TSA confirms controversial Amtrak passenger screening program underway
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Highly effective, indeed[1]. The US would probably be better off dropping the pretense and paying the 55,000 employees of the TSA to do nearly anything else instead. Even continuing to pay them their entire salaries while eliminating their jobs would save money in the form of increased airport efficiency.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/17/11687014/tsa-against-airport-s...
Biden is famously pro-rail and I think this is just a way of killing off rail before he has a chance to fund a bunch of construction and equipment. Which is sad, because our federal highway system is crumbling in decay because we way, way overbuilt it.
It's all moot. No matter how much security there is, no matter how badly intelligence services or political leaders fuck up (in the case of 9/11, it was political leadership. In the case of the Boston Marathon bombing, it was intelligence), they'll just shout that they need more surveillance, more security measures, more rules. Nobody will ever say "no, you intelligence people need to do your job properly."
When I lived near Dulles airport I frequently used the train to travel up the north east as far as NY or Boston-- even though the train was often more expensive. The fact that I didn't have to deal with the TSA and their intrusive searches was a significant part of that. From the article it sounds like they're only currently planning to quietly invade your privacy in the background, which might not the rail killing effect you are concerned with. But if they did go full airport-tsa style handling of the trains then I wouldn't be shocked if it killed passenger rail: Not dealing with the TSA may not be a reason for most passengers, but it only has to be a reason for enough to bring it under a threshold of viability.
3 in 70 is between 1/23 and 1/24, but really how many significant digits does this study get to. Surely 1/25 is accurate enough.
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/01/politics/tsa-failed-undercove...
[2]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/reassessing_a...
> "On March 24, 2015, the co-pilot of a German airliner deliberately flew the plane into the French Alps, killing himself and the other 149 people onboard. When it crashed, Germanwings flight 9525 had been traveling from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany. (history.com)"
I believe there's now a strict rule of two pilots in the cockpit at all times as a result. Also, hijacked planes are now much more likely to be shot down by military jets if they approach urban areas, which is not a topic airlines like to discuss.
Not sure of the veracity, but I know pilot Suicide was one of the major theories held by investigators in both cases.
Also maybe let's stop firing them for getting mental healthcare.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/opre.49.2.181...
People hear radiation and lose rationality because of the fear mongering in the 50s and beyond.
Probably not, but only because "That's silly, bananas are just fruit!" rather than because of any scientific study I've seen or done. So you really shouldn't listen to me.
Just because of where the article is listed, I've always just assumed it to be crackpottery.
All potassium is always radioactive. Unless your have a gas centrifuge facility next to your greenhouse, all your bananas are always radioactive.
While practically true, this is sufficiently imprecise to bother the more pedantic variety of nerd; for accuracy I therefore quote the relevant section of Wikipedia (a resource we should give daily thanks for):
"Naturally occurring potassium is composed of three isotopes, of which potassium-40 is radioactive. Traces of potassium-40 are found in all potassium, and it is the most common radioisotope in the human body."
While driving is safe, it's also a lot more dangerous than flying. So pushing people towards driving miles instead of flying iles also should have been a source of mortality in your analysis-- too bad that one is harder to assess. Since for many trips driving is often not a reasonable alternative there probably wouldn't be that many-- but again, it wouldn't take much to overcome any arguable benefit of the TSA.
And, of course, the enormous resources that go into the TSA could be instead funneled into actual lifesaving activities.
It’s a drip for everyone but there are many more drips available where that came from.
The methods used by Israel and by USA (the USA methods being imitated by most other countries) for checking the flight passengers did not have any resemblance.
After 2001, Israel did not make any change in their procedures, because there was no reason, their procedures were much better than what was invented then in USA.
While USA has relied on spending much money on improved machines for scanning people and luggage and in harassing the passengers with things like taking off the shoes, Israel did not rely on machines, but on ancient low-tech methods, i.e. well-trained professionals who questioned the passengers.
The main test that you had to pass to be allowed boarding were 2 separate discussions with 2 Israeli security agents, to whom you had to explain the purpose of your flight. The 2 agents asked mostly the same questions, but with various variations in content and order, so you had to tell convincingly the same story twice.
