> In total, the TSA raised concerns about almost 49,000 Clear customers who were enrolled despite facial-recognition software flagging them as non-matches, and concluded its broader methods were inherently inferior to how the government checks travelers’ IDs, the people said. Enrollment photos seen by Bloomberg in some cases didn’t show a face at all and instead, for example, a shoulder and ceiling.
This seems like it ought to be a huge story.
There has been a great deal of evidence over the years that the safety measures of the TSA are easily bypassed (google "TSA security theater" for a wealth of sources) and there's no evidence of increased safety since the department was created.
To be clear, not really making an argument on TSA vs private security screeners that were in use before 9/11. But I am making the argument that those who like to shout "security theater" - what do you think is a better alternative? Do you honestly think it would ever work to just let flyers board planes with no screening of them or their luggage? When the inevitable jet loads of people are taken down by a terrorist bomb, the populous at large would be scrambling for more security, basically like they were after 9/11.
Basically I'd like to know what your alternative proposal is.
A better alternative would be to let people keep their shoes on, stop worrying about liquids, and not scrutinize small objects in luggage that can't be identified, but obviously aren't guns or bombs large enough to crash a plane. Yes, people have tried to bomb aircraft using shoes and liquids, but those plots were not only ineffective but likely ineffectual.
One, Pre-Check rules for everyone. Shoes and jacket on, metal detector only. ID check or biometrics. Random subset of bags get X-rayed.
Arming cockpit doors went 90% of the way to preventing another 9/11.
We already made the sensible changes. X-raying bags, armored cockpit doors, and passengers who know to fight hijackers - the Flight 93 folks knew immediately the “be quiet, land, and everyone gets out alive” era was over.
We don’t need the shoe, laptop, and liquid rules that take most of the time.
There were very few plane bombings even when bombing was popular (Oklahoma city, wtc, etc). Planes are only interesting to terrorists as a weapon, not a target.
Pre-9/11 the assumption was most nut job with guns on a plane wanted to hijack it as part of some heist, etc. 9/11 changed that assumption, locks went on cockpit doors, a few protocols were tweaked, and that actually solved the problem. The naked scanners on the ground were for theater of “being secure”.
There are plenty of terrorist bombs that screening stopped (search the famous El Al case), or alternatively that terrorists were able to successfully bypass which led to stronger rules in the first place (e.g. the shoe bomber), or which they planned (e.g. the Bojinka Plot).
I can easily buy the argument that a lot of other commenters are making that a lot of the specific rules can be improved, or that there are other targeted approaches that could work better. What I absolutely don't buy, because there are plenty of examples to the contrary, is that screening itself is unnecessary.
We don't do any screening at FBOs/private terminals so long as the plane has less than some number of passengers. Every flight out of Oakland on JSX has zero screening whatsoever, you just walk on and those are 30-seat Embraers. Larger than some of the stuff going out of the regional gates at the main concourse. It's even in their marketing material under "bye bye hassle." [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing_a...
So, in other words, airline bombings have gone way down as screening procedures have increased?
Either there’s some other non-security reason the likelihood has gone down and we don’t need the TSA — or it hasn’t, and something else (like reinforced cockpit doors) is stopping them and again we don’t need the TSA.
We’ve been running an A/B test the whole time between the public and private aviation terminals, and the results seem pretty compelling.
To answer your question directly: the procedures at the private terminal haven’t changed at all.
We already did it. The only thing we did to materially improve security in air travel since 9/11 is fortifying the cockpit doors. It's super effective.
This means the only really viable attack on aircraft is to blow them up mid-air which:
1. Is much less impactful
2. Still achievable by a determined actor today
1. Taking off your shoes
2. The liquids rule
3. Taking out your laptop.
To which I totally agree (and since as a TSA Precheck member I never hit those issues anyway I don't notice them as much).
Yes, you can bypass the measures, but there’s a fallacy in assuming they don’t still stop bad actors.
iirc the TSA failure rate is an abysmal 70%, but I’d wager that for determined, organized individuals a lock has the same failure rate. You can easily break past a lock but does that mean we should be leaving our doors, cars etc unlocked?
The solution is probably to replace them or improve them but not get rid of them altogether. Or perhaps the solution is to increase the purview of DHS here, which is generally more skilled and has comparatively stellar performance stopping domestic threats.
"TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints...Two years later, a Red Team test at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport achieved the same 95 percent failure rate to detect explosives, weapons, and illegal drugs. Repeat national tests in 2017 also went badly, "in the ballpark" of an 80 percent failure rate."[1]
[1] https://reason.com/2021/11/19/after-20-years-of-failure-kill...
The ID check was really to stop frequent flier award travel resale back when tickets were paper. It's still possible to use paper boarding pass today, though to my knowledge few people try to fly on tickets with someone else's name. It is still possible because showing ID, like the full body scan machines, is voluntary.
TSA misleads the public about what is mandatory. Freedom to travel is a right in USA. If you closely observe the TSA process, they check the ID with the name on boarding pass. This is revenue management service for the airlines.
For example if TSA misinformation, they claim full body imaging can be required yet they do not have that authority in practice. They can't even detain people.
That doesn't imply (let alone exply) a right to board a plane. This is the same logic used by self-proclaimed "sovereign citizens" to get out of everything from speeding tickets to California's agricultural checkpoints, and said logic falls apart for the exact same reason: you can exercise your freedom to travel on foot.
> If you closely observe the TSA process, they check the ID with the name on boarding pass.
Well yeah, obviously. The whole point of the checkpoint is to establish "you are who you say you are" and "you're authorized to be here", not just one or the other.
> they claim full body imaging can be required yet they do not have that authority in practice. They can't even detain people.
They clearly do and can, as plenty of people have learned the hard way. That, or you can walk (or drive, or bus, or train, or boat, or whatever) to your destination.
Like, I'm with you that TSA is security theater and largely pointless, but you don't have to buy into sovereign-citizen-style misinterpretations of the law in order to arrive at that conclusion.
The rationale for checking name match is there there is a separate part of the TSA process which identifies high-risk and prohibited individuals, and that works on name matching.
That has already been completed based on the name on the boarding pass, so using another persons boarding pass/false name would bypass those checks.
You could still bypass the airline's rules by entering with a ticket for another flight in your name (refundable or cheap) and using someone else's ticket at the gate. Couldn't check a bag, however. (although I inadvertently bypassed the checked bag-ID match at DCA last time)
1. First, the prospective enrollee needs to be matched to their ID. The normal way to do this is to take the person's picture, and then facial recognition software matches that face with their ID. However, since facial recognition isn't perfect, there is a "manual override" process where a Clear employee manually checks your ID and says "yes, this is you." That's why I don't think the sentence about "Enrollment photos seen by Bloomberg in some cases didn’t show a face at all and instead, for example, a shoulder and ceiling" is really that big a deal, because in those cases the photo was just ignored, and the person's ID was manually verified (which is what TSA agents do anyways).
2. Once your ID has been verified, then the Clear system scans your retina and your fingerprints. For any flights then that you want to board, Clear just does a retina scan to look up your ID.
The problem is that if the original ID verification is wrong (e.g. the applicant had someone else's ID that just happens to look similar to them, think of the 20 year old trying to get into the bar with their older sibling's ID), it basically would allow the person to fly unlimited without their ID ever being checked again. That is, you only need to "sneak in" once.
I think a better solution is to just more periodically revalidate IDs, and pick some percentage for random additional verification.