After 20 Years of Failure, Kill the TSA | Hacker News Reader

After 20 Years of Failure, Kill the TSA

reason.com

174 pointsdandotway59 comments

My two favorite quotes:

> But the Homeland Security Red Teams in the 2015 test actively concealed forbidden items just as real criminals and terrorist would. The result was that "TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints."

> What the TSA is good at is high-visibility groping, scanning, and confiscating. Making people drop their pants, take off their shoes, and surrender their shampoo annoys people in a way that says "we're doing something" without actually accomplishing anything. It's what Schneier calls "security theater."

> potential weapons

In case anyone is wondering, I've been part of similar Red Teams in Europe (incl flights towards USA) and "potential weapons" included AK-47's.

Did the weapons get through?

Yes, we obtained >90% success rates with (large) guns.

Wow that's not a comforting thought. How is that even possible?

As everyone else has commented, security theater versus effective screening and detection methods.

My sister worked in airport security for a while in the UK and their team also had >90% success rate.

Into carry on luggage? How do they miss assault rifles but catch my swiss army knife I forgot about? Every. Time.

Because swiss army knives are way more common than AK47s on carry on luggage? Directed Attention Fatigue?

I heard a story from a guy who was a hunter about how he forgot about some misplaced ammo in a backpack that he then used as carry on luggage. Of course security found it and he got himself a criminal record. It happened in Europe, where one doesn't buy ammo at the grocery store and it has to be stored under key separately from the firearm etc.

I smuggle things onto planes all the time. Nothing exciting, just bigger bottles of liquids. The trick? Just hide them in your clothes and walk through the metal detector. Rick Owens pants with a plethora of massive hidden pockets make this all the easier.

Not very high stakes obviously, worst case scenario I might end up losing a bottle of parfume or some hot sauce.

There was a high-profile case a few years ago where Slovakian border police put some RDX-based plastic explosive in the baggage of a passenger flying to Dublin, then forgot to remove it.

Thanks, I'm going to remember this next time I feel like I screwed up at work.

Another fun one. The CIA forgot a bomb in the engine of an actively used school bus after a training exercise.

https://www.npr.org/2016/04/01/472716101/cia-leaves-explosiv...

Did the weapons go through an xray? Did the humans looking at the xray just... ignore what they saw? How do you explain an AK-47 slipping through?

Haha, nice toy, pretty realistic. Next one.

I wonder if one could transport an airsoft weapon that way? I'm not willing to attempt it, of course. It could probably land you in jail in places such as Singapore, Thailand, China, Russia or the US. In Russia they have an article in the penal code specifically for "false terrorism declarations".

The TSA confiscates thousands of guns per year. I wonder, does that stat mean that potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of guns are getting by onto planes? Or is the average person who brings a gun to the airport just not as good at concealing it as these red teams?

Both.

> The result was that "TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints

This is not due to poor training, it's the result of Directed Attention Fatigue, and it can't be fixed by better training.

People trying to get weapons on planes is rare, and a screening agent's typical day will involve looking at thousands of ordinary, boring scans with no intervention required. In situations like this, the mind starts to fill in the blanks and predict what the next scan will be and effectively "zones out".

The best way to fix the problem would be to introduce a steady stream of "false weapons" into the screening process and reward the agents for finding them. Of course, that would be disruptive in other ways.

It's not that the agents are not stupid, lazy, or poorly trained. It's just how we humans are wired.

BTW, this is the same reason why the "human assisted" self-driving cars are so dangerous. Humans can't be constantly vigilant when nothing is happening.

Sure we can blame the TSA agent for failing to find the knife. We can (and will) blame the drivers for not taking over control. But in both cases, the problem is that people have designed systems that assume humans can simply choose to ignore our own psychology, and do so at scale.

Next step: write your local congressional representative with your well-written summary of Directed Attention Fatigue. Unfortunately, your local congressional representative also perhaps suffers Directed Attention Fatigue.

Heh, my office does this with phishing. At irregular intervals—but a few times a month—they send us fake phishing emails and congratulate us if we catch them, or chastise and educate if we click the links.

