The TSA's Dumb Air-Security Rules Are Not Based on Science
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Narrowly considering the rules of the game, it's not an irrational stance at all.
http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/001705.html (ignore the partisan aspects)
What makes you think that non-profits cost less?
The only thing "special" about non-profits is that they don't return money to investors.
There are lots of other places for money to go.
Nope.
> The tax-reporting requirements alone would be a benefit.
But is it a significant benefit?
Non-profits have to do significant reporting as well even though their tax rate is 0%. They also have all of the reporting for being an employer.
One interesting question is whether a non-profit is at a disadvantage because it doesn't pay taxes. For example, GE pays negative taxes at times. (Their tax accounting is actually a profit center.) I don't know if a non-profit can is eligible.
I'll bet that Lockheed spends more money on compliance accounting, which a non-profit defense contractor will have to do, than it does on tax accounting.
*yes, I took a liberty to avoid such a negative emotional content word
It's worse than that, since I'd categorize the TSA as part of the blob of bureaucracy that is one step removed from politics or real political (democratic) accountability.
Voters and politicians panicked after 2001 and acted to do "something". Unfortunately, it's been over a decade since that something was put into place and for at very least half that time we've known that it's a mostly misguided effort.
How long does it take for the US government to undo mistakes like this, if ever?
Maybe now that we know a lot about code refactoring, we could apply the same concepts to legislation.
To connect back to another HN topic today, maybe we need a lot more articles entitled "Write Less Laws".
The TSA is rolling on with its own mandate regardless of science and the opinions of thinkers, and they will do anything that they want and that can superficially be based on increasing "security"; that is, such claims that people are easy to persuade to believe if they're not left to think about it.
I don't know how they fit in the big picture: they represent some fears or some power that people have invited into this world. But I can be pretty sure what the true reason is that compels them to justify their own existence. Follow the money.
Same here. I've always wondered at the certainty of the proclamations of fire investigations. I assumed that the disconnect between what I thought could be determined after everything was burned to a crisp -- and what they claimed to know about how a fire started and progressed was a result of my ignorance... go figure.
"The bottom line was “The “old-days” of locating the point of origin of a post-flashover fire by relying on the “lowest burn and deepest char” are OVER![12]
When word of the ATF experiments reached the fire investigation community, people began to examine the data more closely, because an error rate over 90% was simply unimaginable! In fact, the poor results should have surprised nobody. "
The banning of liquids and pastes are logical. There are some extremely volatile liquid and plastic explosives that would take your leg off if you dropped [1][2]. Or if they were used as primary explosives to ignite a more powerful secondary explosive. That could be disastrous if TSA allowed liquids in larger quantities.
As for the detection technologies that are currently out on the market, all I have to say is that every single one of them can be confused and circumvented, which is why they have seemingly arbitrary rules. For example, xray technologies can easily confuse plastic explosives with a piece of cheese, which is why you have to take shit out of your bag. MMW wave technologies are confused by water substances, which is why you have to do a pat down if an anomaly is detected.
My own technology that I worked on was primarily developed as a low-cost surface technique, so if you had explosive residue on your hands or baggage our detector would alarm.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitroglycerin [2]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa6fcun3kag
This example, and many more, is why we say the TSA's security rules are useless and arbitrary. About the only way to ensure a risk free flight is to force everyone to fly naked, not allow luggage, remove the cleaning crew, etc... and I don't think there are any airlines that are willing to go that far. :/
The step that screens liquids isn't going to actually find explosive liquids; it is going to stop all liquids, so the bombers won't be bringing them through in the first place.
I can hear lots of good arguments that the restrictions on liquids doesn't pass a cost-benefit analysis, but once you make the decision to stop liquids, having a common disposal place really isn't the problem. Someone could just suicide-bomb the security line in the first place.
(1) I just got back from DisneyWorld. One night the fireworks smoke drifted across where I was standing....
(2) The person who packaged the explosives need not be the person carrying them.
What utter garbage. Solids, SOLIDS should be banned! Azides, fulminates, picrates and the like are all SOLIDS and extremely UNSAFE, they can take both your legs off and more. I propose that no single SOLID piece weighting more than 4 ounces should be allowed on board, though of course several such smaller pieces are not a problem.
There's nothing inherently unscientific about this rule. Presumably someone has calculated the volume of explosive that's worth checking for, and then another person has translated that into simple, practical rules that can be quickly taught to a large number of border agents.
In the past (2001), terrorists attacked airplanes using tactics and weapons we were unprepared for. It seems reasonable, then, to think that if there is another terrorist attack on an airplane it will follow this pattern: it will use tactics and weapons we are unprepared for.
