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Comment by k2enemy | Hacker News Reader

I'm a huge critic of the TSA and would be thrilled to see it dismantled, but I always find these kinds of arguments a little intellectually dishonest. It could be that “terrorist threat groups present in the Homeland are not known to be actively plotting against civil aviation targets or airports” because we have scanners in place that deter that kind of threat.

Now, I don't believe this is the case, as plenty of research has shown that the scanners don't increase security, but the "no active threat" argument by itself doesn't get us very far. By that logic, we should remove security at Fort Knox because it never gets robbed.

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> By that logic, we should remove security at Fort Knox because it never gets robbed.

Airports should have security. Every country has security in their airports. Where it crosses the line are when you have the security preemptively treat you like a criminal, and violate your personhood without justification other than a blanket statement of "terrorists".

Security ! always have to = Neo-Fascism. But many people feel it does in American airports.

> Airports should have security. Every country has security in their airports

but wait, in your response to me you said that the line people wait on for security checks is just as big a terrorist hazard as the plane itself. How are you not contradicting yourself here? Which is it, we wait on lines for metal detectors or not ?

Security doesn't have to mean inspection lines or profiling.

It could mean guards walking around, like in an apartment complex or mall. It could mean people watching CCTV.

This could all be done by the airline. They don't want bombings just as much as you or I. The only difference is they don't have an incentive to create a regulation that forces people to subject themselves to embarrassment or harassment.

Where is the TSA's incentive? Justifying their existence. In one hand, you have an anti terrorist, governmental agency, which will always try to justify itself, and on the other you have a necessary expense for the airlines mandated by their public relations and to reduce bad press/events from happening.

But airlines provided the security before 9/11 and failed at that job miserably.

Airports (not airlines) provided security against known threats. The 9/11 hijackers circumvented that bringing in box cutters, not the expected guns and bombs, and by using the planes themselves as weapons, instead of just hijacking the plane and using the hostages as leverage.

TSA is in precisely the same reactive mode: make people take their shoes off after some nut tries to blow up his shoes, etc.

Bruce Schneier: "Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers."

Wrong. Items used on that day were items that were permitted through security. They weren't "missed".

Why should airports have security? Just because other countries have security, doesn't mean the airport needs security. I don't know of any other transportation that requires airport like security, why are airports so special? I've seen bomb sniffing dogs at train stations, and cops patrolling, but no patdowns, or forced searches.

the "no active threat" argument by itself doesn't get us very far. By that logic, we should remove security at Fort Knox because it never gets robbed.

Security needs to be proportional to the risk. We know there are plenty of people who would make off with the gold in Fort Knox if they could because hold-ups and bank-robberies happen all the time.

We do know the level of risk that the TSA is defending against is minuscule because of these basic facts:

(1) The TSA is not catching terrorists: No TSA action has ever resulted in a conviction on terrorism related charges. To the best of my knowledge, the only actual arrest on terrorism charges turned out to be completely bogus.[1] Meanwhile they crow about stupid little things like the guy with a funny looking water bottle.[2]

(2) The TSA is not deterring terrorists: Someone bent on spreading terror doesn't just give up because good security scared them off - they find another target. There are all kinds of high-profile soft targets: Shopping malls, the line at the airport, bridges, tunnels, movie theaters, derailing passenger trains, etc. It does not require much imagination to come up with a very long list of easy targets.

But so far we've seen just one effective attack like that - the Boston marathon and it was super easy for those guys to pull off. It is so easy, yet it is a once-in-a-decade event. That is unequivocal evidence that for all intents and purposes nobody with the ability to carry out attacks is actually attacking us.

Given those two facts, we can have very high confidence that the TSA is not providing useful security.

[1] http://www.clickorlando.com/news/TSA-exaggerates-claims-abou...

[2] http://boingboing.net/2008/07/30/tsa-proud-of-confisc.html

That doesn't follow. The TSA may be deterring terrorists for airlines, or they may not.

But the fact that they don't protect other things, like malls, doesn't change that possibility. You are right terrorists can target softer targets, and have recently done just that. And it may be because because of heightened security at other places that they are starting to choose softer targets. If you want to kill a lot of people and get a lot of attention, go where lots of people are that will have a big media reaction and where the security sucks.

The issue (beyond the fact that the scanners don't work, which you've addressed and I publicly schooled back in March 2012) is that in public (especially on the floor of Congress) the TSA talks up all of these threats against us in order to garner support. Essentially, we've been lied to, which, at this point, is not a surprise coming from any federal agency.

The problem is: The TSA and its equivalents around the world have made air travel less secure. Those agencies are mere security theatre designed to serve the political agendas of conservative agitators.

Nude scanners convey messages such as 'We're doing something.' and 'The state is looking out for you.' while they're much more prone to errors and missing actual threats than 'good old-fashioned' airport security.

Defunding and dismantling out-of-control agencies such as the TSA and - while we're at it - the NSA would not only make the world a better but also a safer place.

Moreover, while the US - like most other industrialized countries - struggle with their budget at the same time they have no qualms about spending enormous amounts of money on government agencies that clearly provide no value other than furthering an utterly sinister political agenda.

"By that logic, we should remove security at Fort Knox because it never gets robbed."

There are, however, active threats against Fort Knox -- we know people want to rob it and that they would given the chance. On the other hand, it is not clear that there are people who would attack airplanes were we to scale back the TSA's operations (particularly airport checkpoints).

> There are, however, active threats against Fort Knox -- we know people want to rob it

Fort Knox seems like a bad example of necessary security. How far would you get with a convoy of trucks, each carrying some tons of gold? Does that gold need more security than a nuclear weapon?

Fort Knox seems more like an example of security theater, designed to impress people with the idea that a pile of gold matters a whit compared to large modern nation's budget.

It could be that my mother isn't dead because I avoided stepping on a crack yesterday. I'd appreciate some evidence, though.

This seems like a perfect example of the intellectual dishonesty k2enemy was talking about. Those two examples are not comparable.

There is no demonstrable, rational connection in your example. It is entirely rational and possible that extra airport security is a deterrent to airbourne terrorism.

"It is entirely rational and possible that extra airport security is a deterrent to airbourne terrorism."

Possible, but easily disproved. You can buy the material you need to make various weapons at duty-free shops, restaurants, and so forth on the other side of airport security. You can walk through security with a laptop, which has loads of sharp metal pieces, several lithium ion cells (containing dangerous chemicals that can be used in various ways), etc.

The 9/11 hijackers were not heavily armed. What I described above would have been sufficient for that attack, and the "extra" security at airports does nothing to stop that sort of thing.

Right. Your example sounds ridiculous because there is no logical connection between not stepping on a crack and your mother's life. To most people, there is a connection between airport scanners and airline safety. My point is that we should be stressing the fact that the scanners do not actually increase safety.

How's the saying go? Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Except when it is.

Yeah, really absence of evidence is evidence (though not proof) of absence, unless the absence of evidence can be explained as "well we haven't bothered trying to find evidence."

(In other words, if I don't look in a box, then I don't have evidence that anything is in the box, but that's not evidence that the box is empty. If however I do look in the box and fail to find evidence of anything in it, that is evidence that the box is in fact empty.)

They have presumably been looking for terrorists rather intensely.

as plenty of research has shown that the scanners don't increase security

We can infer from this statement of yours that "the scanners" (such as they are) are not a component of security, so the analogy to Fort Knox security is inapt.

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