TSA Privatization Returns Airport Security to a Dangerous Past

From the article:

>Covenant Aviation Security was another early winner, getting $19 million for unspecified airport security services in 2005. Since then, it’s gotten an ever-increasing amount, including $773 million in 2021 to support security screening at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) until the end of this year; taxpayers have spent about $1.5 billion on that company, mainly for security at SFO. That airport is held out as the exemplar of how well private companies manage security, which labor leaders say is the case because Covenant workers at SFO are unionized; as a result, they are better paid than security contractors elsewhere and can more strongly influence practices. But even so, the FBI found that some of Covenant’s security personnel helped smugglers traffic cocaine between 2013 and 2014 by allowing them “to pass through the x-ray machine at a security checkpoint line without adequately screening the luggage for explosives, incendiaries, weapons, or other threats to security,” as the Department of Justice wrote.

Just hard to get anything useful out of this article. Privatization returns us to a dangerous past, but we already privatize, and it's really good, but it's only because of unions, but despite that it's still bad, but I guess it must not be too bad because we haven't had any terrorist attacks since 9/11, which is the reason why it's bad to privatize.

What are "porno scanners"?

I think I would prefer more accountability, if a private firm can do that, than I see no issue.

This is the key insight: it's not a question of better or worse security. Airport screening doesn't enhance security. This can even be experimentally measured. Bottles of liquid get screened reliably while weapons don't get detected because it's rare for a weapon to pass through the baggage screening machine. The correct response to a lose lose situation like that is to minimize the cost and friction until someday it's announced that a magical technology can do mass walk-through "screenings," and we can stop paying the shampoo bottle screeners.

Speaking of Europe, when the topic of airport security comes up I often think about how many European countries use the gendarmerie for public security. We explicitly do not have any such thing here in the U.S., so we wind up with all of these fragmented police forces like ICE with varying degrees of heavy arms.