Hacker News Reader

Comment by crusso | Hacker News Reader

The thing I love about the TSA is that their record of failure is so numerically concrete.

FTA: “The experience to date is 50,000 false positives and 16 known terrorists not flagged,” says Thomson. “No known terrorists have ever been flagged.”

That's some pretty obvious and epic fail on the part of the Agency. Why hasn't it been eliminated or reformed by now?

Government's inability to allow its ideas to fail, or at very least its inability to pivot toward success is so disheartening. This has really been on my mind a lot today. I watched "Waiting for Superman" last night and I can't get the images of the poor kids just looking for a decent public education out of my mind. The crimes against humanity perpetrated upon us with our own tax dollars should really be prosecuted with all vigor.

View on HN

>That's some pretty obvious and epic fail on the part of the Agency. Why hasn't it been eliminated or reformed by now?

My guess is the TSA's long-term purpose is not to prevent terrorism, but to provide the federal government with a means of visibly asserting authority over the travel of citizens (and the opportunity to intervene in the travel of dissidents). Otherwise it makes little sense.

I'm a bit cynical, but I don't think that it's anything quite that sinister. The TSA is just another agency that gives budget dollars and a corresponding amount of power to the bureaucrats and government representatives who run it and a lot of contract dollars to the crony companies that supply it.

Because Americans are so terrified of "terrorism", they don't even have to prove efficacy of their methods in order to continue existing.

It's a whole lot of easy money for a bunch of pigs with their snouts in the trough.

As the bankers have well-established over the past few years, money == authority.

But the key thing is there is a difference between de facto functions of an organization (DHS is, de facto, an organization which seeks to control the populace) and the intended functions of an organization (DHS is intended to keep us safe. It does this by seeking to control the populace....).

The first is the domain of the structuralists in Anthropology. The second is the domain of the politicians.

I was visiting friends near the Mexican border in Arizona and we passed by a compound with literally hundreds of parked border patrol vehicles. I was amazed and said "In order to staff these, they must have thousands of field agents", to which the reply was "they have nothing of the sort - that compound is simply there for the TV cameras, to show 'how serious' they are about border patrol. Very few of those vehicles ever get driven"

Note: I've never seen anything of the sort near the US-Canada border, but Canadians illegally sneaking into the country isn't as big of an issue (or as large of a political hot-button) as Mexican illegal immigrants.

While it can certainly be used for that, Adam Smith had it right a very long time ago. The purpose of the TSA is to purchase millions of dollars worth of useless equipment, lining someone's pocket. Oh, the unions get a little slice too. Oh, and "Homeland Security" gets to expand and have more clout. Like businesses, government loves expansion. Everybody gets a cut and we have to pay for it.

Unlike businesses, the government doesn't contract (as in shrink) or 'fail.'

That plus, with the ability of the scanners to see anything and everything you are carrying, the near-complete ability to turn the continental USA into one big lockdown, a sort of free-range prison. Gold, silver, jewelry and other forms of portable wealth will not be able to be taken out of the country.

> Gold, silver, jewelry and other forms of portable wealth will not be able to be taken out of the country.

Does the TSA assist with customs now?

No, but they do assist with drug enforcement now.

Some people might want to make a "slippery slope" argument.

And the TSA will call the police if they find drugs while they're scanning for explosives. Apparently people think that cannabis can be hidden inside jars of peanut butter, but the TSA say that peanut butter looks like some forms of explosive when scanned, so they normally check it, especially if it has some inconsistency.

There are links on the TSA blog, but I can't post URLs with this new account.

The public demands that Something must be Done. The TSA is Something, therefore it is Done.

I personally assign blame straight on the general public. The general public is a bunch of scared nitwits who can't stand any possibility of any risk when flying on an airliner, even though they literally stand a higher chance of dying on their trip to the airport than on their flight. This irrationally frightened public demands that their elected officials protect them from the imaginary monsters under their figurative beds. Government simply complies with their wishes.

I don't know anyone in the general public you describe. I know a bunch of people wondering what the hell is going, or worse, don't care.

In fact, the only place I've heard of the "general public" proclaiming "something must be done" is in the media. But the media isn't the actual general public.

It is the same general public that causes shit like this:

http://www.wmctv.com/Global/story.asp?S=13392236

http://www.sharonlbegley.com/the-latest-trouble-with-racial-...

http://www.ummah.com/forum/showthread.php?291386-Nun-forcibl...

Seriously? "Frodo Baggins"? (Check your third link...)

Seems sourced from here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jalees-rehman/catholic-nun-for...

