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Comment by nathan_long | Hacker News Reader

Yep. This is why every dollar spent on the TSA would be better spent on preventing car accidents, heart attacks, and falls in the shower.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/the_comparativ...

But I like the OP's more practical point: personal attention to normal activities that are actually risky, based on a realistic view of those risks.

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Especially since the TSA actually accomplishes almost nothing in preventing deaths. All a terrorist about to be discovered at the airport security gate would have to do to complete his deadly mission would be to detonate his bomb right then and there. It would cause people to fear airports and security gates and mess up the whole system. Terrorism is all about sowing fear that the government can't protect you. The TSA just shifts some of the risk from the airplane to the airport. You can't security check everything in life. Better to figure out why people want to detonate bombs in the first place and solve that problem. But symbolic solutions are so much easier.

Ironically, the fact that there haven't been any big successful airline-related terrorist attacks in the US for a long time is evidence that the TSA is useless, because of what you point out, despite the tendency for certain groups of clueless people to claim the opposite.

There are a couple of more parts to that story that help to make it more persuasive.

1) Zero succesful airline attacks

2) Zero convictions for attempted terrorism of anyone detained by the TSA

3) Zero civilians killed in any form of (islamic extremist) terrorist attack on US soil in the last decade or so (all the way back to 9/12 if you don't count the borderline case of John Malvo).

The point being that not only is the TSA not stopping attacks on airplanes, it is also not doing such a good job that it would redirect those attacks to other targets.

Well, the obvious "other target" would be the security lines, so I think it already makes that point. But of course more point-making is better.

Worse than that, the TSA nonsense encourages a non-trivial population to drive when they would have flown. Driving being far less safe, it's probable that Security Theatre has a body count.

The body count has been tallied quite a number of times over the last several years. Here's a search I just ran that gives a couple: https://www.google.com/search?q=tsa+drive+rather+than+fly+de...

Of course people interested in increasing government control over the population love security checks and any excuse to increase them.

I am a little skeptical of this idea. We should spend no money fighting one threat until all greater threats (as measure by deaths/year) have been eliminated? I think rather we should spend money proportionally.

And I do not think that we should completely ignore the fears of irrational people. If our citizens are unhappy because they fear something, it is worth some expense to set them at ease. Though perhaps a careful placebo would be most fitting

>> Though perhaps a careful placebo would be most fitting

...which is exactly what the TSA is.

A very expensive and inconvenient placebo.

Well it's a little more complicated: you should always spend money where the most deaths prevented per dollar are achievable. So if you can save 1 life per $20 spent on thing A, and 1 life per $100 spent on thing B, you shouldn't spend any money on thing B. That's because each life saved via thing B means five people died from not having thing A (net loss of 4 lives).

while that is good in theory, the reality is that the $100 spent on thing B is much more visible. The action from money spent saving thing A could be less visible, lower profile and generally more pedestrian, so politicians who makes these decisions go for the more flashy option and therefore garner more votes or credit.

The goal has never been to save more lives - which is the root cause of the TSA's problem.

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