Can We Just Throw in the Towel on Airport Security Theater Already?
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
Any modification to the system must include ways for the rent-collectors to continue collecting rent from someone. TSA Precheck is a way for you to say: it's fine, TSA, I'll pay rent directly to you, so that I can avoid the worst parts of your services. It, of course, has nothing to do with actually pre-checking that certain passenger are low-risk -- it's just a solution to the problem of "but if we made the system more efficient, how would we still collect rent?" Collect it directly from the passengers themselves, for the privilege of avoiding the worst parts of dealing with you.
I'll add that one solution is to simply not fly through TSA airports.
I flew JSX last weekend and security was a swab for explosives and a metal detector. It took 30 seconds. Ticket says to arrive to the airport 15 minutes before departure. I'm not sure how scalable flying out of regional airports is, but the extra $200 was worth the price for a) not burning an hour arriving and b) having a large enough seat to work while airborne.
And the other option is of course to invest in HSR where possible.
...Let them fly private!
I don't know about you, but $200 is a lot for me to pay to save an hour.
This is why SFO is generally amazing and my favorite airport in the country. I often show up after boarding has started and have never been close to missing a flight.
JSX security advantage may not last forever
I don't live anywhere near Dallas.
It's not that rent collectors must continue to be able to collect rent, it's that "it'll put people out of a job", no matter whether those jobs ever made any sort of sense, and actively make people's lives worse. Jobs are near-religiously sacred to the US mindset.
I did a bunch of international travel a few years ago and found the process to be fairly standard. Didn’t feel as if other countries are quite so obsessed with removing shoes, but they seemed a bit more obsessed with additional carryon screening.
AKA The Shirky principle, which was discussed in great depth last week
In some airports (like in Haneda) you don't even have to pull anything out of your bag. Bag on the conveyor belt, yourself through the gate and you're done.
Well, to be fair, this is also the case in other parts of the world. They just differ in what part of the economy the rent-seekers have latched themselves on.
(Though I have to agree that allowing them into healthcare was a uniquely bone-headed decision.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/03/04/direct-fi...
The US government took the initiative to create this system. AFAICT, Intuit will not be collecting rent for anyone who uses it. Perhaps this will not be a significant number of people but this nonetheless contradicts the assertion in the parent comment that the US government must protect Intuit's rent collection "at all costs".
I think that since last year if you do not file them, they are automatically filed for you according to the info the govt has
EDIT: typos
And if I didn't have any of those, well I wouldn't even need to touch whole thing.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the government has to be seen doing "something". This was the something.
Then, in the following years, the TSA evolved into a welfare program for veterans, because here in the US we can't dream of just giving people money, we have to invent bullshit jobs that make society worse.
The problem is that society has placed the janitorial job at the bottom of the list of wanted jobs. You know, the jobs immigrants are stealing
No one pays for this work. Give people an appropriate salary and benefits like TSA workers get, and there will be no problem.
Also, TSA worker is negative status.
Someone mentioned upthread this is a job for veterans because we won’t pay UBI or similar. It’s status enough, in some cases (“make work for veterans”.
https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/factsheets/tsa-numbers
>Nearly 20 percent of TSA employees are veterans or still proudly serving
That trailing qualification tells us that % of TSA employees still serve - but in a way that is other than proudly.
No, that might have been true then, but the real reason is the same that Airlines suddenly unlearned how to group people who book togehter to sit together unless they reserve booking. The security theator is expensive to run, but it's less expensive than what you make selling more expensive methods of avoiding the security theather.
Airlines don't want you to have a nice and easy travel, unless you've paid the appropriate primum. They are perfectly happing intentionally pissing off 98% of their travelers to maintain the 2% who pay extra. And when you zoom out, that also means that what you pay for the premium tickets isn't to pay for extra luxery, its to pay for the intentional annoyance of everyone else.
The situation is not dissimilar to how power tool companies would not deploy SawStop technology because that would make it clear to consumers that said companies knew their products were unsafe and would expose them to millions / billions in liability claims.
https://www.aboutlawsuits.com/sawstop-boycott-lawsuit-ruling...
I'll take off my shoes, get scanned, listen to contradictory instructions, suffer "random" pat downs, whatever. Just have enough agents checking IDs and keeping scanning lines open so that the queue doesn't get to be 45mins long!
In my opinion it's far better to cut down scope than to add cost.
Is there really no job of moderate status that isn't too physically demanding and actually needs doing?
At the time I was typically travelling with a laptop, a tablet, and two USB-C portable monitors. It was quite a lot to unpack and re-pack.
NB: Out of concern for the sanity of myself and my fellow travelers sharing a TSA I made sure I could do it as fast as humanly possible. Everything was packed to allow the quickest possible retrieval in line...
https://www.cbp.gov/travel/us-citizens/mobile-passport-contr...
Used it last month coming through SFO and almost no one is in the MPC line compared to 1000+ in the standard lines.
“The majority of folks” who are found with firearms “are what we call low-risk passengers,” Jeffries said. “These are your more frequent travelers. They’re the ones usually in PreCheck. I don’t think there’s any malicious intent. The number one thing that we would hear out there, and I’m sure it still stands to this day, is, ‘I forgot it was in my bag.’”
This maybe more a reflection of how many people in the US own guns and less about people intending to stage some kind of shootout at the airport.
https://www.tampabay.com/news/nation-world/2024/03/03/did-ts...
Drunk guy with gun is a huge problem.
Sleep-deprived guy with gun is a huge problem.
I insist on a manual opt-out every time I fly, and I've noticed particularly in LAS that TSA seems intentionally to delay that screening process as an extrajudicial punishment and disincentive. It's outrageous and this intentional crippling of manual processes to which passengers are entitled needs to be checked, not expanded.
