TSA lines are so out of control that travelers are hiring line-sitters
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
> There is an official way for travelers to bypass long TSA waits if they’re willing to spend: hiring concierge services to escort them through security.
> Perq Soleil is an airport arrival and departure assistance service that can help travelers through TSA in about a minute flat by accessing alternative lines usually reserved for airport staff and airline personnel. The company — which operates in more than 300 airports and 150 countries — charges a base rate that varies by location.
Talk about burying the lede. Apparently the airports “highly discourage” line-sitters, but if you use services that pre-bribed airports you can skip the lines entirely.
Or is licensing and registration (of pilots and aircraft and manifest and flight plan) enough?
I wasn’t aware that DJI drone with 60lb payload was subject to more regulations than a Citation leaving TEB but I guess I’m open to learning what those are.
Private planes can do the same thing.
Hell the TSA doesn’t do much to prevent that on commercial flights, but requiring private flights to start going through commercial security would be completely pointless
If TSA were added, there still wouldn't be any lines at private terminals.
Private planes are just as capable of crashing into buildings as commercial jets. The TSA has picked up some ancillary public safety functions over the years, but their raison d'etre is to prevent hijackings.
Little planes, like this one [1] just don't do damage on the same scale as airliners.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack
(But regardless, it’s not clear that the TSA is even performing that kind of calculus.)
No argument though, just saying it's a hard problem, and the scaling issue makes it somewhat awkward to deploy security resources in proportion to the threat.
I don't have a solution. I'm not exactly thrilled with the current setup, but I try to stay quiet since I can't think of anything better.
Federal civilian workforce (ex Postal Service and Military) is only 3 million.
TSA has 60k employees.
That's a lot of permanent jobs.
TSA was created to accomplish a goal - security theater (mostly), preventing another 9/11 (maybe more in theory than in practice), etc.
The New Deal WPA, according to wikipedia, supplied about 3M jobs at its peak in 1938, when the population was ~130M.
2.3% of the population vs 0.017%.
Also empirically - if it was a jobs program, it would be way better staffed..
You're saying it's not comparable to the size of the New Deal, the biggest jobs program ever in the US.
That doesn't disqualify it from consideration as a jobs program as there are many jobs programs much smaller.
Adding 60k to ~3 million is significant because it's permanent. These are low skilled workers (and security theater as you astutely say) mostly concentrated in large cities.
Whereas the New Deal was temp jobs that disappeared once grants and funding disappeared.
Edited to clarify NOT TSA
Imagine the pandemonium that would ensue if Taylor Swift were to enter an airport terminal through the normal entrance.
If this is so, why does Congress have to fund the program? Why not pass the funds through directly to the agency?
The federal government does not work like a private escrow account where a fee collected for X automatically goes to Y. Tax revenue comes in to the Treasury, and Congress decides what agencies are allowed to spend. So even if TSA screening is funded in part by a per-ticket user fee, TSA still does not get to just collect that money and use it directly. Congress has to authorize and appropriate it.
On a practical level, imagine the chaos if every federal department acted as its own tax collector and then set its own spending priorities. That is basically an argument for gutting Congress's oversight of TSA and treating it like an independent agency, just because Congress and the executive branch invented the modern shutdown in the 1980s.
Keep in mind shutdowns are a fairly new concept, that nearly no other country has. The US also didn't have it for most of its history. Congress could stop at any time it wanted.
From their website:
Covenant Aviation Security, a private company under contract with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), provides passenger and baggage screening at SFO.
Visit Covenant Aviation Security to learn more about security screening at SFO.
https://www.flysfo.com/about/airport-operations/safety-secur...
More coverage here: https://www.npr.org/2026/03/26/nx-s1-5759273/not-all-airport...
> The Screening Partnership Program contracts security screening services at commercial airports to qualified private companies.
Examples:
* USCIS (source: https://www.aila.org/library/practice-alert-what-happens-if-...)
* 1,823/7,001 Fish and Wildlife service staff (https://www.doi.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2025-09/do...)
* 38,252/74,210 of the FDA (https://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/fy-2026-hhs-contingency-sta...)
* USPS (although as a government owned corporation the separation of funding is more obvious)
* Customs (the actual folks that process tariffs are paid for by the tariffs, unlike border patrol)
"Nonappropriated fund activities" are a thing though?
