When Will Being a Non-TSA Airport Become a Competitive Advantage?
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Hopefully this will change.
ADD: Hate to be Mr. Cyncial Guy, but I think it's important to look at the problems with the system that led to the creation of the TSA. After 9-11, the Republicans wanted to do something big to put boots on the ground all over the nation, to be the party of security (theater). The Democrats wanted tens of thousands of new federal union workers to help shore up their re-election base. Both sides also wanted to be able to run generally on "doing something about terrorism". So a compromise was reached, everybody got something they wanted, and here we are.
Hopefully many airports will manage to opt out. I am not holding my breath for it, though. My money says we'll see those tens of thousands of drones a long time before we see substantial competition for airport security. As the other commenter pointed out, even if you opt out TSA still gets to tell you exactly what to do. Litigation exposure alone will keep most airports from signing up.
The problems with the system that led to the creation of the TSA is that voters vote for theatre. They do it with drug laws, they do it with drunk driving laws, they do it to "protect the children" and they do it with anti-terror nonsense.
The parties' motives for going along with it are almost irrelevant. Opposing these laws is career suicide for American politicians.
It's also worth noting that there are two types of career suicide here: 1. Acting against the population's wishes, and 2. Acing against what is deemed acceptable by the ruling establishment. I think the "war on drugs" is an example where the general population might be very receptive to an unorthodox (i.e. decriminalization) candidate, but such candidates are filtered out of the process.
You can be arrested for drunk driving a segway or a horse.
The drunk driving threshold in most states is so low they can't do physical tests to determine that level of impairment. They can only test your 'impairment' by testing directly for alcohol as many people preform better on reflex tests etc with that much alcohol in their system.
There is some impairment at that level but it's well below other accepted thresholds like being sleepy or talking on a cellphone. Still even sober people cause accidents so there are plenty of accidents caused by people with that level of impairment, which helps keep threshold set that low.
PS: Much of the world is much worse though with .02 being the limit in China, Estonia, Poland, Sweden.
BTW, I live in Sweden. You don't drink even a glass of wine for dinner and plan to drive that night. On the other hand, there's great mass transit so less need to drive if you want to drink. It's also fine to drink beer in public, unlike several places I've lived in the US.
Aside from highly religious towns with strict licensing like, say, Salt Lake City, and aside from lunch during the work day, alcohol consumption is pretty well accepted.
I misunderstood and thought they were talking about drinking at a restaurant or something. I figured the likely cultural miscommunication was over the European position on having a beer with lunch.
While it's possible to get beer in Sweden at the company cafeteria, it's "lättöl", max 2.25% by volume. By comparison, Budweiser is 5%. There's actually no age limit for lättöl, but many stores require 18+.
It's not the same as Germany. There was a strong sobriety movement here for decades to reduce the amount of drinking. Back in the 50s there was a maximum limit of the amount of liquor you could by. You were allotted a maximum of 3L of vodka per month (1 liter if you were an unmarried woman), and the government store didn't sell wine. You had a book, which was stamped with your alcohol purchases so they could keep track.
It's been effective. The drinking level is now about average for the rest of Europe, but there's still the international impression of hard-drinking Swedes.
I kind of think the 0.0 laws in the Scandinavian countries make a lot of sense, if you plan to drive, just don't drink anything, full stop.
And there's definitely something to be said about established party powers holding sway over policy. But as we've seen recently with the Tea Party: the established power in a political party can find itself very quickly out of power, should it ignore the policy preferences of a motivated voting bloc.
Consider this quote: "Once the 0.08 standard took effect nationwide in 2000, a curious thing happened: Alcohol-related traffic fatalities increased, following a 20-year decline. Critics of the 0.08 standard predicted this would happen." It has a link for you to verify, but that's to a Cato ("libertarian think tank") essay from 2005. The Cato publication in turn refers to an increase in overall deaths, but doesn't say how large the increase is, nor if there are any other reasons which might cause the increase.
