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Comment by batgaijin | Hacker News Reader

The TSA is there to make people feel secure, not to be secure.

Tourism is a trillion dollar industry; even if you hate jumping through hoops you are infinitely more likely to take a flight if you know everyone is being molested.

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you are infinitely more likely to take a flight if you know everyone is being molested.

Speak for yourself; I for one don't like being treated badly. It's security theater at best, and runaway government power at worst, and either way it's at the cost of human dignity.

I am saying that the whole point is the theater.

Not even the TSA believes that. That's why they have "TSA Precheck" - pay $100 and submit to a "background check" and you will almost always skip the molestation.

TSA Precheck is a program explicitly designed to placate the people with enough influence to get the system changed. You can be sure that every member of congress and their staffs are in the Precheck program, along with anyone who flies on business or is otherwise wealthy. Pretty soon the only people getting molested on a regular basis any more are the lower classes.

http://www.geek.com/articles/news/pay-the-tsa-100-and-bypass...

Precheck is free.

https://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/travel/airport/tsap...

I'd wager most of the people in the program aren't rich, they just have jobs that require them to travel a lot. We're talking Accenture consultants, not bank execs.

It isn't that most of the people in the program are or are not rich, it is that most of the rich in the country are in the program. In other words -- anyone who is (a) likely to be annoyed by the inconvenience AND (b) powerful enough to do something about the inconvenience has been co-opted by PreCheck.

...along with anyone who flies on business...

Not quite. As a counter-example I give you http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randal_L._Schwartz. Due to his past felon status (now exonerated so not a felon), he is not eligible for TSA Precheck.

But he flies business a lot, and has made it clear that he'd love to be in TSA Precheck. He's simply not eligible.

I think there is probably a finite number, and one that is calculable if you have the right data. My totally ignorant speculation is that it's a small percentage.

I believe it also serves as a public works program of sorts. 50,000 decently paying jobs with great benefits and plenty of opportunities to steal passenger's possessions for people who, quite frankly, aren't qualified to do much else.

What if you realize, like many, that they're too busy molesting people and confiscating shampoo to be doing anything useful?

The point of the TSA is that its use is in providing the charade of security because it is the only tangible proof of increased security that most people will see/experience.

There are numerous other measures in place to actually increase security, i.e., fortified cabin doors, armed air marshals on all domestic flights, anti-hijacking procedures, terrorist-wary passengers, crew training, etc., all of which have prevented terrorist activities to some degree or another.

> The point of the TSA is that its use is in providing the charade of security because it is the only tangible proof of increased security that most people will see/experience.

I think at this point it has overplayed it's hand.

There aren't enough air marshals to place one on all domestic flights. The cost would also be astounding and unsustainable.

As Schneier has pointed out, more air marshals have been arrested than they have made arrests. (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/the_effectiven...)

The cabin door fortification has been the most effective thing so far. Passenger awareness and quick thinking has actually prevented several incidents, making them the best line of defense.

The rest is just nonsense.

> The TSA is there to make people feel secure, not to be secure.

Security theatre is part of it but they do make planes more secure.

I (and the majority of people) don't want people bringing pocket knives, guns, samurai swords, lighters or whatever other crazy thing people feel they "have a right" to bring. Because when disagreements happen we don't need people escalating situations into life/death scenarios that require planes to make unscheduled and riskier landings.

Most of those things were not allowed on airplanes before 2001 as well. Not sure what you are getting at really if this is an attempt to justify what TSA does.

Not to mention the "pocket knives" and "lighters" plots are foiled by the new policy of "beat the shit out of terrorists and then sit on them, or you all die".

This is one aspect of the security situation that I haven't been able to wrap my mind around: if someone were to attempt to hijack a plane with a pen knife/nail clipper/etc in any year past 2001, they'd get their shit stomped in. The public is well aware of the fact that terrorists don't always merely force landings and take hostages like they did before 9/11. Why do we continue to ban the most trivial shit?

Before September 2001, I routinely flew with my Leatherman on my person. I'd simply remove it from its sheath and drop it in the little plastic basket for your keys and change and such, or hand it to the uniformed person manning the metal detector before passing through. I was never once questioned, or even looked at twice for doing this, and I flew fairly regularly.

A pocket knife is a rather absurd weapon anyways to anyone with common sense. Sure it could be used as a weapon, but it's not something that would keep passengers from stopping a terrorist in 2013. I don't know if pocket knives were technically allowed or just overlooked because of the above reason. My reference was in regards to the obvious (guns, swords, explosives, etc). I was at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix in the late 90s and the entire airport was shut down when someone went through security with a gun.

Pedantics aside, airport security used to have common sense. Now, it's been tossed out the window for zero tolerance "no need to think" policy. It doesn't mean we should return exactly to the laws of the 1990s for airport security in the US, but the "security theater" for the sake of making people think they're safer by inconveniencing at best and harassment/theft/groping at worse is ridiculous.

A leatherman is a bit bigger than a pocket knife.

That would all depend on the model in question[1]. 2-3" blade is pocket knife size. If going by wiki[2], it defines pocket knife as 2-6". 6" is pretty big for a what one would define as a pocket knife though.

[1] http://images.google.com/images?q=leatherman&sourceid=op...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_knife

That's the one thing I really miss. It's almost inevitable that I find myself needing a Leatherman at my destination (after all, you're away from all your other tools).

I've even resorted to buying one at my destination and giving it to someone as a gift when I leave.

I once bought a cheap soldering iron, hookup wire, and solder in Cambridge, MA and left it behind in the hotel room 'cause I didn't want the security hassle of taking it home on the plane.

Every flight I've been on in the last several years has allowed you to bring a lighter on board.

Edit: looks like that changed in 2007.

http://www.tsa.gov/traveler-information/lighters-and-matches

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