Hacker News Reader

Comment by acct1771 | Hacker News Reader

> The fuck is the point. This shit depresses my partner every time we travel. It feels like we're cattle. It's dehumanizing...

It sounds like you understand the point of this program juuuust fine.

The effective rate of capture of dangerous weapons is pitiful (less than 10% according to both their own internal audits, and external tests performed by citizens).

At best, it was a jobs program for many lacking education, and was also good reason to sell those backscatter machines that someone in Congress' cousin or business associate's company was selling at the time.

View on HN

What I found really interesting is all this shit treatment has not effected tourism to the United States. I would think there would be huge backlash to all of this, but nope US continues to be a popular spot for foreigners to visit. They don't care about the dehumanization. If there was a huge backlash they might stop to not hurt all the tourism dollars, but no they just keep on keeping on.

Hard to say how much tourism there would be in a more sane security and immigration environment.

Because is it really that terrible? Yeah airport security is a bit annoying and maybe you get sternly told to do something. So what?

The comments here make it sound like the TSA is committing war crimes or something.

I think it's dumb, I think it's a waste of time, I think it's ineffective.

I also think that most of the time, most people spend 5-40 minutes in line, get through it, and promptly forget about it. Expecting it to affect tourism to the US seems totally absurd to me.

Yes it is terrible. It wastes billions of dollars plus additional billions of dollars of time. It is unconstitutional. It doesnt do anything. And it purports to make us safe by making us unsafe. We have to stand in line that can easily be targeted, stands next to a barrel full of suspected explisives, walk barefoot across a dirty floor, and potentially felt up.

It certainly is on my list as a negative if the opportunity to holiday in the US comes up.

There are plenty of other places that are higher on my destination list, so it's unlikely to factor in any decision.

You can add me as a datapoint as well, it definitely factors into some of my decisions (eg. Should I layover in the US or somewhere with saner immigration + security controls?).

Because the US isn't the only country doing this.

from a 2001 low, it seems to have been on a steady upward trend to 2015, and has been flat to down since then.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/tourist-arrivals

Blame the terrorists.

The TSA exists for one reason: to take the insurance risk of another September 11th sized attack without grinding the air travel industry to a halt. No private company could possibly afford the liability insurance for "our guards allowed a few guys with box cutters to kill thousands of people" risk. Paying them well enough to actually do a good job is impracticable at the scale of the US air travel system[1]. So the TSA was created so that the Federal Government would bear the risk, but the pay was not really improved over the private contractors who did the job for as little as possible pre-September 11th.

[1]: Many people talk about the Israeli system, especially when they are trying to justify racial profiling here in the US. What they fail to grasp is that the scales are radically different. Total air passenger #'s in Israel in 2018 was roughly 20% of just Atlanta Hartfield-Jackson, and it was basically all at one airport- US carriers carry more passengers every 10 days than fly in and out of Israel in a year. That means that individual attention is possible in ways that are not in the US context.

How do you feel about the idea that the 9/11 terror attacks are virtual impossible in a post-9/11 world?

Remember that pre-9/11, plane hijackings meant you would get landed and then used as a bargaining chip for a ransom. So, now passengers know a hijacking attempt is a fight for their life (whereas before the recommended advice was to sit tight and let the hijackers do their thing).

Also, now, cockpit doors are reinforced and pilots won't open them for hijackers, no matter the cost.

I agree that a 9/11 style attack will never work again: it didn't even work for the fourth plane on the day of, leave alone in the future. But I am explaining the business case for the TSA, why it exists and is the way it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com