Head of T.S.A. Out After Tests Reveal Flaws
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I used to fly twice a week, and one time one of the screeners shoved a lighter in my shoe as it was going onto the belt. I started yelling at him and he turned to me with the "shush" gesture, and whispered that he was testing the screener to see if he'd catch it.
As a dark-skinned man I did not want to participate in this exercise so I started loudly shouting "He put a lighter in my shoe, does everyone see this?" The other passengers in the line murmured their agreement, the "tester" seemed miffed, and I kept loudly pronouncing the fact that I was not responsible for the lighter in my shoe.
Sitting six feet away from my loud rant, the screener still missed it.
Sadly, the response will probably be an increase in funding, longer lines, doubling down on groping and more naked pictures.
Over all this time, it has found and took away snow globes, nail clippers, water bottles, delayed lots of people, xrayed them and so on. Sure it also provided employment for many, who might have a hard time finding any. All those things it is has done. But it hasn't done its main job. FBI might have. Maybe CIA. Passengers, pilots and flight attendants sure did.
Certainly, there were some. But a) they didn't cause us to create the TSA anyway, b) they often involved bombs in luggage which isn't what we're talking about here, c) they usually weren't in the US anyway, and d) they were rare in any case. Even if the TSA were effective -- and it's clearly laughable -- it would still be massive overreaction to a very rare event.
For a while I thought that the biggest reason to not get into hysteria over security measures was that passengers would from then on see a hijacker as likely to kill them, and so taking control of a plane would get drastically harder either way.
I was wrong - apart from the odd inept wannabe bomber (the "shoe bomber" for example), passengers generally don't overpower hijackers.
Yet most passengers still survive hijackings, because just as before 9/11 most hijackers have no interest in committing suicide.
Things might be different if a bunch of muslims tried to hijack another plane in a major US city, or headed for one, but that scenario was an aberration when it happened, and still is.
9/11 is noteworthy for how little it changed hijackings despite what a major event it was: It didn't spawn a long range of copycats. It didn't cause passengers to risk their lives to stop future hijackers. It didn't cause any large drop in hijackings as a result of new security measures. It didn't cause any large increase in hijackings by "inspiring" others.
sad part is, and this is subjective but for me very visible pattern, the immediate seizure of this opportunity to radicalize/permanently install of fear into US population, pushing for surveillance policies, unjustified wars, mass killings of civilians for money&power equation (Iraq/Afghanistan, you can call it how you like it, I call it like this since it's pretty damn obvious). And american society swallowed this as a whole, without questions, even proudly.
14 years rewind, now look at current situation...
Like most people pontificating/bitching about the TSA I of course have zero legit expertise in airport security, but I do have a bit of first hand experience at Ben Gurion airport in Israel where the threat level is generally pretty high.
The first thing you notice is that the security people always look like they are playing on game day. Unlike joe-blow TSA agent, these folks are alert, speak multiple languages, and likely get some specialized training to detect if someone is lying or was tricked/coerced into carrying a bomb.
It's weird-- the vibe is at times both more tense and also more relaxed than an American airport. The security people at Ben Gurion seem less like bureaucrats following procedures and more like smart people empowered to exercise their judgement (ex grandma isn't getting yanked out of line.)
Once you're in, you get asked some almost chit-chatty questions about what you're up to while they review your travel documents but the whole time it also feels like you're talking to an observant doctor or physician examining you for symptoms of an illness. If you "pass" their filter you're done & on your way in quite literally a minute or two (and it being Israel there's naturally some controversy about who gets selected for "extra" scrutiny and why.)
I've read that the problem in the US is that it's too big to cost-effectively implement a system like this everywhere and that's probably true. But maybe at least at the big/major airports there ought to be some equivalent specially-trained "hunters" who know their stuff.
It's a good thing that the agency head resigned because the TSA flunked a practice test instead of the real thing.
I doubt that is true, although I haven't seen any evidence either way. I guess it stops people indirectly, as any would-be terrorist has to be more creative, and in so doing probably alerts security authorities in other ways.
We all hate airport security, but without hard facts, it's very difficult to work out what you would use instead of TSA-style security.
There's without doubt a lot of people who've already done the "difficult working out", and not all of them ended up with "The TSA", or even anything vaguely similar.
(Can I point out that from outside the USA, while I greatly admire things about your civil liberties - it _astounds_ me that those same people put up with the TSA. I have no choice, the privilege of visiting requires it, but pornoscanners and gropings for domestic travel, and Kafka-esque no-fly lists? I can't quite understand how "the land of the free" ended up there...)
That's not TSA so much - on the contrary, TSA workers are, nearly without exception, pretty upbeat, efficient people enforcing rules they know are kind of silly. But Homeland Security as a whole is just one mistake after another, old-school Stalinist wannabes trying to bring back the good old Cold War gravy train.
Entering Europe, on the other hand? Nobody cares. Hi, you're here, need a taxi? Just the way America used to be.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/tsa-expands-duties-beyo...
While we do not have admission security to a mall like a plane the idea you are not watched in the mall and that there aren't guards around is a bit far fetched. You aren't searched unless you enter a store which has a bag policy because of a theft issue.