What the fuck is the TSA even supposed to be doing? The 9/11 guys supposedly used box cutters. Does anybody seriously think you can't get a little blade like that onto an airplane in your carry on luggage? I bring double sided razor blades with every time I fly and they have never flagged it. And more importantly, does anybody actually believe you could still hijack a plane with a pocket knife? All the other passengers now know the score, they all die unless they throw themselves on you which they will and have done many times since. What's more, you won't get into the locked cockpit anyway. Airport security is solved. Basic bitch scanning for guns is all you need and we had that solved in the 90s which is the reason the hijackers used pocket knives, which no longer works. Disband the TSA.
In addition, most fees (including most of the TSA fee) collected by the US Federal government isn't earmarked - it just goes into the general fund.
More breakdown here: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/23/us/tsa-funding-security-fees-...
So even if all the money went to TSA, less than half their budget is covered. There is inherently bloat in that, but that is for a different discussion.
But bigger still, if Congress didn't reappropriate that money from TSA, they'd either have to spend less (less likely), raise taxes (not likely), or go deeper in debt (very likely) in order to cover whatever they are currently covering with their 70% share of the fee.
If you are wondering how that could happen, it starts with no-bid contracts and ends with inefficiency and has been heavily influenced by a guy whose name sounds a lot like Schmical Schmertoff.
Either because ICE is more competent than TSA or their presence is scaring away a lot of people
Edit: Newspapers have a long history of using headline editors who add “spin” otherwise reasonable stories handed in by journalists. This story was built by talking to a few entrepreneurs who offer line-sitting to see if they’d served any customers for airport security waits. Only one had.
Last I heard it's a morally objectionable thing at this point rather than something that's having any practical impact.
(Which of course doesn't make it ok... I'm just a little less inclined to judge people that still use archive links when needed.)
The archive.today domains have also poisoned DNS lookups from some privacy-preserving DNS providers, and in rare cases have been caught tampering the archive data. Make of that what you will.
Today I wanted to try something different so I used singlefile to make a html and then make pdf file from that html and uploaded it to archive.org
https://archive.org/details/tsa-lines-are-so-out-of-control-...
I don't wish to have news articles in my github as it clutters or I am not sure how these laws might follow (there is definitely a reason as to why archive.is creator is anonymous) and so I am looking for more anonymous ways to upload (my main intentions are that archive.ph can be nice but I feel like its not validated within wikipedia/all the controversies it has and I am just experimenting with things right now)
I have also uploaded this on catbox.moe (https://files.catbox.moe/mt9sus.html) but it has plain/text content-type, does anyone know a more anonymous content-type plain/text -> html where I can upload things perhaps, I have thoughts about creating something like this (where people can give links to text .html files and I can then display the html) but I am also a bit worried that it might be used for nefarious purposes.
I am not sure what I should do actually about it, I like thinking about archiving though, but anything other than archive.org like archive.is, can only function best if they are anonymous and I am not really anonymous/intend to be.
This makes me sympathetic of them against the journalist who tried to dox them but also I kind of understand that journalist tried approaching first from a more curiosity, maybe a threat-actor model, I had done something like this once to a service because I wanted to know if govt.'s would be able to catch them or not (they had a reddit proxy) and I found that they had their opsec secure and I was really impressed but I sometimes wonder, if the journalist also did something like this and the archive.is owner felt like it was a threat to archive and decided to ddos and all the things that followed, I sort of understand both the perspectives, so it just makes me sad as how this ended up folding up.
(This comment might've been more relevant within the archive.is drama hackernews thread but I think that its long gone and I was still forming my opinion on all of this which clearly has some nuance)
Every family has a "kuladeivam" which is basically a temple for that (patrilineal) lineage. Every family has one. Every temple has few families.
Then it's special for people in the same town as the temple. Modern migration makes this a different set from the one above.
Then each temple has special events on specific days/week/month/year.
And then on top of that some few hundred temples are special in general and are crowded 365 days of the year with people from all over.
Adds up.
> Must worship take place in a temple?
Just my understanding. You can worship anywhere even in your head, but temples are one thing which improve "quality" of worship by a lot. The logic roughly goes - since most people aren't capable of high (enuf) quality worship in their head or at home, temples help them. More of a magnitude thing rather than a binary thing.
The status isn’t even necessarily money related, but can just be to see who is more “devoted”.
It's interesting that the market solution is hiring line-sitters rather than, say, pressure on TSA to improve throughput. Says a lot about how normalized the dysfunction has become.
In Turkey people with connections to the government get strobe lights permit to skip the traffic through the emergency line. There's so many opportunities both for monetization and loyalty rewarding.
Due to lapses like that sometimes I question my theory that all those people(Erdogan, Trump, Putin etc) are in the same group chat.