From the point of view of the traveler, the disadvantage of the Israeli method was that it was slow, a lot of time was needed for the discussions with the agents.
Nevertheless, I prefer that method, because it was much less stressful for me than having to do a lot of unpacking, then undressing, and then dressing, and then packing, while having to be very careful to not have something lost or stolen (I usually travel with a very large number of electronic devices, many of them small and easy to loose; I have also seen once how the laptop of another traveler was successfully stolen before entering the scanning machine, without anyone noticing how; I do not know whether the thief could have been identified later, from the security camera recordings).
In many hundreds of flights with El Al, I was subjected to a body search only once, while on the airlines embracing the USA model, many travelers now do not remember any more the times when they did not have to pass through a body and personal luggage security check.
The only one case when I had to pass through a body search was because I happened too be extremely tired and I wished that the discussions would pass faster, but of course, my noticeable haste had the opposite effect.
The flight was late in the evening and all the day I had been extremely busy. I had literally run through the city the entire day, to complete various errands in time from the flight. After much effort, I had succeeded to reach the airport just in time, but I was exhausted and I just wanted to reach the airplane ASAP, to finally be able to rest.
However, the security agents noticed that I seem to be in a hurry, and they thought that this is suspicious. Therefore I had to also pass through the body search, but like I have said, they did not do such searches on everyone, but only when they had grounds for suspicion.
/s
I also appreciate the security theater because it makes airports a generally drug-free environment. I bet few here have ever spent much time on a bus. Not a short hop on a city bus, an overnight inter-state trip on a greyhound. I have a couple times and each time I would have PAID for a TSA-style check before boarding. It would weed out 99% of crazy/high people who make such journeys so miserable for everyone around them.
A typical long trip by bus, without the TSA:
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-fin...
If I was a terrorist looking to bring a bomb onto a plane, I would probably also build it to sneak past security checks. Isn't that the point?
https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2021/10/13/tsa-firea...
>> By October 3rd of this year, TSA officers had stopped 4,495 airline passengers from carrying firearms onto their flights, surpassing the previous record of 4,432 firearms caught at checkpoints in the full calendar year 2019
I'd really like to understand the TSA's scenario, it looks like another massive and pointless waste of money added to what that the organization already does in airports.
The actual items under dispute are: (1) what is the TSA's domain (anti-terrorism? catching personal amounts of drugs? guns?), and (2) why should we put up with all of the theater that isn't making us any safer?
Most Americans don’t even know the names of their representatives. Improving the public’s ability to petition its officials is something we should try before completely giving up.
I think hijackings are over because everyone now knows that if you pull a knife or a gun on an airport, you will immediately get taken down by literally everyone on the flight. People before 9/11 didn't realize the downside risk of a hijacking was a suicide crash. It was just unthinkable. Now that we know, it will never happen again. TSA is not a factor.
Also your example is from Canada where there is no TSA yet people don't do similar things on planes, it's not an ideal example.
You really think that Canada doesn't have a TSA? They do. It is even called the CATSA, ie the CAnadian TSA. In fact, to comply pre-screening, CATSA is largely forced to mirror all US TSA rules. Literally the only difference between Canadian and American screening procedures is the colour of the uniforms.
Bad assumption.
Flight crews, terminal restaurant workers and gift shop workers, and maintenance people who go through back gate get to avoid the theater. And even TSA walk around their own theater.
Who thinks bad people can't bribe or compel someone to carry a backpack around?
> Look into news reports from the 60s and 70s, before serious security at airports. Hijackings were almost normal. Today they are almost non-existent.
I would wager that this has more to do with the FAA requiring the reinforced and locked cockpit doors, and almost nothing to do with the TSA. The hijackings of the 1960s and 1970s were not done as acts of terror -- they were frequently "statement" actions, done with the goal of making the plane land somewhere troublesome for the US (like Cuba).
> I also appreciate the security theater because it makes airports a generally drug-free environment.
