I flew on a plane without going through security. It was amazing and no one died
washingtonpost.com
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First, the TSA itself has admitted that there is no evidence of terrorist plots against aviation in the US[0].
Second, the circumstances under which 9/11 happened would be impossible to repeat. Plane cockpits are all but impenetrable[1] - the only reason that some of the 9/11 hijackers were successful was that the standard protocol for dealing with hijackers assumed that hijackers wanted to take the plane hostage for ransom, not use the plane as a weapon. This protocol was fixed almost immediately. (Note that United Airlines Flight 93 did not face the same fate as the other three planes, because the passengers knew what the hijackers were planning.)
Since it's impossible to take control of the cockpit as a hijacker these days, even if someone managed to bring a gun on board a flight, the most damage they could do is kill all the passengers (leaving the pilots unharmed). That is truly a horrible scenario, but that makes flying no more risky than going to the movies or going to school (eg. Newtown, Arapahoe, Boulder).
Of course, one "logical" conclusion is therefore to establish TSA-style security at every school, cinema, mall, etc... in which case we have turned the country into a police state, and we should expect the same crime rates as within federal prisons: http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=194
[0] http://tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/tsa-admits-...
[1] I believe I read another comment on Hacker News a while back in which the pilot had a heart attack after the cockpit had been locked from the inside, but before leaving the gate, and it still took the fire department almost an hour to cut through the door.
I can't find a report of this ever happening, though I did find an article from December 2001 which pointed out potential danger to pilots behind locked doors. It also notes that the danger of an incident mid-flight can be reduced by having a flight attendant step into the cockpit whenever one of the pilots steps out.
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2001-12-17/news/0112160265_...
(Edit: Lest my nitpicky comment be misunderstood, it also talks a little about how strong the reinforcements are; I think your point about cockpit doors being extremely solid can be reasonably taken as fact.)
With seatbelts and their introduction there were anecdotes about people crashing their cars into ponds, lakes etc. where their lives were saved because they were not wearing their seatbelts. I think it is human nature to want to repeat the one incident where the safety measures could have led to disaster.
Since you are so adept at research, can you find this one for me?
Recently a senior New Labour politician who was responsible for bringing in TSA style checks in the UK wise-cracked about how those that complained should be offered two lines at the airport, one with the body scanners, sniffer dogs, robocops etc. and another - to a different flight - where you could just walk straight on. He wondered which flight would be chosen to go on by those complaining types.
It bugs me now that I can't find the quote or remember whether it was Gordon Brown or some other politician.
Now on pilots, this really depends which pilots you are talking about. North American pilots, and here I am pointing at Canadian pilots more because I am in Canada and I am in the process of getting my PPL (for pleasure),however, I am sure this also applies to US pilots, very well trained. To get a job at a big airline you need experience, and where do you get the best experience, far up north where harsh weather, huge winds and tiny landing strips are located. I don't think that 3 years college will do, unless you are lucky.
I also talk to a lot of commercial pilots as my girlfriend is a flight attendant, so during the travels we go out and chat about everything.
As far as safety, over exaggerated, really. No one cares, well, people do but they shouldn't, because if someone wants to hijack I am sure they will find a way to do it. This is the big boys game on a government level. Tax payers are paying for scanners etc, whoever wins the bid makes them and they are sponsoring the next election. (I will not get into this here but you get the point). Scanners are useless.
This is an older video from 2010, scanners give better pictures nowdays but are still as useless as before. I got scanned at Schiphol 3 months ago, the scanner was not much different from the one shown this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idICUSiGcqo
It is great to fly small planes, no security, quick, and more fun to fly than a big airliner.
Opinions are personal.
"Recently a senior New Labour politician who was responsible for bringing in TSA style checks in the UK wise-cracked about how those that complained should be offered two lines at the airport, one with the body scanners, sniffer dogs, robocops etc. and another - to a different flight - where you could just walk straight on. He wondered which flight would be chosen to go on by those complaining types."
Passenger aircraft are supposed to NEVER operate with only one person on the flight deck, but rules are not always followed.
We don't know how many hijackings have been prevented by the locking doors. Are there any documented cases? We do know of a few cases where they have caused deaths, or at least prevented any chance to try to avert a disaster.
(Cialdini cites research, which I'm too lazy to look up right now, that claims something as high as 40-50 excess deaths from car and plane crashes in the US per highly publicized suicide)
A co-pilot at the helm, or an unlocked door through which someone may come in and question the pilots actions could very well make all the difference.
Discussing any behavior, especially in the media, makes it more likely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide (Werther effect)
The interesting bit (from the book IIRC) is that the copiers will often wait some time so it seems like they are not copying. This is why the risk to subsequent air travel increases after some delay from the original incident. People are partially unpredictable, so it's possible to have an immediate copy as well.
Could that happen? It's not that hard to know that the doors can be locked, and if so, you pretty much give up on trying to get in to the cockpit to take over the plane.
