TSA Policy on Light Sabers
tsa.gov
tsa.gov
Actually, the labor is worse than pointless. The travel productivity cost to society is astronomical. Like, literally everyone would be better off if the TSA paid people to just stay home and do absolutely nothing at all. The current employees would have their time back, the travelers would have their time back, and travel security would be no worse in any statistically meaningful sense. But the US has a huge contingent of people fundamentally opposed to doing things like this even when it would make literally everything better for literally everyone.
So here we are.
This is the very fundamentals of mixed strategy calculations in game theory.
I really don't see a meaningful reason for most of "security screening" anymore. It just slows things down.
I don't mean to assume bad faith, but this was, at best, a throwaway comment that minimized the bravery and sacrifice of a lot of good people. Either way, I'd like to recommend you educate yourself a bit more. The Wikipedia page has some excellent detail, and if narrative structure is your thing, the book The Only Plane In The Sky is a masterpiece on the subject.
How has this claim been authenticated?
It's such a good racket Hudson News...a little news stand company inside a few dozen terminals was able to go public on the NYSE...
The public perception that security is "doing it's job" is non-existent since everyone knows it's at best a jobs program and in practice another group of people measurably stealing travellers things.
Dufry existed prior to the invention of the airplane…
Singapore’s is the best. The security is right at the gate so the timing is a lot more predictable and you don’t have to worry about missing your flight.
If you run a penetration test, asking an individual to run a red light. You will achieve near 100% success.
However, when the traffic lights change actors’ behaviors to stop (at some probability such that it results in less collisions), most actors will stop according to the traffic lights.
“By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.”
“Oh, how does it work?”
“It doesn’t work.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s just a stupid rock.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But I don’t see any tigers around, do you?”
“Lisa, I want to buy your rock.”
Anyone with clean floors should fire their janitors.
Etc...
Those don't mean every security spend is worthwhile and justified; but Simpsons quotes also don't mean that no security spend has any effect.
Do you believe that none of those people are factoring in the presence of identity checks, x-rays, backscatters, bomb dogs, and metal detectors into their risk/reward calculation or the techniques by which they’d commit nefarious acts?
Just look at the number of help wanted signs in the US.
The Native populations in America and Iceland have some of the worst suicide rates because their cultures way of producing goods and food was supplanted by government benefits.
The problem is when they know there is no need for them to contribute. That leads to a sense of pointlessness.
> But the US has a huge contingent of people fundamentally opposed to doing things like this even when it would make literally everything better for literally everyone.
I don't think this is why your idea won't happen. I've talked to many people over the years who are genuinely worried about terrorists and they believe that the TSA protects them. You can cite all the statistics in the world to them, and it won't matter. They are not rational on this topic. They will view "get rid of the TSA" as a huge negative impact to their safety, and will vehemently oppose it with or without the paying agents to stay home.
I do think that paying people to stay home instead of doing make-work is relatively unpopular in the US, so that doesn't help. But the biggest problem you will face is just that people don't want to get rid of the TSA no matter how you do it. The TSA is very unpopular in tech/geek circles (and for good reason), but I've found it to be quite popular with normies.
I think that's a significant understatement of the prevailing condition.
[0] https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2023/01/17/tsa-break...
The TSA makes rules and then enforces them. Their ability to enforce their own rules doesn't make them effective.
Hijackings have been reduced since 9/11 but were always thousands fewer than the number of guns confiscated in the United States alone.
The most significant safety improvements (to the pilots' door, new training, changed passenger willingness to fight, revamped air marshal program) do not involve the TSA, at least not the 'retail' side to which most passengers are exposed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
edit: s/weapons/guns/
- people being forced to throw away their water bottles if they forget to dump them before passing through
- people being forced to remove belts and shoes
- people being forced to have their prescriptions and containers and bags wiped down after they've gone through the first pass
Aren't they paid by the passenger fee?
Do you really think things would be better if we had no xray scanners for luggage or full body scanners for people? Someone needs to run those machines, and thats the job of the TSA. How can you say we would be better off without those?
They're not saying that it has no effect, they're saying that it's harmful.
> Do you really think things would be better if we had no xray scanners for luggage or full body scanners for people?
Yes, that's the point?
Explain this please? How is it better if I can bring swords or guns onto a plane and no one can even detect it?