Just like the invasion of Afghanistan, this was all driven by the need to "do something" after 9/11. Now the US has finally left, a decade after assasinating Bin Laden in Pakistan, maybe the domestic security theatre can be dismantled too. The salience of terrorism in the air has vanished when mobs fight each other in the street and the US loses a 9/11 worth of COVID deaths every two days.

It also seems odd that mandatory groping never received as much pushback as, say, mandatory facemasks.

>It also seems odd that mandatory groping never received as much pushback as, say, mandatory facemasks.

Not really? Mandatory groping is an infrequent experience reserved only for those who travel by air, while mandatory face masks affect everyone, all the time. I don't know why you'd be surprised.

Right. I avoid airports as often as possible

It seems like every 10 years the US uses something to reassert it's foreign policy, maybe also followed by a financial crisis? In 1991 it finally succeeded screwing up the Soviet Union, shortly followed by the war in Yugoslavia. In 2001 they used 9/11 and the War on Terror to invade a host of countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. In 2008/2009 the subprime mortgage crisis triggered a global financial crisis, followed by the NATO intervention in Libya. Now they're using Trump's trade war, Covid and a chip/comodity shortage to stir up things with China. It makes one wonder if it isn't all intended and planned in advance, or if it just reacts when opportunity arises.

Unfortunately the political risk for dismantling protections and then having a new attack occur is something politicians won’t accept.

definitely kill TSA precheck (and clear). It’s absurd to me that the government now offers a paid subscription service to enable people to bypass an entirely government-created problem that has little to no benefit.

“We are instituting a policy in which the government employs people to hit travelers in the face with a board as they enter the airport”

“If you would prefer not to be hit with a board as part of your travel experience, please apply for our new program and pay up.”

That won’t add pressure to get rid of the TSA. I don’t know what will. I’d support an actually libertarian party at this point. One that did not consider women and black/brown people inferior and did not defer to megacorporations and multibillionaires.

This is a gross mischaracterization of libertarians, and a cheap straw man.

You’ve just defined a racket. Operating a racket is called racketeering.

Guess I'm going to wholeheartedly agree with Reason Magazine today. Doesn't happen often, but they're totally right here; security theater was a knee jerk reaction and the sooner we get rid of it the better.

I was putting my stuff on the belt when a TSA guy came up and slipped a lighter in my shoe. He did the “Shhh” gesture to me indicating he was testing the X ray guy but as a brown man I wasn’t having it. I started loudly yelling “he slipped the lighter in my shoe did you see that” and everyone around me nodded in agreement but despite the commotion the X ray guy still missed it. The guy who slipped the lighter in was very exasperated when I started yelling but even more exasperated when his colleague missed it, after the whole line was made aware of the frame up.

Imagine the billions of shoes removed because of the threat of one shoe bomb.

War veterans being disassembled to make sure they aren’t terrorists. What a disaster.

I never understood using tax money to screen zero-risk travelers.

It's a complete waste of time and resources for everyone involved. I guess it's a job program and a form of welfare.

I think some of this could be automated.

The xrays show large radiopaque items. If TSA recorded the images of each scanner and collected a dataset then a real time object detector could be used to improve screening sensitivity and efficiency.

It would help pay for the infrastructure bill, if we put the TSA out of its misery.

The TSA exists to normalize control. It doesn't matter if it works or not at stopping terrorists, the point was never to actually prevent terrorism. Much like "communism" or "drugs" during the wars on those two things, "terrorism" is just a convenient excuse to expand the surveillance and police states in the name of "security", and much like with the activities the NSA and social media companies get up to spying on people and stealing their data, everyone complains about the TSA but no one ever does anything to actually challenge the existence of it. In fact, it only helps this agenda that going through the TSA is often a demeaning or dehumanizing (especially if you're POC or trans, interestingly enough) or at least extremely annoying experience; we still have to put up with this, and the state knows this. When you go through the TSA, what you're supposed to get out of it is "I will comply with what the state wants even if it's completely nonsensical and unpleasant"

In that respect I'd say the TSA has been a resounding success and probably isn't going anywhere.