Do we go to the same airports? I regularly see daydrinking, mixing alcohol with sleep medications, and all kinds of behavior that adults generally do when they're in a space where they know their actions don't have real consequences for them. I'll go as far as to say that I've seen more open drug use (and consequent poor behavior) in airports than I've ever seen in the Port Authority in NYC. And I rode interstate buses for years.
Nope. Hijackings disappeared long before 9/11, when they started x-raying carry-ons in the 80s. No longer could just anyone bring an AK-47 on in a guitar case.
https://airport.nridigital.com/air_mar20/timeline_the_histor...
"As time went by, a series of skyjacking attempts – which in 1969 alone amounted to 40 in the US [ie one every week] – eventually led to the introduction of the first x-ray scanning machines for baggage in the 1970s. However, passengers themselves were only checked with an electronic magnetometer and later through metal detectors."
When people talk about the TSA's security theater, they typically mean:
1. Non-evidence-backed methodologies and screening requirements, such as the 3oz liquid limit and requiring passengers to remove their shoes (but only some of the time?)
2. Arbitrary "secondary screening" procedures and rampant pretextual justifications for screening selection (read: "looking too much like a terrorist")
3. Overdependence on questionably useful scanning technologies[1][2]. I chose millimeter wave scanners arbitrarily, but "backscatter" scanners have similar problems.
If x-raying luggage keeps people from bringing AK-47s onto airplanes, then we should continue to do that. But we can skip the rest of the theater and save some time and money in the process.
[1]: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/tsa-agent-slips-through-df...
[2]: https://www.propublica.org/article/sweating-bullets-body-sca...
I don't think I would consider today's screening techniques "basically the same" as those in the 1980s and 1990s. My understanding is that the liquid limit, shoe removal, and use of largely ineffective personal scanning machines are all post-9/11 changes. All of that is a significant departure from having your bags scanned and walking through a single metal detector.
(More generally, this raises the question: if things are "basically the same" in your opinion between now and the 1990s, why weren't we able to stop 9/11?)
The US variant of the Gregorian calendar sounds wild!
The high price of the flight is what weeds those folks out. People don't take an overnight Greyhound because they love sleeping with their neck at a 45 degree angle, or because they love watching the worst parts of New Jersey roll by in pitch darkness.
It is not even close to the same. First class is expensive. No argument there. It isn't just a little better. It's an entirely different experience.
What you have there is an "America" problem, not a "Bus" problem.
There was a baby on one bus who cried all the daylight hours and at least third of the dark hours for about 1200 miles, and he or she did make it hard to sleep. But I don't think a TSA-style check would have screened out the baby.
[edit: duration of stop in Detroit]
Like many pro-efficiency/anti-waste rants, yours ended up flying to close to the sun here.
If you eliminate the TSA you also eliminate the entity doing the random screenings. And random screenings do provide some security which is difficult to game.
Hell, random screenings even publicly signal their unpredictability by generating news stories about a famous presidential candidate being pulled out of the line for a random screening.
That's the only bona fide security feature I know about the TSA-- I'm not a security expert, so there may be others.
- reinforced cockpit doors - passengers now actively resist hijackers
Everything else is security theater.
I swear the authorities who come up with this garbage have been trapped in a fluorescent dungeon for too many decades and forgot what life is about
That seems to be a bit of a meme in plenty of western movies.
Edit: Los Angeles, not New York.
may be that story? that says LA though, not New York.
Politically, if you're anti-TSA you're not only anti-safety and pro-terrorism, you're against jobs for veterans (in reality, the bottom tier of veterans with no marketable skills and personality problems that make them unemployable in the private sector).
Thank you for reading the article.
> This isn't about setting up security checkpoints.
However, all I have to say is: "yet."
"Americans deserve to feel safe when they’re traveling."
It's so ridiculous that I can't help but think cynically of it: either TSA is doing the bureaucratic thing of expanding as much as it can, or some really good airplane lobbyist finally got their payday.
"What if they were laying the tracks during the night - and, God forbid, ran a train into the White House?"
