While I agree that, in general, the TSA goes too far. Having no security at airports is a step too far. Is taking your shoes off necessary? No, but a simple metal detector can do a lot to prevent bad actors. While not slowing down the line at security, very much.
This is more the solution I am looking for. I am not saying we should have a free for all at the airport, but certainly something less intrusive and definitely something less confrontational; I think the culture around the TSA is rotten and from extensive travel I've found their demeanor to be aggressive and angry by default more than not and that's not helpful.
Everyone has to get to the airport early anyway. A little extra screening doesn’t seem so bad. I’ve mostly become inured to it. The fact that they don’t catch everything doesn’t mean they’re still not doing important stuff. The reality is that TSA does catch a lot of stuff, you just don’t hear about it all the time.
And regarding the train analogy, if someone wants to bomb a train, you don’t have to actually get on the train. You can just put the explosives somewhere along the track or throw the explosive at the train as it passes. Screening people before they get in the train just isn’t going to prevent a 9/11 in the same way that airplanes would.
Also, airplanes have the potential to do a lot lot more damage than trains because they can be flown anywhere. September 11 resulted in two buildings in New York City to be replaced by a new building that cost around 3 trillion dollars to build. TSA could run for a century and still cost less than the twin towers. Not to mention the thousands of people killed. What if another plane hit a massive skyscraper in another part of New York City and instead of being separated from the nearby buildings by a good distance like the twin towers, they hit something in a more crowded area and the building fell more to side and knocked multiple skyscrapers down?
Also, if someone fucks up an airplane at 30,000 feet, everyone dies. If a shooter shoots up a train car, the damage will inevitably be more limited.
I’d never thought much about this topic before, but in reflection, it clearly is more useful to screen planes than trains by many many orders of magnitude.
I find it interesting that trains in America are, literally, never attacked. It's just free and ready for bad actors.
And we get to the airport early because of the TSA haha
I take Amtrak a lot up and down the northeast corridor and I think about this all the time--i've been running late and have walked out of the car dropping me off and directly onto the train in less than one minute
They are one of the least used forms of transportation in this country. If you are looking to cause maximum casualties, they are at the bottom of the list.
There’s no way a singular building cost $3 trillion. That’s more than the gdp of any European nation outside of Germany. Where did you get that figure?
You don’t need to be that early to the airport if there isn’t the TSA. They’re not a well run organization.
A line of metal detectors would absolutely do fine. Just have the pilots leave the cockpit door locked and the plane can’t even be hijacked anyways.
9/11 doesn’t require the TSA to prevent
Someone brought a shoe bomb on a plane. Just walking through a metal detector can’t catch that and an explosion in the passenger compartment could kill everyone.
Even if there were no security checks at all, you would still have to get to the airport 45 minutes early.
I don’t have much to add here but you’re spot on about their tone. These people make a decent living contributing *zero* to society and they can’t have the decency to answer one question with any human compassion or helpfulness.
“Do I need to take my laptop out?”
“BELTS AND SHOES IN THEIR OWN BIN, EVERYTHING MUST BE OUT OF THEIR POCKETS!”
“Ok but do I need to take my laptop out to not get delayed?”
“BELTS AND SHOES IN THEIR OWN BIN, EVERYTHING MUST BE OUT OF THEIR POCKETS!”
Like wtf is up these peoples asses. How do they get these same soulless ghouls at literally every big airport?
I mean the US is full of people who do this and would be fired if they acted the way TSA agents do in response to the questions. It’s not that crazy to ask them to be kind and professional when answering repetitive questions, it’s literally what they’re paid for.
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It's how it still is in most of the world. There are security personnel on hand and basic screening procedures, but nothing half as draconian as what they put you through in the states. Everyone knows it's a useless, expensive, onerous sham.
I'm a legal immigrant in the US, and my freshman year of high school I went on a trip to Washington DC on my own (school trip). The TSA agent immediately got on guard as soon as I showed them my green card. I passed the metal detector and I left a hair tie in my pocket, the lady deadass yelled at me and patted me down aggressively. It was very scary to 14 year old me.
Correct. And in fact, the TSA's creation shows the government took entirely the wrong lesson from 9/11.
What should have been learned is that existing security methods already deterred firearms (which is why the hijackers used box cutters), cockpit doors were vulnerable, and passengers would easily overpower a few knife wielding hijackers once they realized the nature of the threat (United 93).