Not all fighting back scenarios involve crashing the plane into a field. In fact, now that cockpit doors are reinforced, most fighting back scenarios will end in the plane safely landing. There have already been several cases of passengers successfully fighting back before much damage was done.
tl;dr: I think fighting back is a rational response.
1) I know everybody else is thinking that theory. Nobody will move.
2) Bystander effect. Nobody will move.
In short, the one to act first will be me, 'cos y'all a bunch of cowards. (Hopefully not too coward to jump in once someone's made the first move though)
But what you really need to think about is- what if I'm not on that plane? What if every person on that plane is a coward? Will you wait in terror and lose your chance? Are you willing to take that risk?
Unless there's literally seconds until the hijacker will be untouchable, that's likely the most rational choice: play chicken with the other passengers, to see who gets desperate enough to act first.
Now, the moment someone acts, all bets are off - some non-negligible subset may quite likely follow the first person, depending on that persons social standing (people are more likely to jaywalk behind a jaywalker in a suit than one in less formal clothes, for example, if neither of them does anything else to get people to follow - our propensity to deviate from the group behaviour depends on how authoritative the person "leading the charge" appears)
Similarly, if at any point it appears that the hijacker will suddenly become impossible to take out, it becomes more rational to go first, out of the risk that nobody will act.
But the bystander effect is there for a reason: It is generally quite safe to do what everyone else is doing. Except when it isn't.
In terms of hijackings, as it turns out, it is quite safe: Most hijackings, even after 9/11, ends with no dead victims. 9/11 represented a small set of extreme aberrations from hijackings both before and after.
With that in mind, throwing yourself on an armed hijacker only becomes rational once it appears they'll otherwise gain control of the cockpit, at the earliest.
Anyway, I don't intend to wait and find out what the hijacker intends, and as the best window for action is going to be right after he/she walks by your seat, your window for action is small. When they are far away, you have to close the distance, which costs you surprise. So waiting to see if they are going to try to breach the cockpit is probably not the best plan.
Well, I guess if they take a hostage at the back of the plane and yell "take me to Prague!", it's probably not worth it, I guess there would need to be some attempt to read their intentions.
More importantly, security is provided by catching would be terrorists before they even get anywhere near the airport. Because otherwise they can do a lot more damage at a crowded security checkpoint than they could with whatever explosives they managed to mix in their underwear. This is a job for intelligence agencies, not for the TSA.
But really, if someone wants to destroy a plane, they're going to be able to destroy a plane. The question is not "should we try to stop people from blowing things up?" The question is "what are reasonable and effective means to stop people from blowing things up?"
Unless we have measures to prevent them from getting on the plane in the first place, and since no bombs have been going off on a plane for quite a while, isn't that a sign that the security measures are working?
Why not? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you are making a claim without backing it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FedEx_Flight_705
"About twenty minutes after takeoff, as the flight crew carried on a casual conversation, Calloway entered the flight deck and commenced his attack. Every member of the crew took multiple hammer blows which fractured [the flight crew's] skulls. A lengthy struggle ensued with the flight engineer and captain as Tucker, also an ex-Navy pilot, performed extreme aerial maneuvers with the aircraft, at times flying upside down, with the intent to keep the hijacker off-balance."
It worked, too. Everyone survived.
Let's also remember what genius methods and techniques the "terrorists" used to hijack some planes....they "smuggled" some box cutters on the plane. .... The END ... FIN
I bet you if any one of you put a plastic craft blade, you know, the marker sized ones with the break away blades, in your carry on bag you would not be stopped or discovered; especially if you placed it with the blade on edge to the image.
Here's a tip though, never, NEVER ever will another plane be hijacked by anyone else using those means. Not only did the "authorities" finally secure the cockpits like it had been pleaded for years prior to 9/11, but I can guarantee you that anyone even attempting would be ripped apart by the limbs. I, for one, don't care if you were able to smuggle a middle-earth battle axe on the plane; you will be dead within seconds of pulling some shit.
That being said, I'm not quite certain if it has gotten any better, but just relatively recently it was still rather easy to access the runways and bays. Just saying, the phantoms we are fighting might get "genius" and pull of a "highly sophisticated plot" that my seven year old could plane and execute with just a tablet computer at their disposal.
The transfer of existing security responsibilities from airlines to the federal government wasn't a make-work program, it was a measure to eliminate potential airline liability for future security failures.
It was about the economy, because reducing the airlines liability risk going forward was one of many steps taken to help the airline industry, but it wasn't primarily a "make-work" program.
First time I was travelling with it, I went to check it in, and they looked at me as if I was stupid. Clearly no terrorist has tried to use a huge umbrella as a pike yet, so it's not yet a risk. If I was a terrorist, testing a suitable set of objects with enough sharpened metal pieces for whether or not they'd ask me to check them in would be trivial - any terrorists being stopped by their lack of ability to bring something sharp on are so dumb they'd be stopped by someone drawing a stop sign in crayons and insisting they're not allowed to pass.