The whole interview is genius.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taking_of_Pelham_One_Two_T...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Dutch_train_hijacking
There was an attack on the Thalys not all that long ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Thalys_train_attack
and another attempted attack
https://www.voanews.com/a/europe_americans-who-foiled-attemp...
So while there isn't nearly as much history for train hijackings they did happen, and I'm sure there will be more in the future. But that doesn't justify the kind of security theater that the TSA goes in for.
Not to mention that the most important measures protecting against this have nothing to do with the TSA. 9/11 Changed completely the way passengers and crew see hijacking. It used to be that hijackers had demands, not suicide missions. Anyone trying to do it now will face a planeful of people fighting them like their lives depend on it, not to mention a locked, reinforced cockpit door. Attacks on planes are stopped either before they ever make it the airport, as with the plot that made them ban liquids, or after they're in the air, as with the undewear- and shoe-bombers.
"Welcome to Seaview Estates, a Safer Neighborhood(tm) by Amazon & in cooperation with the TSA.
We are proud of our award winning public transit connections. Our security officers will conduct quick, minimally invasive searches of all residents, visitors, pets and vehicles when leaving your house, and upon returning to a Safer Neighborhood.
Please note that delays should be expected when entering a Safer Neighborhood, so you should arrive early to clear our screening process.
All liquids, gels and powders should be in transparent containers of no more than 2 ounces, unless from a Safer Neighborhood certified vendor. Did you know that all products purchased through Amazon Prime are pre-certified?"
Honestly, as a European going to the us, it was shocking how bad the train system is. But I get it, places in the us are too far spread apart, so that it is more difficult to connect them.
If there are airport like security checks, even less people will use it. Good for the freight trains though, since they'll have the tracks to themselves.
I can't really comment on the article, since it bans EU visitors, but judging by comments here, I'm afraid the system will only get worse.
By 1967 passenger train ridership had plummeted. Most people and a whole lot of freight shifted to the freeways and/or jetliners. Railroads could not compete. In 1952 there were 370 thousand miles of track. By 1992 that had dropped to 190 thousand miles.[0] Much track steel was recycled, and many rural railbeds became 'trailways'.
[0]https://www.railserve.com/stats_records/railroad_route_miles...
I'd be very interested to see a comparative study of the US and Western (and Eastern) European countries' transport infrastructure in this period, but I've never found one.
Most of the tracks (in the west at least) are already owned by freight companies and Amtrak just squeezes in usage at their behest. It’s part of why Amtrak sucks as much as it does (no priority).
However, it is potentially the first step in a slippery slope that leads to that kind of screening.
If such invasive screenings are implemented it will impact the already dismal commercial appeal of intercity train travel in USA.
Not only because (as several folks suggested) that "hijacking" a train is absurd on its face (although this[0] -- and not the garbage remake comes to mind), but especially because all someone has to do is drive a car (or even "better", a fully loaded 18-wheeler) onto the train tracks on the far side of a curve and blammo.
Or, more dramatically, a bomb on a railroad trestle (or just on a track) moments before a train is to arrive (there are, you know, schedules and stuff) would have a similar effect.
The whole idea is absurd security theater that needs to be killed with fire.
So unless all car purchasers/renters are also screened for "terrorist" impulses, you can't stop folks from wrecking trains.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taking_of_Pelham_One_Two_T...
Edit: Added the missing link.
Completely honest question - are trains in, say, Germany that much cheaper for going between cities? Most of the times I've considered traveling to a country where train travel is more common/normal, I've been surprised by how relatively expensive it is compared to my expectations.
Checking now, for Coach/Second Class Berlin to Frankfurt on a Friday is about 50 USD and NYC to Boston is 75. It's 50% more expensive on Amtrak, but neither is really "cheap", with both of them being about the same length of trip between similar sized cities. It's certainly not so cheap that "people without a lot of money" would be easily able to take that trip on a budget.
This was for the 30th of April between Berlin and Frankfurt.
I don't mean any of this to say I wouldn't love a better train system, just that it seems like more of the value of it is in realms other than its cost-effectiveness, even in countries with good infrastructure and investment in it.