So checking 13 inch Macbooks more closely than 11 inch Macbooks (assuming taking the thing out of its case actually does anything) just means that terrorists should find ways to put a sufficiently-powerful bomb in an 11 inch Macbook in order to be successful.
Our approach, therefore, is completely unscientific because it assumes that terrorists today will continue to use the tactics they used yesterday, or were planning to use yesterday, when we know from observation and inference ("science") that this is not the case.
Note that there have been several attempted attacks since 2001. None have been successful, and none of them, not a single one, was foiled, even partially or with assistance from, TSA. Each of these attempts exploited a weakness in the TSA processes. Seems like the terrorists are better at "science" than the TSA are.
The arbitrary rules may help people gaming the system, but are completely exploitable when scratching even a bit below the surface.
It's a fucking farce.
(I'm not saying which airport. I like it this way.)
If I have to bend over and take their stupid, unconstitutional rules, I'll look them in the eye while they rifle through my pubes, no sense letting them off easy.
Security doesn't need to be a motivating factor, merely sufficient justification - after that things like back scatter body scanners, procedures that require more security staff and any other product or innovation the SIC comes up with can be shoehorned in.
They've worked out they can make money off of people's fear, and there's a neat little feedback loop where more security makes people more paranoid, more afraid leading to more security. Good business, if you can get it.
To me the better example of an arbitrary rule is laptop thickness. However we can speculate that someone has determined that objects greater than > 1 inch are more likely to carry explosives. We can argue that it's arbitrary, but aside from the TSA coming out and explaining the reasoning we will never know. And I'm not sure they are obligated to tell us.
But the scientific evidence for this worry is sketchy. Some devices emit signals that could theoretically affect an aircraft's electronics. Yet “there have never been any reported accidents from these kinds of devices on planes,” FAA spokesperson Les Dorr told the New York Times last year. Once again, irrational fear, not solid science, is dictating policy for millions of travelers."
Actually, it is based on science. Cell phones flying by overhead while landing or taking off overload cellular base stations. So as a courtesy to cellular phone carriers, airlines require cell phones to be put into "airplane" mode. Digital Communications 101 son.
[citation needed]
I've heard this, as one of many theories, discussed about the rationale for this rule.
A plane typically has about 150 passengers and there is a narrow window of time during takeoff and landing when you can actually get cell coverage. I find it hard to believe that with the popularity of cell phones today that the towers would be overloaded by 150 phones (or, let's extrapolate to 1000 phones accounting for the takeoff/landing windows) moving rapidly across a couple of towers.
I fly small planes for fun and sometimes use my phone in the air to check weather. The biggest problem is that it doesn't work above about 5,000ft because the signal gets too weak. I never bother to turn my phone off, and neither do most of my pilot friends. I spent about fifteen minutes flying a plane with an instructor friend once while he chatted on the phone with his wife about when we was going to get home!
Obviously it's a different circumstance, but it's another point of data where cell towers aren't always 100% functional when the target is moving.
Edit: by the way, have you reported the problem to AT&T? I have no idea how responsive they are, but it seems like it could be worthwhile, especially if it's as easy to reproduce the problem as you make it sound.
I would consider the first 1,500 feet of altitude to be a zone where appearance of cellphones would be considered "normal", so the window in which you're truly in the supposed problem zone is even smaller.
I'm not sure that the evidence your phone connected to some random carriers is any evidence that phones in flight could be problematic for modern towers.
RF systems are also very interesting... I'm not an RF engineer, but I know enough about it that the cell towers coverage pattern is not spherical with equal coverage in all directions. The antennas would be designed and placed to direct the signals mostly out and to lower elevations, not up. Again, this would limit the chances that phones zooming overheard are appearing to multiple towers simultaneously, or moving tower to tower faster than the billing and tracking systems could manage.
Actually, in that case as well as safety, I don't see much difference between a book and a Kindle. But they can't go and whitelist one device without complaints, can they? Sigh.
In the average, there are always few devices on. Multiply that by a few hundred takeoffs and landing on a single busy airport. No planes have crashed so far because of that.
IIRC, some aerospace manufacturers have stated that they would allow electronic devices being on if only <insert your local aviation control body here> approved.
I much more gladly believe the cell tower explanation than any appeal to security.
False - I'm always told to actually turn my device off. Furthermore, why can I leave my cellphone on when I'm traveling via bus, or rail?
Neither of them rely on radio for essential communication/navigation.
I'm not asserting that electronic devices interfere, just that the possibility of interference distinguishes planes from buses and trains.