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Comment by Nasrudith | Hacker News Reader

Better idea of course - abolish the TSA. I mean harshly enough the pandemic proves they don't really care about tens of thousands of lives so their justification for existence is even more moot - on top of their ineffectualness.

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9/11 will never happen again because the idea of a plane hijacking for ransom no longer exists in passengers' minds. If someone hijacks a plane now, the passengers assume the hijackers have suicidal intent and will curb stomp the hijackers to death or die trying. So in that regard I think TSA confiscating scissors and pen knives is just silly. A simple metal detector is sufficient for finding large weapons like guns.

On the other hand, terrorists' only option now is to just destroy the plane and kill all the passengers onboard. Cabin doors are locked, so this involves blowing up a bomb concealed somewhere (checked luggage, shoes, liquid explosives, etc). How do you propose we detect whether someone is trying to smuggle a bomb on a plane without something like the TSA? Just keep an eye out for nervous passengers and report them?

In other words, if we abolish the TSA tomorrow and replace it with metal detectors, what's to stop someone from bringing a few gallons of chemical explosives in their backpack, mixing them in the lavatory, and blowing up the plane? TSA has always caught when I accidentally left a full water bottle in my backpack.

I think in general there are more crowded and easily accessible places to blow up than a plane if you aren't planning on hijacking it, so I don't see anyone doing that anyway.

I don't remember the actual statistic, so I'll lowball, but in an internal audit the TSA did not catch 70+% of contraband that was intentionally brought through security by the auditors.

They had a 96% failure to catch rate in 2015.

https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/tsa-has-made-a...

>In other words, if we abolish the TSA tomorrow and replace it with metal detectors, what's to stop someone from bringing a few gallons of chemical explosives in their backpack, mixing them in the lavatory, and blowing up the plane?

The reality is that it's already feasible to sneak conventional weapons and explosives past TSA. Here are two fairly recent investigations on the TSA's efficacy, one from 2015 [1] and one from 2017 [2]. Both of these undercover investigations were performed by the Department of Homeland Security. The first one found that in 67 out of 70 tests, agents were able to get weapons past TSA, including a fake IED strapped to an agent's back. The second found that this failure rate dropped from 2015's staggering 95% to "in the ballpark" of 80%.

Yes, the TSA always stops you when you bring a full water bottle. Eight times out of ten, they won't confiscate your gun or bomb. Even if they did, what's to stop someone from mixing chemicals to cause an explosion on a bus? Or in a crowded hotel? Or an elementary school? Or a mall? Or...

In my opinion, there simply aren't that many people with both the desire and means to do these things.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-fin...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...

And let's not ignore the fact that someone could just kidnap the pilots families and blackmail them into "hijacking" their own plane. An organisation with the money and motivation doesn't care about the TSA and their security theater.

Meanwhile I can't pack through sun-tan lotion in a carry on so I can use it before I tear into my suitcase in a hotel room. I think the actually most dangerous thing in my bag was the laptop's lithium ion battery, though there were the lovely cellphone issues a year or two ago as well.

Meanwhile, I hear it's possible to carry on a whole pumpkin pie. As if someone couldn't hide a good bit of volatile material in that format, or an improvised weapon in the form of it's carrying container.

As much as I dislike profiling, I do believe it has a place of use in focusing actual suspicion based fact finding and proving. It should be used to exclude suspects and focus investigations and judicial review for search requests to cases that might matter.

Well I mean what stops anyone now from bringing a few gallons of chemical explosives and blow up the line at the TSA checkpoint, I think the locking of the cockpit doors was the fix and the TSA is mostly security theater/job creation scheme.

It's always grimly funny to see how a TSA officer confiscates somebody's bottle of water, on the grounds that it might be a can of liquid explosive, and casually throws it to a bin full of other such water bottles, possibly full of liquid explosive, positioned right next to a large crowd of people in front of a TSA checkpoint.

That is, they are actively showing they themselves don't believe in what they are doing.

Seems like a perfect way for a terrorist to have a time bomb landed inside a 2L "soda bottle" in that confiscated bottles bin, and go board a plane, all clean.

