Why Airport Security Is Broken—And How to Fix It (former head TSA)
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
really? having watched three TSA officers debate for five minutes over whether or not peanut butter was a liquid and concluding that "well, peanut butter goes on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and we don't allow petroleum jelly through, so we don't allow peanut butter through either", I really am skeptical of this claim...
Although, if you read his claim with the right squint, maybe it's true: No security agency on earth is as bad as the TSA.
And if they really are good, and unfairly painted, then they've got some serious "evidence of outstanding work" type of reputation building to do. They have their reputation for a reason.
He got to regularly see the best. We get to see the average, and the blogosphere highlights the worst.
Our perspectives are simply different.
As someone who does not have a college degree and full acknowledges you can be super smart without one...I was kind of bummed that the TSA so openly acknowledges that their market for job recruitment responds well to "College Degree Not Required!"
This seems somewhat irrelevant? I know we're always supposed to be "supporting the troops", but I think you're suggesting we should be supporting professions that they may later go into?
If they're so unstable that being told they're not good at their job sends them in to a killing rage, they shouldn't have that job.
Or are you doing them a bit of a disservice there?
Off topic, I heard (from a former US military person), that they have a distinction between the terms "ex-military" (kicked out) and "former military" (left voluntarily), and saying "former military" is a nicer thing to them, and that they'll pick up that you're aware of the difference. Any military people able to confirm/deny?
We all need to calm down and accept the fact that, once in a while, a plane will blow up and 300 people will die. 9/11 is a rounding error compared to deaths from heart disease or car crashes, but we don't seem to be doing much about those.
All this is to say that you have about as much of a chance of shooting down a commercial airliner with an RPG as you do by throwing rocks at it.
With that said, good luck getting something with the firepower equivalent of an RPG anywhere close enough to a commercial aircraft to even be within the weapon's maximum range.
About 6 or 7 years ago, I used to take lunch break in a nice grassy, woody area where no one else really went which was right under a take off area of Heathrow airport in the UK. Apart from the fact that it was a really nice place to sit and eat lunch, I loved the place because it felt like you could almost touch the planes they were so close. And it did occur to me how easy it would have been to aim a small missile, or something, at the plane of your choice with out any interference.
Of course, I presume that it's not that simple, other wise either it would have been done, or the terror threat is hugely exaggerated...
Ding ding ding, we have a winner.
No realistic amount of prescreening can alleviate this threat when al Qaeda is working to recruit "clean" agents
al Qaeda's advancing skill with hydrogen-peroxide-based bombs...
etc, etc.
After 10+ years of war, the al Qaeda of 9/11 is pretty much finished. The organization can barely survive in Afghanistan and are being picked off by drones in Yemen.
Realistically, al Qaeda is a defunct organization, and this article repeadly mentions al Qaeda like it's some eternal bogeyman. This distraction tactic is to drive attention away from the fact the methods for "How To Fix The TSA" merely reinforce the status quo.
None of the former head of the TSA's 5 suggestions reduce wait times or make the experience of flying more pleasant. You _still_ have to take off your shoes and get scanned or patted down. There's _still_ going to be that person at the head of the line who scribbles on your boarding pass after checking your ID.
I would like to see a radical rethink of airport security, something that would put a smile on the face of the passengers and the security officers.
These people are not our friends.
As if the security officers would have a smile after having to deal all day with the douchebag anti-TSA nerds who deliberately try to make life more difficult. I am sick of flying and having them holding up lines and generally being a nuisance.
How about you sort them out first ?
Based on what actual evidence? Al Qaeda has pulled off attacks in Africa and other countries besides Afghanistan and Yemen. It's a distributed organization and ideology.
I'm not saying this isn't true (I would like it to be), but claims like this sound like wishful thinking. As though Westerners cannot fathom a reason why other groups of people would want to kill them and so it surely must be a 'boogeyman'. Your statements read as though you're trying to convince yourself.
This is not an argument for the TSA (if that wasn't clear). It is possible for Al Qaeda to be a threat and for the TSA to be an inappropriate way to deal with that threat.
If we could stop being cowards and accept that we might die, or our families might die, then we might fight these invasive policies. I'd love it if efficacy, privacy, and freedom were once again as given the same weight as security.
I don't hear many calls for courage, so I applaud even this veiled statement.
*edit - spelling.
It's not that Americans are actually afraid of terrorists. It's not that we "haven't been ready to embrace risk."
It's that we don't care about freedom and liberty anymore.
Moreover, this former TSA head is acting like the TSA has to "cooperate" with public opinion or is even in any way beholden to it. That is a lie. The TSA can and does do almost anything without reprecussion.
30 seconds of inconvenience OR a more secure airplane.
I guarantee 99% of people choose the second option.
Ugh. Was that true? What if the TSA had announced they had determined that knives and lighters no longer posed a significant risk? It might have helped the American psyche a little bit to hear the government reassuring people instead of stoking their fears. It sucks that all our confidence-building Bush-giving-us-our-mojo-back demonstrations of "strength" were military operations in foreign countries thousands of miles away, while at home citizens were taught to be afraid of pocket knives and nail clippers.
There are people in the political arena who stand to gain from citizens living in fear. And we as citizens would do well to remember that.
I bet you'd have a hard time keeping command with a machine gun if people are swarmed against you knowing (a) they will die anyways and (b) if they don't stop you people they love will be killed as well.
