you are a private prison owner).
Not to mention that with 2012's National Defense Authorization act, America was qualified as a war zone to justify its indefinite detention clause. I don't think anyone what's to live in an America where groups of politically active people could be hauled off as terrorist threats because they didn't want an oil pipeline polluting the waterways of the natives.
Go to the airport for vacation and end up indefinitely detained as a terrorist? That would frighten many people out of flying I'd imagine.
DHS is a bad joke that needs to go away.