Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't surprise me in the least. I've been in India for the last month, and I've been shocked by two new things since my last visit (several years ago).

First, security here is everywhere.

Second, security here is pointless.

I have had to walk through security to get to supermarkets, discount stores (think Walmart), high-end shopping malls, temples, mosques, movie theaters, national monuments, airports, hotels, you name it. You can't walk into a large building and not walk through a metal detector. The ACLU would probably go ballistic if the US had even 1% of the number of pat-downs that I have had to go through daily here.

Unfortunately, it's entirely pointless. Generally, I don't take my belt/jewelry/phone off when going through the metal detector, and most of the time, it doesn't even detect that. Whether or not I set off the detector, the process is the same: they (occasionally) wave a wand over, and then send me to a second person who briefly pats me down (<5 seconds in all). Keep in mind, the exact same process is applied to those who do and do not set off the metal detector. A few times, I've set it off and they just wave me through without even checking me further. It's mind-boggling.

I can't say I'm a fan of ubiquitous security, but the only thing that's worse than ubiquitous ineffective security. Anybody who really wants to cause trouble can bypass it in their sleep - all you manage to do is disrupt the lives of everybody else, all the while accomplishing literally nothing.

Similar thing happened to me when visiting a museum in the Vatican. Long queues, metal detectors, etc. After passing through the whole thing with no problem, I realized I had my pocket knife in my pocket throughout the day. I noticed then that the metal detector was beeping all the time, but they were not paying attention, as they probably didn't want to get people to take off belts, etc.

I accidentally took a pocket knife through airport security in LAX.

After that, I realised that the TSA was not only annoying and a waste of time and money, it was completely pointless as well.

It is possible to deduce that from their track record as well. In 10 years TSA has caught exactly 0 terrorists. Not saying there weren't attempts, but those were caught by FBI, other agencies, and most importantly, regular citizens.

I'd never thought about it like that. That is both scary and amusing.

While I agree that the "security theatre" that the TSA provides is largely useless, I don't think this is really an accurate statement. It's entirely possible that TSA screening prevented someone getting on a plane with a weapon of some sort, but that the person in question was never identified as a terrorist, since they had to abandon whatever plans they had.

> It's entirely possible that TSA screening prevented someone getting on a plane with a weapon of some sort

I disagree with that statement. "It could" is hard to measure. We spend 100s of billions of $ on something based on this unproven hypothesis.

Keep in mind, TSA was created to catch terrorists red-handed as they are just about to board a plane. As in "Hey look a bomb in the x-ray machine, arrest this guy!". That is their purpose. They have not yet done that, once, in 10 years!

Govt. intelligence work and regular citizens have prevented and stopped attempts. There is some track record there. TSA doesn't have one.

By your metric one could have just as well re-defined TSA's mission as "Protect the citizens of the United States of America against Evil Pink Elephants from Neptune". Chances are very high that TSA's track record with that task would have been exactly what it is with their current mission. AND you could have still made your argument "See no Pink Elephants from Neptune have attacked us, so they must be doing their job."

Or think about it another way: How many airliners were blown up in US airspace before 9/11? Was it a monthly occurrence? Yearly? Now if was a yearly thing, and then TSA came along and it suddenly stopped, you could have made a correlation based argument saying, that it is probably because of fear of TSA that we didn't have any more attacks.

Yet another way to look at it. As a terrorist you are trying to instill terror and kill as many people as possible. A large gathering of people would maximize your impact. I wonder what places and events consistently create large queues of people waiting in line? What about also a place that would cripple and disrupt the economy and travel? I'll leave that as a rhetorical question.

I agree with you completely that it's entirely unproven whether or not the TSA has been effective for catching terrorists. I also agree that it's a wasteful system that should be seriously reformed into something that is actually effective.

It's precisely because it's unproven that we cannot say that the TSA has never caught a terrorist. That's all I was saying. The TSA may or may not have caught a potential terrorist at some point, it's pretty much impossible to say. You can't have it both ways. Either the TSA's effectiveness is unknown (meaning they may or may not have caught terrorists), or it's known to be 100% useless (meaning 0 terrorists were caught).

