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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

The sane reponse should probably be: "TSA doesn't work. It has never stopped a single red handed bomber in all these years. It has to be reduced and defunded."

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.

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We have this weird idea in the US that the world changed fundamentally on 9/11/2001. But it didn't, really; the risk of terrorist attacks didn't skyrocket just because one happened. That doesn't really even make sense. It's us that changed. With that in mind, one question to have is, if the TSA stops terrorist attacks, where were all the attacks before 2001?

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.

yeah, for the most of the world (read - outside US, roughly 95% of mankind), 9/11 isn't anything significant - vast amounts of people die/are murdered all around the world, all the time, and very few really care.

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...

The interesting thing is, contrary to what I expected would happen, hijackings still "work". As in: Plane hijackers succeed at taking control of planes about as often as before, in general without passengers risking their lives to overpower them.

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.

I wouldn't want to trust 3/4 of the TSA folks I've encountered to run a cat house let alone exercise their independent judgement when it came to my safety or the safety of my friends and family getting on an airplane. While this isn't very polite, this screwup pretty clearly indicates that the TSA isn't exactly made up of "A-players."

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.

> It has never stopped a single red handed bomber in all these years.

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.

Well, they don't have to be that creative, if 67 out of 70 attempts succeeded.

We don't know what the attempts were, so we can't know if it requires real creativity and ingenuity or not.

There were previous reports that included very detailed descriptions, e.g. [0] from 2008. Some will probably be published this year too.

[0] http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/01/28/tsa.bombtest/

To get terrorists to be more creative, you have to convince them that the TSA would notice so it's not worth trying to walk through security with a kalashnikov in your hand luggage.

However, I accept your point that given the cost and inconvenience, it would be great if the TSA actually did notice.

One could, for example, take a look at other countries that does not have the same level of security theatre. I have no data obviously (this being the Internet and all) but I wouldn't be surprised to see that there is no measurable difference between countries that have a more sane approach to security and the ones that follow the US lead with the security theatre.

Not all countries have the same risk profile

The US doesn't necessarily have the risk profile that it's made out to have.

Nor does it have the same risk profile as say Ireland or Iceland. Whether its over blown is a different debate and a much harder one to quantify.

what risk profile? The administration has never presented a credible risk profile to justify these intrusions, has it?

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.

There are a couple of hundred countries on the world that manage to run airports without the TSA being there.

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...)

While the other countries don't have TSA most other countries have their own security theater.

Not like the TSA they don't. I'm an American with a Hungarian wife and we travel a lot. For the last ten years or so, every year entering the United States has been more and more like entering an armed camp. Really it's a whole lot like Eastern Europe used to be - the looks of suspicion, the whole "why did you even leave?" attitude.

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.

I feel ya. I'm an American citizen based in Eastern Europe (grew up in Milwaukee, let's say I don't pose an enormous "presence" or have much of an accent). Last time I came into Washington DC the border guide asked me "how long are you staying?" I very desperately wanted to just say "as long as I want."

Eeyowtch.

If the TSA or Homeland Security doesn't report on how many terrorist attacks their invasive measures have stopped, then nobody will believe terrorism in the US is still a threat - and they will call for the disbandment of the TSA, cut in funding to Homeland Security and the other agencies like the NSA, etcetera.

The police report on crime too - why should those organizations be exempt from that?

How about nothing? We don't have security getting on a bus, we don't have security getting on a train, entering a mall, and barely have it entering a stadium. Why do we need it getting on a plane?

What country are you in? We (china) have security getting on the subway and trains, Thailand and phillipines have security going into malls.

He's in the US, which is where the TSA is generally present.

But he didn't mention the TSA specifically in his post. Anyways, if you look outside the USA for a saner system, you'll be quite disappointed.

Because, compared to those other vehicles, the difference between a plane and a guided missile is small.

Yet there's been no epidemic in using planes as guided missiles, despite a long string of hijackings after 9/11.

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.

A guided missile is a an airframe packed with high explosives designed to destroy heavily fortified buildings and vehicles. A passenger plane is a lightweight airframe designed to carry people, cargo, and fuel. Besides the fact they both fly it is a world of difference.

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. .

You bet we do. Trains, buses, stadiums, everything. Think of the upside: If you ever thought it might be interesting to visit a police state, traveling there costs a lot less than it used to.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/tsa-expands-duties-beyo...

well we just need to wait until the first terrorist does strike one of those targets and I am quite sure Homeland Security will step in and correct the short fall.

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

Well given the criticism if they actually stopped someone credible you betcha they'd blow the trumpet all over the news patting themselves on the back.

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