Since the Reason article was written in 2010, you'd think they would see if the predicted upward trend was more than a statistical anomaly. Go to http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811402.pdf and look at Figure 1 in Chapter 1. You'll see the trend went up, until 2005, and then dropped. The number of deaths in 2009 is about 4,000 less than the pre-2000 low of 34,942.
This means the trend hasn't continued, and the critics' prediction is wrong, so the foundation of this aspect of the argument does not exist.
This was pretty simple research (I think I spent 10 minutes to find that publication), so it's poor scholarship to use an outdated, secondary source, especially if it can appear that you've cherry picked that source.
Or take this example of what's considered a legitimate behavior: "Imagine a driver pulled over or stopped at a checkpoint after having "one for the road," knowing his house is a short drive away and the last drink won't kick in until he's sitting on his couch." That makes little sense to me. (Okay, the concept of "one for the road" doesn't make sense to me either.)
You've got, what, 5 minutes until the alcohol starts to affect you and 30 minutes until the BAC is at its max? Since "one for the road" happened when that person was inside, who needs to say goodbye, get out to the car, etc. then I'll call it 15 minutes until the alcohol starts to impair driving. There's very little margin of error: what do you do if you get a flat or you get out to the car to discover you've left the lights on and it needs a jump start? What about road construction, or if the lights are against you?
(Of course if you're less than a mile away I would say to just walk home.)
So I just don't see that as being a reasonable counter-argument.
But I didn't feel like typing a three-thousand word essay and that article covers many of the problems and was fairly easy to find.
I'm also not out to persuade anyone. If you're not convinced, cheers. But at least be aware of the technical limitations of the breathalyzer, the liberties being infringed by drunk driving checkpoints and mandatory breathalyzer and blood tests and the punishments that begin at accusation or assertion of your rights, rather than after due process.
In other words, it isn't convincing and I don't think it's a good link for this context. Others might be:
http://www.paduiblog.com/pa-dui/pennsylvania-takes-the-war-o...
http://www.lawyersmaine.com/blog/the-wars-on-drugs-and-dui-t...
These talk more about the justice involved, without getting into misinterpretable numbers like the Reason article did.
Anyway, for the original questioner, try doing a search for "War on DUI" for more essays like these.
Airports using private agents will not be distinguishable from airports using TSA agents until the law changes, just as how SFO is indistinguishable from any other airport now.
http://blog.tsa.gov/2010/11/airports-who-opt-out-of-tsa-scre...
Last May, Texas tried to pass a bill to ban 'groping patdowns'.
The bill was passed by the Texan House of Representative, but then the federal government, approx 1-2 weeks later, threatened to shutdown all Texan airports because they would be a threat to the overall security. The bill failed to go any further on that threat.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/13/us-tsa-groping-tex...
http://www.texastribune.org/texas-legislature/82nd-legislati...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_busiest_airports_by_pass...
"Sure, we'll shut down DFW and IAH. Your move."
Overall, the headline is (unintentionally, perhaps) misleading. I thought there might be some network of airports that don't have TSA-like security procedures. If that were the case, yes, I would use those instead if the prices were close. I guess that is a (libertarian?) fantasy though.
(Please don't interpret that as advocacy for the GOP -- I'm an equal-opportunity basher of the governmental parasites and thugs.)
this is not even remotely close to true. most americans care much more about things like the economy and jobs than things like civil liberties
(I'm not asserting that Fox doesn't have an editorial slant, I'm claiming that every news agency, bar none, does as well.)
(I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican, being from outside the US; I'm just a guy who wishes the US would get its house in order on this one so governments elsewhere in the world have to stop pointing at the US and saying "Well, they do it!" as if it's some sort of justification for their own security theatre.)
As long as our choices are defined for us, our choices will suck.
I'm afraid to say that you're the victim of propaganda. Yes, Obama is hawkish (to the chagrin of many of his early supporters). But Democrats tend to get us into wars more frequently than Republicans do:
* VietNam - in fact our escalated presence there was directly caused by LBJ's misrepresentation of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident [1].