In regards to occurrences of terrorists prior to 9/11, you're correct that there weren't many (any?) incidences of using a plane for a terrorist attack, but hijackings were certainly not uncommon prior to 9/11. In fact, come to think of it, incidences of hijackings are almost certainly down since 9/11. I don't think this can be entirely attributed to increased security, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it as a contributing factor.

> we cannot say that the TSA has never caught a terrorist.

But why? I am sure any such catch would have been paraded in front of media for months. Are you saying they caught a terrorist with a bomb red-handed but hid it and instead shipped the guy secretly to a prison in another country? If not, that then I think we can say most definitely that they have not caught a single terrorist. Would you agree?

> but hijackings were certainly not uncommon prior to 9/11

Obviously hijackings were not that bad. That is the reason the first two planes ended up being used as projectiles, because people thought it was a regular hijacking. Within hours everyone in the country including passengers of the plane that went down in PA learned to not think about hijackings anymore in the same way. So the problems basically "fixed" itself immediately.

You are right the # of hijackings is now lower. TSA presence might have a part to play, that's plausible. But because of the previous paragraph it also becomes irrelevant. So the reasons for having the TSA evaporate away again.

The main reasons for the TSA are: 1) politicians seen to be doing something 2) making the public feel safe flying again 3) because someone, somewhere is making a pile of cash from it 4) it's a good way to employ unskilled people

Catching terrorists is likely to be one of the lower priorities.

Personally I think that random thorough screening and randomly distributed flight marshals is a better deterrent than poorly screening everyone. It's always harder to evade a security threat when you don't know what it is or looks like.

Another thing that annoys me is that people push for more railways on the basis that it is safe than flying. Railway in the last 10 years has had more crashes and more terrorist incidents than flying, and a determined terrorist can create massive havoc, fear and deaths from targeting trains, as was tragically displayed several times.

But for some reason, you can still hop on a train with no screening. Go figure.

I accidentally left a pocket knife in my carry on as well, and made it through the first leg. On the second leg, I had to go through security again and they spotted it. I explained that it made it through the first security check, so it must be safe. They allowed me to keep it. I wonder if that would have worked with a gun...

I had a 6 inch hunting knife in my bag and it went through security in Denver, Chicago, New York (JFK), Zurich, and Amsterdam.

Found it when I get back from my travels... was hidden in one of the folds of my bag.

Unfortunately, it's entirely pointless.

It's much the same in the states.

I went through eleventy-dozen checkpoints on the Mall, and elsewhere. All the guards searched my backpack at every check point.

On the way home I found I had left a charged magazine (8 .45 rounds) in the bottom of my backpack. Not especially well-hidden, just snugged under my spare socks.

D.C. seems to have the highest per-capita police presences in the US. And it's all useless and dumb and ineffective.

It does. Near the Capitol, you have the Capitol Police. And since the area is designated a national park, you have US Park Police. In addition to DC police. Finally, you have the Diplomatic Security and Secret Service that will randomly be in the area, and each building's own security force.

I remember the security nightmare at IGI: The entire airport was surrounded in soldiers who wouldn't let you in without a ticket. The whole concept of electronic reservations seemed to go right over their head, until I managed to convince a very kind BA stewardess to go in a print an e-ticket confirmation and then bring it outside to me (I'm sure even Al Qaeda could fake one of those). What a bunch of muppets

How many attacks and/or suicide bombings have taken place during your time there?

It's more about giving people jobs I think

I doubt it. The supermarkets in West Bengal, for example, have security because there were riots when they first came to the state (which is not that hard to believe if you compare them to Wal-Mart in the US). Ditto for the hotels (2008 terrorist attacks) and the temples and mosques (decades of Partition-related violence). India's focused on developing its economy, but not in the way that private institutions (or a budget-aware government) would actively spend money on security theater just for that purpose - especially not when there actually are real security threats afoot.

It's just like the US - the problem isn't that people don't care about security, or that they don't recognize it's a concern. The problem is that the existing measures (like the TSA) don't seem to be paying proper attention to the problem.

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