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Comment by bradleybuda | Hacker News Reader

A little zero-sum class warfare to distract from the fact that the TSA is the most wasteful and useless government agency in human history.

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the TSA is literal street sweepings, but that does not mean private companies should be able to sell the ability to skip lines in public airports. if the government wants to implement its own program they can.

$12 billion. So you're right that it's not a lot relative to the size of the federal budget. But it is a lot relative to the TSA's accomplishments:

1. Has never prevented an act of terrorism in its history

2. Robs travelers of their time and sanity

3. Makes life a living hell for people with unfortunate names

heh, I meant as in "the garbage that no other department wanted" rather than "not much money in the grand scheme of things". I agree it's a total waste of everything.

Unfortunately, the state government cannot alter TSA's authority.

How’s it work with SFO where they have their own contractors for security screening that aren’t federally employed TSA agents?

Airports can run their own agency but they still have to follow TSA’s guidelines. If they aren’t there, then TSA would be.

The TSA hate/dislike wouldn’t be anywhere near as strong as it is if it weren’t for the poor service levels, which is the key selling point for Clear.

SFO was the only airport where i had to wait in the security line starting from inside the plane. took 2.5hrs to reach passport control.

went again in february this year. 3 guys checking passports of hundreds of travellers. another 1.5hrs wasted.

meanwhile back in london i just scan my passport and go thru the automated gates. why can’t the US solve this issue? is it unions? is it federal government? what’s going on?

Passport control is CBP (a part of USCIS) and doesn't really have any relation to TSA, which is security checks to go from the "unsecured" (curbside) part of the airport to the "secured" (planeside) part.

> back in london i just scan my passport

Presumably your passport is a UK passport? Generally it's much quicker for a country's nationals to enter a border than foreigners.

>Generally it's much quicker for a country's nationals to enter a border than foreigners.

The UK is somewhat unusual in letting nationals of a number of countries, including the US, simply scan their passports at an electronic barrier and pass through without speaking to anyone, essentially the same as their own nationals; it usually just takes a few seconds. Many EU countries do this for EU and sometimes other European nationals, but rarely for the US.

The US is rather unusual in having their own nationals need to go through a non-trivial border control process, even with Global Entry. However, this is in part because many European countries have separate border control and customs processes, with border control before baggage reclaim, while the US tends to have them combined.

My son just back to the US after a trip to the UK. He was amazed by the automated scanning going into the UK. Then he got home and was treated like a criminal by the US border people.

> Many EU countries do this for EU and sometimes other European nationals, but rarely for the US.

EU countries are expanding this. France lets Can/US/Aus/NZ and probably others use the e-gates.

Belgium, Germany, Italy, Portugal and others do too with different eligibility lists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_border_control_sys...

Some other EU countries too, but only on exit.

(No physical exit controls are a nice thing about US/Canada, but in my EU experience, the rate limiting step is really security, not exit controls).

It's called the "Screening Partnership Program"[1].

It's an agreement the airport makes with the TSA to maintain TSA standards (and I believe the airport gets federal funding to run it).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screening_Partnership_Program

Don't all states have the ability to ignore federal law (enforcement) leading to situations like sanctuary cities and legalized cannabis?

Not really, states don't have a way to prevent federal agents from enforcing federal law. The best they can do is decline to cooperate with and help those agents. Plenty of dispenseries have been shut down by feds over the years against the wishes of the state.

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