Given the right resources (more wholly-owned tracks and legislation requiring commercial railroads to honor Amtrak's timetables), Amtrak could be a pretty great national service.
The fastest TSA agents I ever dealt with didn't care about belts, shoes, or anything. It was great. Apparently they were all involved in an illegal gambling ring.
Everyone always imagines all the power going to the EPA or whatever their favorite pet agency is (the fact that we even have these de-facto lawmaking executive bureaucracies is a travesty for another day) but forgets that there's one TSA, one DEA, one ATF and one DHS for every EPA.
To make this happen they have to screen trains, and perhaps even create check points on state borders.
>Mission: Protect the nation's transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce. >Vision: An agile security agency, embodied by a professional workforce, that engages its partners and the American people to outmatch a dynamic threat.
I suppose that is vague enough to prevent anyone the government decides is not a person from using our "transportation system." Hmm...
I can. Make them ride the bus instead.
I haven't experienced that on the train. And I have on the bus. An accident on the road and you're not going anywhere until it's cleared.
What's more, have you even ridden on stank Greyhound or Trailways bus? Yuck. I'd rather have my tonsils extracted through my ears.
It was overall quite a miserable experience compared to just using my own car. And the return trip ticket cost was actually more than gas+mileage expenses on an ordinary economy car.
Whereas crossing the border by train is miserable because CBSA/CBP have to clear everyone on the train. I once took the train from Toronto to NYC (nominally a 12.5 hour trip). We were stuck the border for 2.5 hours (a bunch of passengers had to go through secondary inspection), which made it a 15 hour trip. I could've flown it in 1.5 hrs total.
Lesson: never try to cross a national border by train. We're not Europe -- we have neither a Schengen-like agreement or pre-clearance for trains like we do for airports. Though we theoretically could have pre-clearance for trains (there have been efforts [1])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_border_precleara...
The fact that some goon is allowed to pat me down at any time in an airport with zero probable cause. They stick their hands in places I wouldn't allow ANYONE else to touch. They remove my shoes showing my bare feet in public. I have to travel without any cash because they can steal it from me for no reason.
If they lie, they will be believed automatically. If they arrest me and charge me with a crime I didn't commit I will be required to pay absurd amounts of money for my own defense. If they shoot me, it is trivially easy to justify it as long as there are no witnesses.
What do I get in return? Do I really get to feel "Safe?"
[1] https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Toilet_Safety_Administrati...
A lot of the comments here are laughing at the absurdity of a train hijacking, but I think the greater threat is someone or some group of people choosing a packed train as the very soft target it is for a domestic terrorist attack or mass shooting.
To be clear, most places in America are soft targets for people who want to perpetrate mass casualty events. But while generally people can run and hide, there is no where to run and nowhere to hide on a train.
I'm surprised we don't see more of it, being honest. Only a matter of time.
List of places where people are more exposed with no places to hide: - a TSA line at an airport (bonus because victims very unlikely to have their own fire arms) - a lecture hall at a university - a Walmart - a movie theatre - a Costco on a Saturday
> I'm surprised we don't see more of it, being honest. Only a matter of time.
You haven’t really thought this through. There isn’t anything special about the train here. The only thing that is special is how obsessed we are with airports.
The plan is to track and trace everyone, everything, everywhere. And most people are pretty much on board! Using credit cards, capitulating to govt. requests, shopping at megacorps, splashing their data all over the place, spy phones, coding the future dystopia, etc.
Amtrak is actually late to the party, but it did eventually get the memo, it seems.
As did lots of other corporations - around here they have upgraded the security gates to access supermarkets.
The entire interview is gold.
I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn't there the moment before. I looked down: "Rail? WTF?" and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling.
Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife's pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC's pulling, and 2 Dash-9's pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours!
Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths?
A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.
- Cab Dolowicz
I can see why this would be lucrative now a days. Go to a state with cheap recreational marijuana, and then take a train back to a state that is still illegal. You could easily double what you put into it.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/multiple-people-shot-i...
Or just give them the money no strings attached.
Is this an intranet?
This is why people fight against vaccine mandates and I’m about to join them.