2. If there is no scanners run by the TSA I can bring in tools to open the cockpit door. Now I can redo 9/11.
Safes are still useful even if they have never tried to be breached, and armed forces are useful even if a country has never been attacked.
Perhaps the fact that the TSA exists means fewer crimes are even attempted.
I don’t think the TSA agents would be better off in that scenario.
My question is, why do people only worry about poor people not having the dignity of work? Shouldn’t we be more worried about all the children of the rich who will never need to earn a living? Shouldn’t we make them all do labor, for the good of their own souls?
> Shouldn’t we be more worried about all the children of the rich who will never need to earn a living?
We should be worried about those people because they tend to die from drug abuse much more frequently than the general population. The same is true for washed up celebrities and lottery winners. In fact, this is something that rich people tend to worry about a lot in regard to their own children.
This statement seems bonkers to me. People work at the TSA because they need money. Anybody who can hold down a job at the TSA would be entirely capable of doing many productive tasks that may not be remunerative, such as child care, elder care, care for the disabled, any number of home/landscape maintenance tasks, home construction, etc. Not to mention all of the activities that people do to add value to their lives and those around them: contributing the community, making art/music, etc.
Those are literally all remunerative jobs.
We would also all be better off if we lived in a socialist utopia where everyone helps each other, free housing, free food, unlimited transportation, no money, no jobs, no rich employers, no corporations, no war, famine, etc.
But all of that is as likely to happen as an American population giving poor people money to live just because there aren't any jobs that will hire them where they live with their qualifications.
So instead we do the hack of a welfare program disguised as a valuable civic service and eat the larger cost to the economy. Every politician knows it's a welfare program, and they love it, because they don't have to call it one.
This is a role usually filled by the armed forces. I suppose it’s good to have a few options.
One of my main peeves—aside from the general which I mostly avoid with TSA Pre—is a hiking pole which I often want to use at a random destination I’ll just use carryon for. But it’s not allowed in carryon.
The rules really are ridiculous. You aren't allowed to bring a clear bottle of water, but you are allowed to bring fish in your carry on. Freeze that water, or put a fish in that bottle of water, and it is allowed, because you're transporting live fish! I was going through a checkpoint a few weeks ago and forgot a filled, reusable water bottle in my backpack. Instead of just letting me dump the bottle out and proceed, the TSA handler made me go to the back of the line and go through the entire checkpoint, body scanner etc again. If I had just brought a fish with me, I could have avoided the whole thing.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VN5LRYQ No longer for sale, but there are similar ones
The TSA allows for breast milk and "toddler drinks" to be brought on board, with or without children present.
They also allow contact lens solution, liquid medication, and, during covid-19, hand sanitizer (an accelerant!).
Since the final decision rests with the TSA officer.. maybe.. just maybe you can sweet talk them and they'll allow it since it is _just_ a hiking pole.
Otherwise, agree. What an annoyance.
I was blocked and told I'd have to check the bag. I did and missed the flight, so my partner picked up the bag (free shipping!) and I stayed home that weekend.
The TSA is such a joke. The fact that they can't even make determinations without leaving the, "The final decision rests with the TSA officer on whether an item is allowed through the checkpoint" disclaimer shows it's all pretend, made up bull.
Then imagine a rule set as complicated as “all rules required to ensure safe air travel” being redteamed by a population of a billion people with incentives varying from “personal convenience” to “fly into an occupied skyscraper” to “move ten pounds of cocaine.”
Now make that rule set enforceable by tens of thousands of people in a time and cost-effective manner.
Deferring a lot of authority to a somewhat sensible person on the ground is the only plausible approach.
The TSAs job shouldn’t be preventing drug trafficking. What’s next? They check everything with serial numbers to ensure no stolen goods are being carried?
At a certain point that’s a legitimate safety issue.
Also, yeah, air travel is a global system. Are you proposing that we just let people fly from other countries with no security infrastructure to the US? And your view is that this somehow makes sense?
My issue is mainly that the security crap is applied when there is no connection to the US occurring.
If that poor security theatre stayed within US borders it would be more palatable to us outsiders, then we could make adjustments for that and carry on.