Do you really think someone trying to kill the pilot would be waving the knife around in the air causing a scene ? No. They would do so quietly.
You know. So passengers don't know what they are doing.
Do you really think it will make any difference whether the hijacker kills the pilot or not? He is still going to be beaten to death (and the control tower os going to tell whomever pilots the plane exactly which knobs to turn to land the plane, if the autopilot can't.
The 9/11 hijackers had crowd controllers for a reason.
Ironically, reinforced cockpit doors are a necessary part of any terrorist's plan post 9-11, because that's the only way they can protect themselves from the passengers. I think there are now protocols to take control of the plane remotely in case an attacker infiltrates the cockpit and barricades himself inside. Unfortunately, trying to search the web for that information only gets me conspiracy pages about how the government remote-controlled the planes in the 9/11 attacks. Information pollution FTW :-/
So, are we training our underpaid and possibly disgruntled TSA workers to detect items of suspect or are we training them to become the suspect? I don't want to generalize, but training everyone in the agency in "terrorist tradecraft and bomb-making" is about the dumbest thing you could do. On so many levels.
I think it gives some insight into the challenges that the TSA faces. They don't have complete autonomy, and like any massive organization, politics plays a huge role.
I have no doubt there are some really smart and innovative people at the TSA, but as anyone who worked in a huge bureaucracy knows, you often spent 90% of your time trying to please everyone and 10% actually doing real work.
Not true. Cockpit door opens when the captain takes a piss. Flight crews are usually sleeping at the back of the plane or stuck behind those beverage carts. Very few flights have air marshals and most passangers are tied up in their chairs with the seatbelt. I agree it is less likely than in the past, but definitely not impossible.
In any case, 9/11 was only possible because passengers had been previously instructed to passively cooperate with hijackings. Before the end of that day, they were ready to fight to the death instead.
http://www.windowanddoorsecurity.ca/img/SecurityCurtain.JPG
Most recently on a Logan-LAX United Airlines nonstop in February.
This allowed secure restroom breaks, as well as food service to the cockpit.
Ah -- great to see another wonderful contribution by management consultants...
On top of that, actually punish people for willful violations of basic constitutional rights to keep whoever the airports hire from getting too big for their breeches (unlike the TSA...), and the problem -- if it actually exist -- should resolve itself.
The effort spent on security is wildly disproportionate to the risk-- based, it seems, on the supposition that terrorists care fabulously more about damaging faith in American air travel than actually killing Americans.
I'm not saying I know anything one way or another, but that seems crazy.
Have you tried buying terrorism insurance recently? Guess who the primary provider of that insurance is.
Would your proposed model have prevented 9/11 somehow?
The San Francisco Airport Commission. Or am I not understanding the question?
Would it have stopped 9/11? Did the TSA? Did anything else we tried? Nope. Because we didn't know about it until it happened. What it would have done is made sure that the cost of the cleanup and re-build didn't turn into a decade+ long charlie-foxtrot situation, and would have incentivized the airports to not let it happen again, instead of just putting on a show.
I've flown at least once a month for 10 years, domestically and internationally, and almost never have a negative experience with TSA personel. While I hate taking off my shoes, turning off my phone, and find the liquid rules particularly ridiculous, I have found that TSA agents have more than met my expectations of professionalism in implementing policies over which they have no control.
Millions of people travel every day. A few bad encounters can be expected. Don't be an asshole and tear down the employees of the TSA because of a few anecdotal occurrences. In doing so, you are just as bad as an ignorant talking head on Fox News. Think and put yourself in others shoes before you rant.
It's more due to the fact that a massive and totally unaccountable police force has been created that violates people's rights left and right, and has also been shown to be almost totally ineffective, despite costing billions of dollars.
Meanwhile, the federal goverment seems to have everything wiretapped. We now life in a "turnkey totalitarian state." [1]
This seems to bode quite badly for the future of the American experiment in individual rights.
[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...
It's just American's anti-police, anti-government, anti-authority streak that cause them to rise up against it.
And there is a substantial view round the rest of the planet that America is a "massive and totally unaccountable police force" that it "violates people's rights left and right", as discussed here, for one example, when certain web sites get taken down and people who have never stepped foot in the USA suddenly have to be sent there to face American "justice", which Americans them selves seem most uncomfortable with.
Stones, glasshouses and all that.
No, it's called the principle of individual rights. The founding principle of the US, totally unique for its time. Now, it's mostly out the window, but it's still in our blood to some degree, as it should be. Also, limited government.
And not only does the TSA totally trample these American principles, but as others have pointed out, it's a much worse unaccountable police force than can be found in most other Western countries.
Remember, the TSA does not exist in isolation. By itself, maybe not a part of the road to tyranny. But look at the broader context (e.g., the government wiretapping everything, political parties that seem to be a complete farce, broken educational system, etc.).
The TSA shows that the government can and will arbitrarily inject itself anywhere in life, potentially under completely flimsy premises. As an American with a basic education in the history of our country, it seems just obvious to me that it was totally wrong for the government to ever have gotten involved with screening airline passengers. (I realize lots of people who know our history do not see it that way, though.) To me, this is very scary.
So again, it's not about the pat downs; that is not the cause, it's just the highly disgusting effect. People worried about TSA pat downs and scanners for their own sake are missing the boat.
As for the rest, he /she will have to deal with dozens or hundreds of passengers and a knife will just not do.