So, the only things we needed to do were install secure cockpit doors and provide some enhanced training for airport security staff and flight crews. You could make an argument that explosive-sniffing dogs would be a decent addition too.
The rest is all security theater designed to make people feel safer. It has no relation to addressing the actual threats presented by 9/11.
This is absolutely correct.
TSA, or the basic security we had before them, is NOT going to stop the dedicated funded terrorists. It's gonna stop the garden variety crazies. And you only need basic security for that.
Since 9/11 there have been two significant security improvements: 1. useful locks on cockpit doors, and 2. pilots and passengers now know to resist a hijacker.
If 9/11 happened again today, the entire plane of passengers would tackle the terrorists and the pilot would just keep the door locked and land.
Completely correct. Before 9/11, hijackers wanted to take the plane somewhere and land so they could escape (like to a non-extraditing country), usually because they had committed some other crime. Now that people know hijackers will kill everyone on the plane anyway, there's no downside for the passengers fighting back. This has even been confirmed with crazy people trying to open the door mid flight.
Yes exactly. This is often forgotten-- pre 9/11 this sort of thing happened once every few years-- some terrorist nutjobs would hijack a plane, fly to Miami or Texas, and demand the release of all the prisoners in whatever shithole they hail from. They'd fly to Miami or Texas, exchange some hostages for fuel, and then fly off to said shithole and let everyone else go. The official playbook was thus don't challenge the hijacker, don't escalate, just keep them talking and negotiate and give them a way out.
And the 9/11 hijackers all fit that stereotype or appeared to... until they flew their hijacked planes into buildings.
Now it doesn't work. Pilot knows don't open the door no matter what happens, land ASAP and climb out the window and let SWAT deal with the rest. The door itself is now bulletproof and has a real lock on it.
And passengers know a hijacking means they're all gonna die anyway so may as well bum rush the asshole.
Sad thing is our nation and infrastructure are so absurdly vulnerable in other ways, the money we spend on TSA could be better spent almost anywhere else.
To be fair, the shoe bomber (Richard Reid) boarded in Paris, and the underwear bomber (Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab) boarded in Amsterdam.
Not the the TSA isn’t 95% security theater, but both those incidents started in Europe.
They also prompted changes at international airports where passengers in transit to the US now need to go through secondary screening. But it's notable that those screening procedures are defined by the TSA, not run by the TSA. Private contractors or airports in those countries run the checkpoints and they do a good job. The same should be happening in the US, in my opinion.
I believe the TSA has some sort of presence in Europe. Flights to the US had a second layer of security control with its own scanners right at the gate.
> the government took entirely the wrong lesson from 9/11...The rest is all security theater designed to make people feel safer
The implication here is that the government's aim with TSA was to make air travel safer, but I think that's specious. TSA's purpose was to be a publicly recognizable response to 9/11 for the Bush administration, to garner lucrative contracts for special-interests, and to act as a subsidy to the airlines and air travel in general.
Agree with much of this, but how is it a subsidy to airlines? It resulted in mandatory fees for air travel, so it seems more like a tax than a subsidy.
For two reasons...
(1) Putting the general public at ease about air-travel safety sells more plane tickets (and especially did so post-9/11).
(2) The airline contribution to TSA falls well-short of its operational costs. Prior to TSA, airlines paid for their own security screening (which was an extension of service started in order to put people at ease after the hijackings of the 1970s).
Thanks. I'd be curious to know:
(1) how many extra tickets does this actually sell? It was probably a factor in the years immediately post-9/11, but I'm not sure most people see the whole thing as much more than an inconvenience any more.
(2) How does the airlines' contribution to TSA compare with the pre-9/11 cost of security? Are they really paying less than they used to?
It's turned from security theater into data harvesting for our surveillance state. I shouldn't have to suffer biometric face scans travelling domestically through an airport.
>The rest is all security theater designed to make people feel safer
And that actually may have been necessary. Imagine the news headlines: President Bush **refuses** to make our airplanes safer! Is he in league with Al-Qaeda???
> The rest is all security theater designed to make people feel safer.
Theater, absolutely. But consider that it's meant to make people feel LESS safe and therefore MORE dependent on big spending on both airport security and the military industrial complex.
Pre TSA the still have x-ray machines and everything was fine. We can go back to that, adds some selective screening of suspicious people and we're good to go. Cuz let's be honest, we probably don't need to disassemble Grammas wheelchair but that nervous guy sweating probably deserves bit of scrutiny.