TSA agents aren't serious people because the agency itself is not treated as serious - as many have pointed out in this thread, it was invented by people who were essentially larping as "serious people", staffed by more of the same, and then given a mandate that is, in fact, very serious.

If we treated TSA as serious we would deputize them as part of DoD, or as part of CBP and abolish the "checkpoint" version of this security theatre we're all complaining about. The Theatre doesn't make sense, we all know it, and as you point out the people working for TSA implicitly know it. A serious TSA agency would have armed troops, along with a myriad of other detection technologies, patrolling airports as is done in other major transportation hubs like Penn Station.

I've accidentally gotten pocket knives, lighters, actual ammo (shame on me, was coming from a military reunion where we spent time at a range) through security in my carry on. Once I was randomly pulled out and had the "sniff" test run on my bag (admittedly one that was in Afghanistan with me), where they wipe it down with a small piece of cotton and put it in a machine that does some magic I'm not smart enough to understand.

It of course came up positive that time.

I'm more afraid of a suicide bomber in a crowded TSA "security" checkpoint line than I am of someone actually hijacking/blowing up a plane.

> whats' to stop someone from bringing a few gallons of chemical explosives in their backpack, mixing them in the lavatory, and blowing up the plane?

Same thing that stops people from blowing up buses, trains cars, shopping malls, movie theaters, etc: not much. There just isn't a sufficient incentive and will to do such things.

This article says that "Anti-immigration hardliners" want to trash the whole system on the way out. https://thebaffler.com/latest/scorched-earth-de-la-hoz

The IDEA of the TSA is to standardize all port security, not just the x-ray of your stuff and making you wait in line.

You don't need a Federal Agency to do that.

I disagree, it's a federal jobs program under the guise of security theater.

it would be totally ok to be a federal jobs program if it actually provided unintrusive security. rather, the problem is that it's corrupt, funneling large amounts of tax dollars to private enterprise for no benefit and a boatload of individual slights. instead, the tsa should turn half of the nearly 50K screeners into canine teams roaming all the ports, letting people walk through with just an electronic bag screen.

That would be a better jobs program. You’d employ the various purveyors of dog care products, vets and other services, some of which benefit society in a more meaningful way than a rent a cop.

Better yet, why not a federal jobs program that does something useful?

I.E the CCC during the depression era.

If only the US were in dire need of massive infrastructure refurbishment projects.

If the government wants to make jobs programs, it makes more sense to have the people getting the jobs do something productive rather than non-productive(if that is what you think the TSA is). For example, a lot of manual, mostly unskilled labor is needed for road maintenance and repair - why wouldn't the government just create/expand a jobs program for that instead?

Because half the government thinks that the government shouldn't be doing things other than security theater?

Because that would take precious jobs away from the private sector and the rich couldn’t get richer /s

That's the excuse, not the motivation.

Except that every port is allowed to choose if they use the TSA or not. San Francisco for example does not use the TSA.

afaik, the tsa is still in charge of port security at sfo, but the screening is outsourced to a private company.

The TSA selects the contractor and gives them the rules of operations, but the contractor is in charge of execution. So, sort of?

> Except that every port is allowed to choose if they use the TSA or not. San Francisco for example does not use the TSA.

Then, somehow, they managed to make it even worse.

Fine. Push TSA into non-public roles and give airport security back to the airports/airlines.

Yup, I'll bet airports and airlines won't cut corners to make sure profits keep flowing.

Given that TSA continues to absorb increasing amounts of boondoggle in return for actually making me LESS safe (giant lines outside the security perimeter are a wonderful target) I'll take the trade, thanks.

And airline personnel have to abide by the law since they can be taken to court. That's a VAST improvement over the unaccountable TSA.

And, oddly, the airlines actually didn't cut corners. What "needs to get caught" is well-defined, and all holy hell breaks over the heads of people if it doesn't get caught.

Now, that means that airlines train their security to recognize the test firearm rather than actual general firearms, but that's a failure to define the problem correctly rather than cutting corners.

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