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Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with airport security in America is that they search for "Dangerous Items", not "Dangerous People". A dangerous person is allowed on an American flight if he/she doesn't have any dangerous items with him. In my opinion, a motivated group of guys could take a plane hostage with nothing but car keys, ju jitsu and some creative thinking.

I'm not saying searching for the dangerous person is superior to searching for the dangerous item. But I think TSA needs to be reminded that weapons don't kill people, its the people that do the killing.

Safe person + Dangerous Items = Safe. Dangerous Person + Safe items = Unsafe.

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Actually, they only search for dangerous items coming through one door. Do you think every person, product or vehicle that enters an airport goes through the same scrutiny as the passengers?

It's like having a bank, where the front door is policed by an army, but the backdoor is wide open for employees, and every window in the place is open every day.

Given the amount of theft from airport bags, and hence stolen goods _leaving_ the airport, do you think it's any harder to bring illicit stuff in?

Well, just to play devil's advocate, I don't get patted down leaving the airport, so I'm not terribly sure that your point about baggage theft is relevant...

If I see someone holding a laptop I don't immediately think "crime", if I see someone holding a gun...

There's a big difference between looking for certain objects that are banned, and looking for objects that are perfectly allowed but might be in the hands of someone other than the owner.

Don't forget that they aren't even able to find the dangerous items. Their system frequently allows box cutting razor blades onto airplanes. How do I know? It happened to me: http://bit.ly/if5XDR after experiencing a traumatic "enhanced" pat down procedure.

After my incident I went to both of my Senators and my Congressman (in person) and recounted my story. I also followed the TSA procedures for reporting civil abuses, which incidentally was a completely worthless excercise.

Their written response to my Congressman's letter to them was, "We followed procedure".

NOT TRUE!

They also try to identify dangerous people. That is what the TSA "no-fly" list is all about. The fact that it worked so poorly is evidence that trying to identify dangerous people has been even less effective than identifying dangerous things, and has a greater impact on civil liberties.

Furthermore your opinion about what a small group of dangerous people can do is over-inflated. FAA regulations mandate a locked pilot cabin during flight. This lock is strong enough that an unarmed man, no matter how motivated, should be unable to get into the cockpit. This does not make breaching the cockpit impossible, but it makes it harder. Particularly since, following the initial attacks on 9/11, on multiple occasions it has been demonstrated that people on airplanes will take extraordinary risks to subdue attempted terrorists.

What constitutes a 'dangerous person'? There is already an extensive no-fly list in place, which incidentally is secret and gives people no avenue for appeal if they have been wrongly put on it.

Israeli airports use extensive profiling to identify potential suicide bombers, from car checkpoints away from the airport to airport staff instructed to look people in the eye and ask them how they're doing (people about to blow themselves up tend to act differently from normal people).

They definitely seem to focus on identifying people rather than things. Seems to work ok for them under much harsher conditions than the US has ever or, hopefully, will ever know.

The TSA already seems to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for their screeners. Given the tremendous discrepancy in the number of airports in Israel vs. the United States, how are we supposed to come up with enough people who are as qualified as the ones Israel can handpick for their airports?

The number of airports is consistent with the number of people. But who in his right mind would want to work in TSA if they can find a respected job elsewhere? Israeli screeners, on the other hand, are respected.

To be clear I didn't mean that there are not literally enough people to hire to do the job. I should've been a bit clearer but what I was really getting at was the massive scope and cost of such an agency with staffing requirements like that. We're talking about something on par with or larger than the FBI.

There is only a $1 billion difference between the two agencies budgets (2010).

TSA is $8billion, FBI is $9billion, DHS is $55billion.

As the US military uses less air conditioning in Afghanistan, that should free up at least a couple billion.

Wow, I should've looked at that, that is stunning, considering that the FBI actually regularly solves crimes.

I imagine if you paid what it really cost to have screeners with that level of training we'd be talking about a pretty hefty increase over the FBI. Mind boggling.

But where is the other $47 billion going to? It is not the FBI's or CIA's budget.

[edit]

Probably to ICE for government provided IP protection and enforcement without due process.

The DHS is huge now. It covers everything from stuff like ICE to the Coast Guard. If you ask me, TSA is the tip of the DHS iceberg. The whole thing is suspect, top to bottom, and probably ought to be scrapped and done over.

Israel has one major international airport, Ben Gurion. It serves ~12 million passengers a year.

That's two months of traffic for Hartsfield-Jackson.

The Israeli security model will not scale.

Israel's population is less than 7.5 million people.

People don't fly into Israel now? :)

No. Only planes and missles.

Your argument:

Your site serves 20'000 users a month. There are more than a billion potential internet users in the world. Your site will not scale.

Everything scales if you put the effort into it. Ok, maybe some things don't, but saying "The Israeli security model will not scale" just because it hasn't scaled, without providing further arguments, is a bit like saying "Rails doesn't scale" without providing further arguments. Sure, Rails does things differently from how PHP does the same things, and that means the performance trade-offs are different, but that doesn't mean it can't be engineered to scale.

And if it makes the passengers/developers happier, it may be worth looking into, not dismissing without argument.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Gurion_International_Airpor...

I'm saying that requiring a face to face interaction with every person about to board an airplane in an American airport would be unreasonably expensive and introduce massive delays.

I won't deny that it works well in a country with a very high risk of terrorist incidents and a low amount of air traffic.

The US, however, flies 633 million people per year, and is at a much lower risk for terrorist attack.

You've got to pick the right solution for the right problem. Israeli security isn't it.

Devil's Advocate: There already is a face to face interaction, though; right before you get into the checkpoint, when they check your ID and ticket. Adding an extra 30 seconds on to have a bit more interaction wouldn't slow things down much - in a crowded airport, it often takes more than 30 seconds to get past there anyways, and in an empty airport where things are already going quickly an extra 30 seconds won't matter much.

You could be correct. At the end of the day, we may be able to make the Israeli model work. But the question most people don't seem to ask or answer: should we?

IMO, there have been exactly two positive security advances post-9/11: you can't barge into the cockpit anymore, and everyone in the air knows to resist attempts to hijack the plane.

Adding more air marshals, creating the draconian TSA, forbidding liquids on flights -- it's not worth the time or money.

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