So the terrorists are either really stupid, there aren't that many of them, or they, like you, are smart enough to realise that they'd better have some pretty horrible weapons to be able to survive a hijack attempt in a post-9/11 world.
In other words, it's not even about stopping sharp items, but about giving the appearance of stopping a suitable set of objects that will keep people concerned about terror threats.
What about liquids? Pretty much every trip I end up forgetting some bottle or other of liquids, generally a half litre bottler of some drink, often because the mother of my child keeps putting bottles in his bag that I don't notice until after security. Not once have they been noticed at the security checks.
So it's a show, as those who do want to get liquids past can just put them in their carry on and send it through with good odds of being able to walk straight on. If they cared, they'd do better. But they don't care, as this is not about stopping a viable plot, but about keeping up appearances.
Meanwhile my 4 year old was picked out for secondary screening when we flew to visit my mother for christmas, without setting off the metal detectors, and had to pass his shoes through and go through the new scanners, and get patted down; I was furious, but didn't want to upset or scare him or risk messing up his christmas by making a fuss about it; and when we'd gone through, I found a full drinks bottle in his bag that they'd missed.
My point is not that it'd be a great weapon - it's not. But compared to the stuff they are confiscating, it's miles ahead in terms of potential damage.
It demonstrates either a total lack of critical thinking when deciding what to allow, or how little this has to do with security, or both.
Personally I'm quite pleased they don't ban my umbrella, but I'd prefer it if they removed most stuff from the list of banned items.
Initially, the Bush administration and the GOP resisted the creation of a Federal airport security service. They were not at all excited about a big new (particularly unionized) government workforce. But the Democrats fought for it and won that political argument. Here's a contemporaneous news account that covers the basics: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=87570
How did you end up remembering it differently?
No, they didn't. By then, Senator Jim Jeffords had become an independent, caucusing with the Democrats and giving them a one-vote majority control of the chamber. Also, FWIW, Norm Mineta was the token Democrat in the Bush cabinet.
And of course everyone voted for the bill once it was clear it would pass. Who wanted to be against enhanced airline security?
I'm not saying the GOP put up the fight of the century on the TSA, far from it. But it's a mischaracterization of history to say that Bush demanded a dramatic expansion of the Federal workforce as some kind of economic smokescreen. If that were so, you'd expect to find accounts of Democrats at least raising token opposition to this brilliant political stratagem.
This is like saying that we're seeing fewer and fewer occurrences of tuberculosis, therefore TB vaccines are useless.
If you have that data (which I'd love to see), there are still powerful arguments that TSA funding would have been better spent in many other ways (better training budgets for security/investigative personnel, more "soft" layers at airports, fewer kneejerk infrastructure upgrades).
That's funny, because I got searched more thoroughly leaving the USA than when I was flying to the USA.
> Would this increase hijacking? Probably. But there's no reason to believe it would increase casualties from terrorist attacks overall. That's because increasing airport security just leads terrorists to direct their assaults elsewhere.
There are two huge problems with this statement.
First, you cannot draw such a causal conclusion from statistical data alone.
Second, it's pulling a subtle slight of hand--the goal of airport security is NOT to reduce terrorist casualties overall. It is to reduce violent attacks of any kind on airplanes, specifically.
At the base of this argument is an implication that terrorist attacks are zero-sum: reduce them in one place, get an equivalent more in another. But that's not how security works.
Look at it in digital terms--it would be like saying that we don't need to bother with strong passwords, because all those did was drive up the number of phishing attacks. Maybe we could just get of passwords, since the total number of intrusions would not go up. And besides, just think of all that wasted effort to create, hash, store, remember, and manage passwords.
Does that sound stupid? I hope so, because it is. But that's exactly the type of argument that this article is making.
Frisking Grandma is another story. Air marshals, metal detectors, and reinforced cockpit doors should be sufficient to halt the vast majority of terrorist attacks. As with any system, a determined adversary will absolutely get in. That is what makes the TSA theater.
That is precisely his point. The TSA is in place not only to stop terrorist attacks (this is the false equivalency the article's author relied on), but ALSO to defend against a myriad of security risks, one of which happens to be "Terrorism".
They did, however, catch the circuitry of the blinking lights in my 4 year olds old shoes, which caused nervous looks for a few moments until one of the screeners who knew what they are looked over at the screens.
IF an attacker has the ability to attack unprotected plains and the ability to attack unprotected trains,
AND the attacker is determined to attack,
AND the attacker and defender basically care the same about successful plane attacks vs train attacks,
THEN protecting the planes alone is useless, as it just shifts attacks to trains.
For example: I think we can agree that it is pointless to put a lock on your back door, if your front door is wide open.
In other words, given a budget of X, it is better spend it to raise MINIMUM(plane security, train security) then to raise MAXIMUM(plane security, train security), since the attacker will attack your minimum. This is just minimax AI theory.