Bingo

It is a jobs program for around 100000 people and a test ground for new scanning technologies. Why would any administration kill it ?

Umm, because politically-elected bosses going to fire them otherwise? At least that's how it should be, right?

The TSA literally grabbed my balls in LAX on a flight to Dallas.

Bowling balls can be used as deadly weapon on planes.

> "Never again will a terrorist be able to breach the cockpit simply with a box cutter or a knife. The cockpit doors have been reinforced, and passengers, flight crews and air marshals would intervene."

I fail to understand this. How would the passengers and flight crews intervene against armed (with knife) assailants?

"Are you guys ready? Okay. Let's roll!"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Beamer

Just like how the seat cushion doubles as a flotation maybe arm rests should dispense 8 in knifes. Not much advantage to sneaking a weapon on a plane if everyone else has one too.

Oh yes, we don't want violence on the plane so just give everyone weapons

Frankly this is the asinine US view which results in so many shootings because there are just so many guns floating around basically unrestricted

We could Home Alone it instead!

Trip wire between the seats. Instead of those oxygen masks it's a hammer that swings down. Hot iron on the bathroom pull handle.

Those guys were REAL heros.

It’s a simple risk analysis. Assuming the hijackers intend to crash the plane, you have nothing to lose by fighting back.

That equation was never in place prior to the attacks, there were official scenarios that suggested this tactic, but passengers and crew would have been correctly expecting another hijack with detour to Cuba or something

Correct — this is why 9/11 was possible then and impossible now, TSA or no TSA. Source: I’ve traveled on airplanes with some frequency between 1980 and now.

>9/11 was possible then and impossible now

pfft, now you have hardened cockpit doors that’ll keep you safe if you manage to SE your way into the cockpit (which at least on long haul flights departing from europe hasn’t been super hard IME)

A terror group could just have one of their operatives blow a million dollars on first class flights to achieve some VVIP-status like BA executive premier, then it suddenly becomes really easy to ask for things like seeing the cockpit during takeoff.

Or you could just charter a few large private jets, there wouldn’t be any other passengers to fuck you over and you’d be in charge of the fligut route.

I guess they’d shoot you down faster these days, but to mitigate that you’d just need to depart from a city airport and make sure they let you in the cockpit early on.

I’m absolutely sure there could be a new (single-aircraft) 9/11, and it wouldn’t even be particularly difficult to execute by a group of people that isn’t already under heavy government surveillance.

Simply push 100 people up the aisle? Sure, the first one or two might get knifed, but attackers couldn't possibly withstand the crush.

The 9/11 hijackings relied on the fact that a "hijacking" was considered to be something like being diverted to Canada/Mexico/Cuba and then being let go. Annoying, but no point in putting your life at risk.

Once the knowledge that the hijackers were doing a suicide run got out the people no longer sat still (see Flight 93).

6 people can't possibly stop all 100 people in the confined space of an airplane with mere knives.

Find something longer than their knife so they are out of reach and start beating the shit out of them with it? Knives aren't very threatening unless they are extremely close, and most knives can't be thrown because they don't have the right balance. Dealing with knives is trivial compared to a gun.

Machetes on the other hand, that might suck

TSA is as useless as traffic police during rush hour.

Speaking of, can someone explain why the TSA security theater does not include body temperature measurement (or any other screening for COVID symptoms) nowadays? The whole airport situation is weird: mask enforcement in the environment where people can plausibly socially distance (airport terminal) is hardcore, yet when they are stuffed into a plane like sardines for hours without any distancing they can take the masks off to drink or eat. Or even sneeze, as the case may be. And _nobody_ screens for even the most obvious symptoms of infection. You can sneeze and cough your way straight to the plane flying a domestic flight, and infect everyone inside if you wanted to. They should run a "red team" to show that.

I would like to know why the food court employees go around TSA theater. These food workers going to their jobs often carry backpacks and nothing is screened.

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