Your airports have security because your leaders learned the same things on 9/11 that the US did. The threat landscape changed immensely. Hijackings were not super uncommon, but they were never that dangerous because it’s hard to do much damage without killing yourself too.
What 9/11 revealed is that there are actually people who can be convinced to fly themselves into buildings on loaded aircraft, and yes I do think “there will be bomb dogs” and “there will be X-rays” etc are factored into bad actors’ thinking about how to commit bad actions.
Or, you know, I suppose you could think that there were only 19 people in the whole wide world who would’ve possibly done what they did and luckily we got rid of them all in one day.
Seems wishful to me though, given that we see thematically similar attacks on a weekly basis throughout the Muslim world. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This isn’t accurate. Where I live, no ID is required for domestic flights and I walk through a metal detector. That’s it. New Zealand.
The rules I face going international are to keep other countries happy and my 101ml of water and potential bomb shoes are a bad joke.
The attack on the US isn’t something I’ve see replicated in the Middle East weekly that I’ve ever noticed.
If TSA rules make you feel safe, I suppose that’s good. Unfortunately they fail at their role 95% if the time.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-...
Yes there are dozens of suicide attacks per year, and yes they are overwhelmingly throughout the Muslim world (not merely the Middle East).
Security’s role is twofold: deterrence and prevention. You have no way of knowing what the deterrent effects are, which is why I asked if you’re of the belief that there were only 19 people willing to do what happened on 9/11 and we just happened to get rid of them all on the same day.
Do you believe that or not?
Fascinating how the TSA overreach and ineffectiveness is somehow required, yet the terror inflicted by the domestic problem of gunmen is not able to be addressed. Is it not terrorism?
Do you believe the TSA is effective? The Department of Homeland Security don’t.
The reason the gun issue is hard to solve is extremely, extremely obvious. The early designers of our country wrote specific words on a particularly important document. Agree or disagree with those words or think they should be changed or whatever you want, the “why” of it being difficult to fix is self-evident to anyone who can read English though.
Huh… DHS says TSA fails 95% of penetration tests.
Let’s try two interpretations:
1) DHS thinks TSA is “ineffective” (your interpretation) and yet continues to commit $9B+ per year to it for… no reason? Because they don’t have other programs to fund instead? To soothe the public while simultaneously publishing the 95% figure?
2) DHS views TSA as one component of a risk-based “defense in depth” strategy and thinks its contributions to that overall system, despite failing most actual penetration tests, is worth $9B+ per year.
You know if you got over the “USA stupid bad mean” the world would be a lot more interpretable.
I have to imagine that politics and power plays also contributed to these changes, as they did with the creation of Homeland Security, the apparent changes in surveillance, the uptick in militarization of police forces, the apparent changes in our attitudes toward incarceration, interrogation, and torture of suspected terrorists, and so on.
When irrationality takes over, people want to feel safe more than they care about being safe. So, as a politician, if I want to achieve and maintain a high approval rating, I must attend to people's beliefs more than I must attend to their needs.
Thus, if other world leaders enact hardline policies and I am a leader in a country where my constituents are innumerate, illiterate, ignorant, or civically uninvolved, then following the lead of a strongman country is a shortcut to achieving my political ends. And in these cases, if other world leaders make these changes and I choose to do nothing, even if doing nothing is the right course of action, I should probably expect my approval rating to drop.
And I suppose this is meant to describe pretty much every European and Asian country?
They have pretty clearly outlined on their website, and in airports, for years that weapons--even toy versions of weapons--are not permitted in carry-on baggage.
A lightsaber is not a real weapon, thus, the TSA allows lightsaber toys in carryons. (Note: this assumes the lightsaber is plastic. TSA agents are treated to assume metal rod-shaped objects as batons or similar, so metal lightsabers generally can't be in carry-on.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qtUzxU8-6c&pp=ygUfaGFja3Nta...
https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/...
Sure carry on is fine!*
*Unless it’s not, who knows what we decide at the last minute and then your bag is already checked and now you’re at the TSA line backing everything up because we make shit up on the fly.
It should just say checked bags only and nip it in the bud. And don’t get me started on the TSA and their rubber rules with guns.
She was surprised to find that the TSA wouldn't let her through security carrying what most would agree is effectively both a golf club (not allowed) and a cane (allowed). (I was surprised that she was surprised.)