Can't hijack a train and knock down a skyscraper with it. At least not very well. Every once in a while a drunk or nutcase takes a train for a joyride (I come from a long line of railroadmen, I hear stories aside from whats in the paper). Most of them screw up the E-brake system but if its a former employee then the worst case is the switches get thrown to derail the engine before the lunatic hits anything. Its very expensive but not much of a big deal.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/12/25/transit-impostor-arre...
Since cockpits are now near-impossible to break into, why is a violent attack on an airplane worse than a violent attack in a movie theater? Probabilistically, the expected carnage in the latter case is higher.
From what else but (suitable) statistical can you draw such a conclusion?
> Does that sound stupid? I hope so, because it is.
Yes.
> But that's exactly the type of argument that this article is making.
No. The argument says that the attacks on society as a whole will likely remain constant regardless of airport security because there are many other, unsecured attack vectors.
Going back to your analogy, airport security is like allowing only passphrase-secured SSH keys of 8192 bits (say), while at the same time running a telnet daemon which gives root immediately – the latter corresponding to all the unsecured roads, malls, trains, you-name-it.
That is, if we don’t want to specifically protect airports but human lives, we have to consider not only the security gain from increased security in one area, but also whether this reduces the effectivity of attacks overall. If we want to protect one whole server and not just the SSH daemon, we have to consider not only making the SSH daemon as secure as possible but also all the other software running on this server – at which point we notice that it cannot be possibly feasible to secure this thing 100%, because nobody likes going through metal detectors to be allowed to leave their house.
OK, but this is an argument for throwing out airport security entirely. Is that what you meant to say?
If I owned an airline, sure, I'd be all about reducing airline passenger casualties by killing non-passengers somewhere else. But there's no public interest in redirecting attacks; the public interest is in reducing them.
> Look at it in digital terms--it would be like saying that we don't need to bother with strong passwords, because all those did was drive up the number of phishing attacks.
> Does that sound stupid? I hope so, because it is. But that's exactly the type of argument that this article is making.
The phenomenon of a counterbalancing reaction occurring when you make some change to a system is pretty general. How much of the desired effect (reduced casualties, or reduced breaches) of the change you made comes through, vs how much is eliminated by the reaction (increased effort directed to bombing theaters, or sending out phishing attacks), is an empirical matter; the fact that phishing attacks don't rise to nearly the level that password-guessing attacks were at before we started using stronger passwords (incidentally, we have weak passwords now, have always had weak passwords, and it is not generally felt that password strength is where we need to improve our online security), has no implications for the likely reaction of attacks to airport security.
The "type" of the argument is fine; it's broad enough that it can work in one domain and fail in another.
I'm not sure that's true though. Airplanes can be used as powerful weapons. I'd rather leave the knife depot open than the nuclear power plant, even if the number of attacks remains constant.
You cannot get to the pilots anymore using the plans used last time, so thus the exigent danger you are speaking of is gone.
The public wants to believe that when they get on an airplane, it will not crash for any reason. That is the problem that the TSA helps to address, along with the FAA, NTSB, and federal air marshals.
Policy based on unreasoning panic is nearly always bad policy. The fact that you can articulate "I'm scared!" doesn't make it good policy.
to provide security theater. It would be a heck of a lot cheaper and more effective to just play rambo movies on the inflight entertainment system.
Actually, it's not just making that argument, it's referencing studies to back it up: http://www.campbellcollaboration.org/lib/project/11/
> At the base of this argument is an implication that terrorist attacks are zero-sum: reduce them in one place, get an equivalent more in another. But that's not how security works.
The analogy you give certainly does sound stupid, but nobody said that the effect was necessarily zero sum, what the sum is is in fact an empirical matter and the research was about precisely this question. Unlike passwords, it would not be all that surprising for it to be approximately zero sum in this case. Terrorists don't sit down and think 'how can I attack an airplane', they sit and think 'how can I cause maximum damage for minimum investment'. Against that kind of opponent, there's no point choosing one tactic and fortifying it beyond reason while leaving a million other options for someone pursuing a strategy of terror. The effective money is spent on identifying the criminals and countering them rather than cherry picking one or two specific techniques. You can see this in most historical counter terrorism efforts.
Very occasionally, it's effective to identify point fixes for things that are low hanging fruit for terrorists. Reinforced cockpit doors almost certainly were part of that. Almost everything else that's been done on air travel since? Not so much.
> Second, it's pulling a subtle slight of hand--the goal of airport security is NOT to reduce terrorist casualties overall. It is to reduce violent attacks of any kind on airplanes, specifically.
That's the job of the personnel at the airports. However, we want to know whether the TSA is a program that should be funded, funded at the level it currently is, or given the powers it currently is. That is a question about the most effective way to reduce terrorist casualties overall (or arguably limited to US citizens anyway). It's no sleight of hand to be concerned about efficiency in the measures we take as a society to combat terrorism.