* Korean War - this occurred under the watch of Truman, another Democrat [2].
* WWII - FDR was keen to get into the war against Germany in order to aid our allies (can't quickly find a citation, sorry).
* WWI - Woodrow Wilson, another Democrat.
The fact is that most American wars in the past century were entered under a Democratic administration.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident#Distort...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#Factors_in_US_interv...
On the other hand, I can't really agree with your criteria for inclusion; in both WW 1 and 2 the US only entered the war after direct provocations (the sinking of the Lusitania and the attack on Pearl Harbor, respectively) and while entry into the Korean war was optional, there were strong strategical imperatives as Communism presented a much greater existential threat to the US in 1950; the USSR had exploded it's first atomic bomb in 1949, and China had fallen to Mao's Communists late that same year. I don't regard it as hawkish to respond militarily to significant emergent threats or actual attacks. You are quite right aout LBJ and Vietnam, though.
My underlying point stands, I think: Obama has shown himself to be far more comfortable deploying military force than many expected, and has had several apparent successes; but Republicans still attack him frequently on national security issues, and will continue to do so given that it's an election year. He needs a fresh electoral mandate before he can propose dialing back the TSA or DHS in general.
There aren't that many places where there are airports that can realistically be said to be in 'competition' with each other.
At the end of last year, TSA took over.
The difference is dramatic. I fly through PDX at least 4 times a month. Average security wait time has more than tripled for me. They've installed scanners. But the big change is the way travelers are treated. As a woman waiting in line next time me on one trip put it, "these TSA guys act like they're Prison Guards - and we're convicts."
It's turned a not terrible experience into a truly awful one. It's turned PDX from one of the best US airports into just another shit show.
I know that I would absolutely fly to a less convenient airport if it were not TSA staffed.
And 500 complaints out of how many millions of passenger flights?
I'm no fan of airport security, but this sort of Fact Light bashing of TSA employees is not useful.
US security services have shown very poor judgment on multiple occasions, in Canada now you're a child pornography supporter if you don't like internet surveillance and in UK you get extradited to US like a terrorist if you link to pirated content.
My advice: Steer away from Anglo-Saxon countries. Continental Europe and Brazil are the only reasonable places if you want to live in a civilized world.
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[1] That is, does a TSA airport pay out of pocket specifically for the TSA staff, or is it a service of Homeland Security (and funded by tax dollars, exclusively)?
These are all larger and easier targets than an airplane, so where is the rationale for worry?
Yes, I'll put my entire family on a non-TSA flight. In fact, I would prefer it.
I can see people being fooled by the theater and grudgingly accept it, but does anyone like it and think it should be expanded?
The US frankly has a bit of a security fetish; you might find this paper interesting: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/GarrisonAmerica2007.pdf
I understand the sentiment here, but low relative frequency for a risk with catastrophic consequences, e.g. your house flooding or a terrorist attack, isn't valid justification for not taking precautions.
I blend back in with the author's rhetoric in calling out the TSA for engaging in expensive security theatre instead of working towards more meaningful uses of funds.
Let's be honest here, you don't have sandbags piled around your house and a boat tied up and ready to use for evacuation. You've also done nothing to protect yourself from the thousands of other extraordinarily unlikely catastrophic events that might happen to you on a daily basis.
As long as the precautions are effective, I have no problem with them. But 9-11 was a rule changer: even if terrorists got on the planes now, they would not be able to control the passengers or highjack the plane and would, most likely, get lynched after stabbing one or two passengers. 9-11 was a spectacular win for the bad guys, but that same trick cannot be used twice.
Before 9-11 passengers had an incentive to cooperate with highjackers - they were the highly valuable item that would be exchanged for something else. 9-11 changed that rule. Now, in most cases, the winning scenario is taking back the plane at any cost.
I don't think this level of precaution is warranted.
That is a completely valid justification for not taking precautions. The amount of money we spend towards fighting terrorism on all fronts could go MUCH further in other places, protecting far more people from the large variety of threats we all face.