I see parents lobbying to remove playground equipment that causes occasional scrapes, I see a proliferation of ridiculous warning signs, I see people freak out deeply and in large number over a heavily trafficked "dangerous intersection" that's seen one crash, non-fatal, in years.

People don't seem to like the TSA in general, but they like it more than not having it.

I believe this may be a vocal minority. Just like all of the "children aren't allowed to pray on their own in schools because it might make another student uncomfortable" people. I doubt that a large portion of the population even cares, but a couple of vocal people and a lawsuit makes it a political hot-topic.

They are scared nitwits, but only because they don't demand that the government's unprecedented expansion of surveillance be stopped and reversed. The TSA is, for the most part, despised by anyone travelling. On top of making you show up hours earlier than you would have, they grope you. No one demands that.

That's exactly it. As another example, witness the internet porn censorship debate in the UK at the moment. No-one in government cares about porn. Jacqui Smith MP even buys her porn using her parliamentary expense account! What it's really about is putting the machinery in place for real censorship and control later.

The TSA is about establishing the infrastructure for real restriction of movement, using terrorism as a mere pretext.

Why hasn't it been eliminated or reformed by now?

Because the TSA has many other purposes that are beneficial to politicians:

- Now, there is someone to blame when the next terrorist attack happens (i.e. one poor TSA agent failed to detect something)

- TSA is a jobs program.

- Politicians can say show that something is being done to prevent airline attacks. It doesn't matter if it's effective.

The crimes against humanity perpetrated upon us with our own tax dollars should really be prosecuted with all vigor.

The problem with this is that may of the victims of these crimes are too stupid (EDIT: under-educated / let down by the schooling system) to vote for the right person (or at all) during elections.

> The problem with this is that may of the victims of these crimes are too stupid (EDIT: under-educated / let down by the schooling system) to vote for the right person (or at all) during elections.

They are not necessarily stupid, see rational ignorance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance

Even assuming there was a 'right person' to vote for, your individual vote only has an infinitesimal chance of affecting the outcome of the election, while the upfront investment in informing yourself about all kinds of topics and how they match the platforms of each candidate requires considerable effort. (And that ignores how candidates often then go and do something else once elected.)

They're not stupid. They're either too scared to stand up to government intruding on civil rights, or they've been misled with false promises (which is a consequence of the schooling system).

> Why hasn't it been eliminated or reformed by now?

Because of the way large bureaucracies work. For one, a clearly defined role of prevention means that false positives are essentially not a concern. Second, rigid promotion and pay rules limit rewards and thus incentives: the old "work only so hard not to be fired" ham.

Still, people want to try. But it seems risky to do something different, and if I'm different and it goes bad, then it's obviously my fault. So we'll just keep installing more anti-virus programs and x-ray scanners. At least then we have something to count, and quantifiable bullet points always look good on annual reviews.

First, I think you have to assume that the TSA will always fail and visibly so. If we assume the best, the goal of setting up an organization like that is to increase the barrier to such an attack, not to be the organization that directly prevents it.

This being said, I don't think we can assume the best here. I think it's easier rather than harder to get prohibited items onto airplanes than it was pre-9/11 and that's the real metric of success. Use of shiny new machines without a thorough review of weak spots and clear efforts to compensate is a recipe for bad security.

I don't think it's just a matter of government refusing to allow its ideas to fail. It's also a product of two more major antipatterns here, which is "Never use the tried and true when you could be using the new and shiny instead" and "security is a product, not a process."

Waiting For Superman is a remarkable documentary that I would recommend to anyone who is curious about the many things that are wrong with the American education system, it honestly brought tears to my eyes at moments -- small kids who have to enlist in a lottery hoping that they are allowed to go to the good school.

> it honestly brought tears to my eyes at moments

Well, I didn't cry, per se. I think a bug did fly into my eye right around the time that poor little Daisy didn't get a lottery spot. Total coincidence timing-wise, though. I swear.

Don't we now have to remove our shoes because of the shoe bomber? Didn't the TSA catch that guy?

He was trying to light his shoe on a plane when he was stopped.

As another poster pointed out, the shoe bomber was caught by alert people on the flight.

The shoe bomber got through airport security in Paris.

When people say that the TSA has stopped no terrorist plots, that's the literal truth. All that money spent. All of the loss of our ability to fly conveniently. All of the loss of our liberties. Not a single foiled terrorist plot to show for any of it.

Not one.

Devil's advocate here: but the TSA has made it more difficult to attack planes, meaning that they stooped attacks that nobody will ever know about

Officially the purpose of the TSA is to deter terrorism, but it's looking more and more like it's just there to intimidate travelers in the US. It's obviously not working for it's intended purpose, so why do they insist on keeping the TSA?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com