> First, you cannot draw such a causal conclusion from statistical data alone.
It's not clear to me why you think that the burden of proof lies in that direction. We have a problem - terrorism. We take some expensive measures - over the top checks at airports. It's not "data wonky" to demand that the programs we've put in place are able to produce real evidence of effectiveness.
That said, the fact of the matter is that the article doesn't back up its claim that airport security doesn't reduce terrorist casualties overall. Instead it states some bizarre equivalence between the decline in the number of hijackings (-6.9) and the increase in the number of instances of other kinds of terrorism (+6.8). But clearly other forms of terrorism do not cause nearly as much death as plane hijackings do, which for each one numbers in the hundreds, so we could be talking about an integer factor decrease in the number of deaths from terrorist attacks - 4x, 5x, 6x - by merely replacing them with other, less destructive terrorism. After all, the relative destructiveness of a plane hijacking is WHY terrorists do it at all. Suddenly airport security seems to look a lot more effective and a lot more worth it. So obviously they didn't mention casualties at all, since it would undermine the point they are trying to make.
Everytime someone complains about security at the airport - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3dYS7PcAG4
People are enjoying an incredible privilege being able to fly in the air.
[citation needed]
Some hijackings have caused deaths in the hundreds, namely 9/11 style suicide hijackings. However this is the exception. Even post-9/11.
According to the list of hijackings on Wikipedia, of the 21 notable hijackinged since 2000, all the non-9/11 hijackings resulted in 5 victims killed (one accidentally when storming the plane).
Note that post-9/11 there appears to have been a substantial increase in instances where the passengers have overpowered the hijackers, presumably out of fear of terrorists planning on killing them all.
But overall, even including the WTC deaths, plane hijackings does not appear to have caused more than a few tens of victims on average; exclude the WTC dead, and the number is small - most hijackings in fact appears to have ended without any deaths.
And few of the deaths that do happen appears to have been intended by the hijackers (many of the deaths have occurred due to crashes as a result of struggles, or when the planes get stormed by security forces).
We had private screening services at airports before 9/11 and people still had to arrive 1+ hours early, and still complained about the hassle of security screenings.
Anyway, the airplane bomb plots are also quite shocking in light of the TSA: There's been a number of attempts post creation of the TSA that failed only because of the ineptness of the bombers rather than because of the TSA.
But this is also a different type of plot: In most airplane bombings, the passengers have had no means of identifying the bomber prior to the explosion. Most of them have been bombs placed under seats or in cargo compartments rather than things like the "shoe bomber".
Regardless of the above, I believe that even if you count the dead from all the airplane bomb plots with the hijackings, the average number of dead will not come out all that high compared to other forms of terrorism, unlike what the earlier commenter seemed to assume. Even quite a few of the bombs ends up with no fatalities, or a low number, and only a few of the bombs that have taken out whole planes have been larger planes, most have been smaller regional flights.
If you look at Wikipedias list of terrorist incidents, and choose a few years at random, a large number of the largest indicdents you find will be bombs in busy locations, or trains - airplane hijackings or bombs with large number of fatalities are rare occurrences in comparison.
Look at the deaths per hijacking incident before 9/11 - well before, when we might glean some useful data to compare.
If we ONLY had passwords because of phishing attacks, then it wouldn't be stupid to get rid of them (based on your statement) But we have passwords for other reasons. We don't have TSA for other reasons (well some people think we do, that is to find drugs)
Frog in a slowly heating pot indeed.
Now that we've accepted the horrors of the TSA, they are working on getting us to accept the horrors of the NSA, slowly but surely, until we reach the point that the average person defends every smartphone being hacked and tracked.
But it does seem that it's a matter of degrees (literally). If sufficiently slow - very slow - the frog may in fact not notice. But it is certainly very slow. It also seems a normal frog will also apparently get bored or restless, and will jump out, not from heat, but because frogs just jump around.
Overall, it seems like a hard thing to test for properly without inflicting some constraint on the frog to encourage it to stay and die.
Just over Christmas break, we flew from the Vancouver commuter terminal to Tofino. Aside from the delays due to weather, no TSA, super friendly staff, quick mostly comfy flight.
If you were flying a UK airline they were probably counting the "fuel surcharge" as a fee, which in many cases can be the majority of the ticket. I just priced up the cheapest SFO-LHR return on Virgin next month, it came in at $1000, with $458 being "carrier imposed surcharges", counted as fees.
Except they're not fees at all, it's the 'fuel surcharge'. Actual taxes and fees were $233, or 23%. Your airline should have given you a link to the line by line breakdown of every item ($5 custom fee, $2.50 TSA fee, etc) when you bought the ticket.
On a related note, if you're flying from SFO you're not actually interacting with the TSA itself at all, San Francisco is one of the few airports that contracts out security screening to a TSA-approved company (some people think SFO has more 'friendly' security screening because of it, I haven't really noticed).