What TSA needs is proper oversight, better KPIs, and a cultural overhaul to stop treating passengers so terribly. TSA ought to provide an SLA commitment, consistently and openly report on their actual service level, reward managers who improve it, and fire/demote those managers who degrade it.
I agree, we need to teach TSA to Scrum and we need to do it yesterday!
Make sure you put your bags through first before opting out.
$20 says it's zero.
How many bellicose self righteous idiots get through every day? Probably 10.
Which causes more problems?
The answer is they are not telling you. They are not telling if it's zero either.
Edit: I'm aware that the TSA was created after 9/11. The point I'm making is that it's possible they were able to bring weapons aboard to hijack the planes because security was so lax.
The threat model before 9/11 was hijacking, not suicide bombers.
Whether the specific airplane controls we have now are effective or required is still a good conversation to have, but you draw the wrong conclusion if you think there is simply no threat.
Of course, this could never happen. It's been said to death, but the conventional wisdom before 9/11 was to allow plane hijackers to run their course and assume that all they wanted was cash, to just sit tight and wait for them to set down somewhere. Not even after, but mid 9/11 people realized that old paradigm was out and the passengers of the fourth plane the cockpit door, preventing the usage of the plane as a weapon.
Post 9/11, nobody could hijack a plane with box-cutters anymore - enough people would rather be stabbed than see their plane be used as a weapon that it's simply insufficient, especially since if they crash the plane you're probably dead anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl... -- details that emerged during the trial, and the conclusion reported by El Reg: https://www.theregister.com/2008/09/10/liquid_bomb_verdicts/
Like, holy shit: you can hide bombs in your shoes?! And that was only THREE months after the 9/11 attacks.
[1] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/shoe-bomber-rich...
A massive overhaul & reduction in all of this security theater. NSA and others already do the heavy lifting of identifying people planning bad things. Can we just do a basic metal detector or something and call it a day?
But if all flights were completely unscreened? It wouldn't change what or when I fly.
I already board unscreened trains and busses quite often.
When commercial airliners crash, usually everyone on board dies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago_de_Compostela_derailm...
It could almost certainly be extremely deadly if it happens. Man, these were the two main ones I recall - Spain has had some bad luck.
You blow up a bus, maybe no one really cares except the locals to the area where the bus blew up.
A plane cuts through many different social classes and nationalities, putting them all in one place and making a large amount of people imagine themselves as the potential victim.
What an odd comment.
It was a totally different experience versus being crammed into a flying bus.
Now compare the money your parents paid for your little vacations back then to a flight nowadays.
From 1973 on, hijacking’s dropped considerably. Since 2001 there have been no hijackings in the US.
Your comment is the odd one.
Originally when the TSA was invented, airports were allowed to do their own security, TSA was optional. Now, airports that already have TSA are not allowed to provide their own security, it is mandatory they hire federal union employees.
WHY is it necessary for municipal airports to hire federal union employees? Airports know their own local risk factor and can adequately manage those employees. Airports want their passengers to have a good experience, so that they come back. This is why they pay big bucks for rennovations, why they have the bad-ok-good-better-best colored buttons in the restrooms and everything else.
The airport has virtually no control over the staff running security. They can't overschedule employees for busy times and holidays, they're beholden to what the TSA does.
And yeah, they do regular tests of the TSA to see how much contraband they can slip past security. TSA regularly fails these tests/audits.
The rest of the world does not deal with the level of security as american airports, and nobody else is having problems. US airports are still running at/above 9/11 security levels... why? In most countries you aren't required to take off your shoes or walk through anything more invasive than a simple metal detector.
1. Abolish the TSA. Allow local airports to hire and manage their own staff (currently not allowed) 2. Adjust minimum standards up and down based on current thread level (don't force people wearing flip flops to take off their shoes)
TSA was a huge mistake and is absolutely security theater. Every other country in the world does a better job of managing risk at airports than the US.
It's not a realistic risk to be concerned about... it's just not worth the hassle trying to mitigate something that is orders of magnitude less of a deal than other easier to mitigate risks.
If you have money, you buy Pre+Clear+Global Entry. The "screening process" is nil (three simplistic questions for Global Entry).
That leaves the bag inspections - and I can tell you that at least for the Pre checkins, they're not exactly enforcing e.g. the weird liquid rules. (And there are plenty of articles showing they're not super-great at finding guns, easier)
And yet, it seems air traffic is mostly threatened by carriers & Boeing implementing cost savings to enrich execs.
Also, we did just fine pre-2001, and it's highly doubtful the TSA would've prevented 9/11. So, what exactly does it buy us, outside of an employment program that mostly enriches folks supplying TSA equipment?
Yes. Without hesitation, yes.
Americans learned a lesson on 9/11/01. Prior to that, almost all hijackings resulted in the eventual release of the passengers. No one had ever hijacked a plane in the US and flown it into a building before. There was no real reason to fight back if doing so put you at risk.
After 9/11/01, the default assumption to the hijacking of an American airliner can only be that everyone on board is going to die, along with an unknown number of people on the ground. That change in perspective significantly alters the likely outcome.
If someone tried to hijack an airliner in 2024 with a knife - or even a gun - I would be highly surprised if, at the end of the day, more injuries were caused by the attacker than from the scramble of people jumping on top of them to subdue them.
The problems TSA was nominally created to solve simply no longer exist. Screen luggage for explosive, maybe walk people through an x-ray if the airline wants that, and move on with life.
If we don’t take our shoes off, how will we maintain our freedom?!?!
Good to [figuratively] see you again :D