As for buses and trains, I am quite sure there are guards and cameras, just no oppressive searching of luggage or your person.
Once they can make it like "The Running Man" portrayed I won't have much of a problem with it but I don't think the tech is quite there yet
A passenger plane carrying 1/2 of its fuel capacity damaged the Pentagon. 2 passenger planes carrying 1/2 their fuel capacity obliterated the WTC towers. This says more about the design of the towers, and resulting engineering shortcuts, than it does about the planes themselves. .
Even including the 9/11 hijackings, your odds of surviving a plane hijacking if you stay down and don't antagonise the hijackers are very good as most of them have goals that does not involve killing themselves or the planets unless absolutely necessary.
However, I accept your point that given the cost and inconvenience, it would be great if the TSA actually did notice.
The police report on crime too - why should those organizations be exempt from that?
The usual response is to keep repeating the same mantras to downplay the severity of these intrustions, not to substantiate (or worse, quantify) any of the perceived threats.
I don't understand this. As the majority of the intelligent people I talk to seem to understand that the TSA is essentially theatre, why seek to prove that fact to the rest of the population? Are these organizations actually buying what they're selling?
I guess I just figured all these agents knew they didn't really serve any practical purpose other than keeping people feeling "better".
Hanlon's Razor is useful here. I believe most people out there are just trying to do their job as well as they can and make a living. They aren't thinking about the bigger picture, and it's easy for many of them to think their jobs have meaning. In fact, I think that's a requirement for not getting depressed.
No need to demean anyone. Most of the intelligent people I know don't even know what security theatre is when I discuss it with them. I think people who have concerns about security theatre are in the minority, judging from my own sampling. I haven't seen any official studies on the question as to how many people even understand or have heard of the term security theatre. I would love to review them if the studies exist.
However, after watching those PBS Frotline documentaries "Top Secret America" and seeing that Lindsay Graham speech this morning, it's clear to me that many of the people who head these agencies are paranoid and delusional. I don't know how they keep amassing so much power and influence.
To be fair, I'm 100% sure of the fact that it is theater, but I still chat up the agent and thank them for their hard work. It makes my time in line go faster as I'm asking for an opt-out.
So presumably they feel they should at least be able to detect the threats tested against.
the laws that Obama and the majority whip called to be passed, weren't. Now they will have to dismantle several parts of TSA and NSA.
This is just to say "I didn't even want it anyway"
Most people must believe that it "feels safer" when the TSA is seemingly "checking everything". And would probably be "worried" if tomorrow the TSA didn't exist anymore, even if that fear is irrational in this context considering the facts that the TSA is already useless.
Sadly this is pretty much how all government works, they think they are the smartest people they know and everyone else just needs to shut up and do what they are told. When presented contrary evidence the rebuttal will be "you don't know the big picture" and when irrefutable evidence is provided a sacrificial lamb or two is trotted out under the idea "it was really just one person" and they continue doing what they do
1. accumulate power
2. diffuse responsibility
Regarding the latter, occasionally the system build up too much responsibility which needs to be released to maintain stability. This is solved by picking an individual of power equal to the build up responsibility that needs to be released and punishing that individual by removal of all their individual power. Thus the overall system is restored to balance and only the individual, easily replaced, suffers.
It happened here, and I've seen it happen from the lowest to the highest levels of power in the government.
- all of the FBI forensic hair matches of the past two decades were faked
- none of the NSA programs they claim keep us safe have been shown to stop a single terrorist attack
- no executives from the large banks that laundered billions money for mexican drug lords or conspired to rig LIBOR and exchange rates, and plead guilty, went to jail or faced criminal charges
- you are more likely to drown in your bathtub than be killed by a terrorist
please stop taking the federal government seriously until they stop with all this nonsense
Although no people are killed, the financial damage done and the suffering inflicted on our population is gigantic.
What possible context could make a failure rate of over 95% look good?
It would be incredibly easy to have some flat-rate boxes and charge 2x what the post office charges. Given how many items they confiscate it's probably a decent revenue source!
At least 22 airports have this (including Cleveland).
Political systems of people exist for political reasons. So, of course, if the entire effort looks useless, it can't be that the effort itself is idiotic. Nope. The real crime here is that somebody made us look bad. In a political system, this is the ultimate crime.
So we fire the head honcho and bring in a new one. Cue up lots of speeches about how seriously we take all of this and how some new regime will make a huge difference over the last one.
The TSA needs to be abolished. Immediately. There are viable and reasonable replacement options. Even if you don't care about the money and prestige we've lost, we can't keep sinking money down a hole on security theater when the hole is endless.
Sure we can. It's a terrible idea, but our capacity to produce more value to sink into the hole is also endless.
His predecessor left in October 2014 after serving in the post since 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/tsa-director-who-tighte...
I guess someone had to take the fall here, but it makes the whole thing seem even more farcical to fire this guy.
Would it cost too much to do this in the USA?
I always find the TSA employees to be polite and I don't blame the shortcomings of TSA on the people working at the airports. They just need better procedures, and that is a TSA Corporation issue.