One way my wife and I have helped deal with some of the line hassle -- GOES (for coming back into the country), Clear (had it before PreCheck came about and will reevaluate), and now PreCheck (GOES helped with this).
I've heard some mention that as more and more people become PreCheck eligible, that will become the norm rather than the exception. We shall see.
With regard to SFO not being TSA, I'm aware of this and generally have found them much more efficient than the TSA. Probably my best TSA experiences have been in Seattle (recently) and Kona, friendly and generally laughing. Worst opt out experience was actually SFO w/ a manager who took exception to anyone opting out and waited 10+ min before calling someone over -- "The delay is to encourage you to go through the machines".
Make it a law or greatly encourage airlines to itemize the TSA inspection fee. Also list the prescreening fee for when they profile all your data before you even get to the airport.
What's crazy is people would be upset about the fee and not the procedure itself.
Took 5 seconds to find.
A tax return is used to provide your income information to the government. If you want information about how government monies are being spent, you can look it up. This information is freely available online. The tax return is not the proper place for this information, as not all government monies arise from income taxes.
Even if a bomb is brought on board we would never give control of a plan to hijackers since we now know it may be used as a giant missile, not just an escape vehicle.
Yes, and they've all failed. That means we have at least enough security, and we should start thinking about scaling it back.
If a terrorist could bring down a plane by clicking a button on a website, we would see hundreds of planes downed every day.
If it takes a day of preparation, we'd see perhaps a dozen per day.
If it takes a week, we would see another order of magnitude fewer.
If it takes a year of training and preparation by one or more high IQ individuals with several hundred thousand dollars, we'd see almost none. This is why we haven't seen any more 9/11 style attacks even though they were so amazingly effective as a terrorist tool: it's become sufficiently difficult to pull them off after counterterrorism efforts were amped up.
In other words: criminals can still break into my car if they really tried, but I still lock my car doors.
It was sufficiently difficult even before security theater and airline liability reduction measures were ramped up, which is why we didn't see 9/11 style attacks before 9/11.
There is no more incentive for someone looking to cause mayhem to blow up a plane than there is to blow up a shopping mall or any other building with more than ~180 people inside (the approximate number of seats in a 747).
Mainly, though, people feel more vulnerable in a plane, so an aircraft bombing is higher impact.
> If it takes a day of preparation, we'd see perhaps a dozen per day.
Nope. People are deterred by socialization and innate biology. I could take a gasoline bomb to a nearby school or church and kill hundreds of people within the week, for little expense and a good chance of getting off scot free. So could most people. It is not difficulty or risk that prevent mass killings.
A: the number of people radicalized into anti-American terrorists
B: the opportunity that As have to cause damage
I suspect A went up in the late nineties and continues to be high-ish today. B went up with OBL and the Saudis funding the game, but has gone down post-9/11 for a variety of reasons, including decreased Saudi bankrolls, increased airport and aircraft security, tighter restrictions on student visas, and a weakened Al Qaeda.
I for one kind of like the fact they have all failed. I would like to keep this track record up since I spend a lot of time on planes. Just my 2c.
I think we're starting to see some of that sort of benchmarking taking place with the TSA, so that's good, but the incentives don't seem like they're lined up properly for the bureaucracy to shrink significantly, regardless of the true level of risk.
If your hypothetical heroku scenario were a government project, they'd be proposing a "conservative" increase to 23 dynos for next year.
[0]: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/excess_automo...
The excuse for the airplane security has been that they can use the plane as a missile. If this is no longer the case, than planes lose their special status as something that needs to be extra protected. If we feel safe getting on a bus without going through a metal detector, a plane should be no different.
Yes, people can do us harm at any time. They could shoot us, bomb us, stab us, burn us with acid, etc. We accept those risks every day, and almost all of us get through life without those things happening to us. That is because the number of people who want to do bad things to us isn't nearly as great as some would have us believe. We don't need more screening to protect us from very unlikely threats.
What about the one that happened yesterday?
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/killed-blast-s...
If you want to argue that near-complete security is infeasible, you're probably better served by acknowledging that attacks on something as pervasive and porous as a bus system are a real possibility. So that's why I thought it was necessary to challenge you on that point.
It wasn't until a hijacked plane threatened to hit a Tennessee nuclear power plant that their thinking changed. No longer was it just the plane that was a hostage, but potentially a much bigger area, allowing for much bigger demands ($2Mil, to be exact). [1]
The next year afterwards, though? Flying was up 15%. Turns out people liked not getting hijacked, and were willing to trade a (minimal) security check for that. Of course, the TSA is a much bigger beast today.
But they were relying on statistics I suppose.
In the old days, a simple note or declarative statement to the effect that the terrorist had a bomb and would set it off would have been enough to get the pilots to open a locked and secured door.
We required the certitude that opening the door was worse than leaving the door locked and risking the chance that the terrorist may be telling the truth.
It's as if after implementing all this theater, imposing myriads of restrictions, that they realized it was all ineffective, and now they're reframing the entire situation by acting as if they're catering to customers by offering a program that reverts things to how they were a little over a decade ago, but now for a fee.
a.k.a. the "sir we assure you that this is a completely random check" racial/gender/economic profiling
The TSA attendant, a Good Ol' Boy, asked "Do y'all have the Pre?"
I said I didn't know what it was. He cracked a grin and said "It don't matter, we don' got it anyhow". We then had a friendly chat about life in Australia before he waved me through.
Why? Because of a statement I've seen attributed to Karl Denninger[0]: "One man's waste, fraud, abuse, scam, and theft is another man's paycheck."
If there were no need for TSA-compliant messenger bags, Timbuk2 would likely see a drop in revenues. If there were no TSA, a whole bunch of people employed as TSA agents would be out of work. I'd expect everyone making money off the current system of security theater to fight tooth and nail to preserve the money they're making.
[0] See e.g. http://www.market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=3149840
I go through the TSA screening several times a month, and while I don't appreciate the invasion of privacy, it isn't really that big of a pain in the ass to stand in line for a few minutes and put all your bags through the scanner.
It was a weird time. Most young people either smoked pot or knew somebody who did. There wasn't much odd about them, although we were told that smoking pot was terrible. On the street, however, it was fairly obvious that this was an overreaction. To hear some folks talk, there was little difference between heroin and pot. That was obviously not true.
It took 50 years for common sense to get back into the system, and even now, when the change is starting, it might be another 10 or 20 years to fully reverse pot laws. I'm not a pot user, but I find this slowness-to-adapt to common sense amazing.
Unfortunately, the system isn't just glacial in fixing bad laws -- it's fairly quick to add new bad laws as we go along. TSA is the case in point. Just like the pot laws, we're constantly told that there is a terrible danger out there that we need protection from, even though it's blatantly obvious that this is an overreaction and power grab. Nobody seems to be driving the bus.
So I guess we'll go through 50 years of increasing TSA "supervision" of travel until we see some kind of sanity? And how many TSAs will we have by then? It's depressing to think about.
And yet this combination was effective in limiting the number of casualties in the recent Volgograd train station bombing. I suspect the amount of Russian editorializing over these security procedures will soon decrease.
Fortunately, while civilian memory is short, government institutional memory is long.
It just shifted the site of the attack to a new bottleneck: where everyone is in line to go through the metal detector (which many people also have pointed out is a ripe target for an attack in the post-TSA US).
Suicide bombings in the middle east over the last 10 years, in comparison, have about a 1:3 ratio of bomber to victims. That's a mean, but the outliers tend to barely break 20. So it's difficult to believe that number was reduced by a large amount.
Yes they did, but according to this article they claim all sorts of things, much of which is not true:
http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/30/powerlessness-a...
Such as the identity of the bomber (she later posted on her FB page, "Nope, I'm still alive!").
Not that I'm trying to imply that Russian officials are particularly different in this regard!
http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-reasons-tsa-sucks-a-security-e...
(yeah I know it is a cracked article, but this time it is different)
Not all "security measures" are created equal. Reinforced cockpit doors and curb-stomping want-to-be hijackers are both effective security measures, as were metal detectors.
Those are not the security measures that critics of the TSA are criticizing.
That's like saying "all the army has done is ensure that someday an enemy will attack with weapons so devastating that the entire country will be destroyed in one foul swoop."
- Typically they still want you there 30 mins early to check-in and load the baggage.
- The pilot to passenger ratio makes them very expensive. A 20 minute flight for me is costlier than a 5 hour one to a major hub. I rarely pay for these out of my own pocket.
- Being a smaller operation your pilot can be very young and inexperienced.
- These planes are very small and at times get uncomfortably hot in the summer.
- The majority of crashes around here are from similarly sized aircraft. Always an uncomfortable reminder of what can go wrong.
- Flying in any kind of adverse weather can honestly be pretty terrifying in a smaller plane. If your lucky they'll delay or cancel it altogether.
- Sometimes your pilot will leave the window open and a wasp will fly in prior to take off. Sitting in the co-pilot seat in a cramped plane, it may be up to you to kill it :)
Overall I prefer the smaller flights in the summer, but I'll take the slow security for the safety of the bigger plane in winter.
After 9/11, they were able to convince us that we NEED to be felt up by strangers at the airport and that we NEED to invade a country and that ITS OKAY to just kill thousands and thousands of civilians "by accident" all in the name of National Security and when some civilians try and kick out these strangers that invaded their country and killed their family, they're the nut jobs, they're the bad people, they're the real terrorists.
I honestly think the US is a bigger terrorist that Osama ever was. Now, after 9/11 people we're living our normal lives normally; while in Afganistan, families everyday are terrorized, scared, afraid that this might be their last day. Today might be the day their father doesn't come back. Today might be the last day they see each other.
Airplane hijackings are actually much more common than most people think. From 1988-1997, there were about 18 airplane hijackings per year, down from the peak of 82 in 1969: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking. Interesting to read the history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings#196....
In the old days, once didn't actually require a weapon to hijack a plane. Merely the claim of possessing a weapon was sufficient.
Now, if we as this article suggests remove all security to get on flights. As someone planning such an incident, i.e. pull out a gun or other random acts of terror; It would follow that getting on a flight to do such a thing would be the best move. You literally have access to 200+ people with no where to run in a confined area, with no security. The reason flights are given security vs other places such as theaters etc is not some random act. It is cause of the specific threats that are posed by hijacked flights/weapons on flights that are fundamentally different from other locations.
(How fast would the cops get to someone who starts firing at people in any city with such high population density?, now compare that with what happens in a flight, you have no options, and once it starts you practically write off the people who are on the flight because you have no chance of saving them)
All big jets have fly-by-wire systems that could easily be remotely commanded. There's no reason why hijackers should be given control of the aircraft; indeed at this point the planes themselves could probably be programmed to refuse to point at the ground in urban areas outside of a glide path.
That leaves them with the option of blowing up the aircraft at inconvenient places. That's a significantly tough and narrow plan of attack.
we just had the 25 year anniversary of Lockerbie. that bomb not only killed all on board the plane, but a lot of people on the ground. no need to hijack.
and we now have a lot of suicide bombers, see just the last two days on Volgograd.
have the Israelis scaled down their anti-bomb detection measures? no? then neither should the west.
i fly a lot, internationally. i do not mind the checkpoints. i mind dying pre-maturely in a fireball.
I'd rather take my shoes off and have 2+ jet engines than get in an 8-seater commuter plane.
Saying that TSA security doesn't reduce terrorism risk is a reasonable argument (although I think it's wrong; consider the possibility of gun-toting yahoos wanting to be "safe" with "self-defense" and blowing a hole in the fuselage because they saw a suspicious brown person). But politically, saying to give up TSA security because it doesn't work is basically impossible. Voters will demand that politicians do something about the threat of terrorism.
Now, they can't stop it without looking "soft on terror". This is how bureaucracy goes awry (see "War on Drugs" for another example).
Lets try a Hollywood analogy. The execs tell the director to make a formulaic teen comedy. How long would a film director last if he replied, F those guys I'm making a documentary about the Soviet Gulag system and they're gonna like it because its for their own good.
The discussion is being carefully controlled by those in power to make sure that no one steps out of line and considers, maybe just for an instant, that possibly there could exist a form of expensive meaningless security theater that doesn't involve brutalizing the population.
No, they're subjecting us to the TSA for a reason that isn't security theater.
Stupidity, not malice.
The TSA basically exists to make Michael Chertoff and Dick Cheney very, very rich. It would be interesting to see how much they raked in from this, compared with, say, Bo Xilai or Wen Jiabiao.
Now I'll grant you if you're coming from Ramallah and you're flying to Pakistan through Turkey and Dubai you should probably give yourself and extra hour or two, but as long as have no nefarious motives and tell the truth you will be on your way. But this is true regardless of the color of your skin or religious beliefs. I have a friend who was doing something like that and he's white, very clearly Jewish and religious. (Often those stories you hear of the 3 hour long interrogations are because the dude was/is an active participant on the rock throwing attacks and they have pictures of him that he is unaware of...)
In fact I flew from South Africa to Europe 4 or 5 years back (in a large Airbus). No metal detector, no scanners, no taking-shoes-or-belt-of, just the quick scan of the carry on. Took 2 minutes, and I did not feel unsafe in any way.
911 cannot be repeated (as pointed out many times before). The TSA checks are a theater and everybody knows it.
so in other words, heightened airport security has worked.
hehe. hijinking-heavy.
In their defense: I tend to do well with these kinds of situations. Exuding a combination of "not criminal" and "don't mess with me" does wonders.
The question I have for people is why they bother traveling so much nowadays. Maybe the experience of le rive gauche cannot be replicated over the internet -- but a lot of travel (especially business) seems to be a bit of showmanship itself. You know, show up and impress the client with a little face-to-face. Or let the striking factory workers know who's boss. Whatever.
What makes me laugh even harder than the deaths of old habits such as flying hither and yon are people who distinguish between security and the illusion of security. Isn't security itself a feeling? And what makes jittery fliers feel safer than a bunch of goons rifling through one's possessions? Isn't that the essence of "stepping up security"?
Of course, you'll be much more limited by weather than a transport-class aircraft.
I guess I also need to point out that I didn't die on that trip. Not even once.
"Is eliminating airport security politically untenable? Maybe"
"Would this increase hijacking? Probably."
LOL
And TSA is a big business.
'nuff said.