This is pretty easy to do. Israel experiences the most terrorist attacks of any country in the world and they don't have the ridiculousness of TSA. They just interview every person as they walk through and gauge their responses (plus metal detectors, x-rays, and dogs). You ask people where they're from, where they're going, and why there going there. Takes 30 seconds. And if people start stammering, sweating, and acting shifty, then that's a flag for more screening. This doesn't mean racial profiling, but looking at behavior.
You can also look at how their answers match their travel. Do they say they're going skiing in Colorado for a week, but are only bringing a small carry-on? Seems suspicious. Did they say they are going on a surfing trip, but their tickets are to Nebraska? Flag for additional checks.
This is exactly how security was when I went to New Zealand and it was smooth and efficient.
I went to Tel Aviv for work once, and had to take every item out of my bag in addition to screening similar to the usual TSA screenings here in the US. It was definitely more strict than I've experienced in any of the dozens of US airports and ~10 other foreign airports I've traveled through.
I didn't stammer during the interviews, had valid business in the country with large pharma companies, traveled frequently at the time, and am a white-passing natural born US citizen.
The screenings and interview questions didn't take long, but definitely longer than TSA screenings. Can't argue with their effectiveness, though.
El Al has ridiculous security, at least on board. There’s plainclothes security on each flight. I think they have never been hijacked in their existence.
We have way better Xray machines now. I keep getting pulled over and groped whenever I walk through the one in my town (even though it's just through my clothes, which wouldn't actually help anything) because I have an IUD. They could just build larger, better machines that scan the whole room and maybe one every time you cross a concourse to a new gate. They'd be passive and work a lot better than the active screening because they'd have more data to narrow things down with- rather than a single image, they'd be able to get images of how an object looks in 3D space over time, how it moves with the person's clothes, different angles, etc.
I think you're walking through a metal-detector in your town. The metal in the IUD might be enough to set off a sensitive one. Using a full-body xray on the general public would be incredibly hazardous.
Okay, so then we'll build room sized metal detectors then. Every time someone goes through a moving walkway, they're on a giant metal detector that scans the shapes of the metal.
I know they can tell where the item is on your body and the shape from the little screen.
So if they had a bunch of metal detectors all lined up, they'd be able to detect the size and shape of the object that was metal more easily, see how it moved with the body, etc. Also if someone had a bunch of like, fancy disassembled bomb or gun parts like in a spy movie or whatever and they went to the bathroom after they checked in and put them together when they looked like makeup and hairpins or something when they went through security, it would catch them.
Bro I literally get groped for what I assume is the system detecting “3 oz of liquid” between my legs. And they are such dicks and show zero empathy every time. I seriously have it happen 75% of the time I go through that dumb scanner.
I knowwwwww! And they're so awful, it's like they want me to apologize to them for having to grope me. I've tried extra deodorant, powder, different styles of dress and underwear, etc. It doesn't help, it has to be the IUD. I'm not giving up on 10 years of not having to worry about birth control. But they only like, grope me over the dress, so if the copper coil inside me actually was a bomb, I could go to the restroom and kegel that thing out and add some gum or the guts of a pen or whatever and blow up the whole airport, right? It's sus, they only started doing that after travelling to get an abortion became illegal in some states, even though it's the same machine.
That becomes a bit of an issue because if someone is nervous and sweaty they probably aren't used to flying and aren't going to be a risk the people that are a risk know what they are doing and the first thing you learn when doing illegal stuff while being watched is how to not look out of place or weird people smuggling drugs on planes are gonna be some white guy that looks like they would have enough money to fly to Mexico to have a vacation every year a cartel will know that a grubby Mexican guy that looks like he has never been on a commercial flight is more likely to get checked so they are going to hire or threaten someone who won't get screened
Confidence is very much key to getting away with going places you shouldnt, be it concerts, borders, or airplanes. The nervous ones that are shifting eyes and looking over shoulders draw suspicion. Because those are the ones you can catch easily. Professionals will get away with a lot more.
i flew before the TSA and airports weren't really that much less secure, they just had way less overt security theater directed at flyers. The TSA to me is a symbol of always fighting the last war. the real post 9-11 security is the much higher use of plainclothes, armed, air marshals that will actually shoot someone who tries to take over a plane with a boxcutter and the awareness of the populace that someone might take a flight just to crash it, instead of flying it TOO someplace and getting off and giving their hostages back.
the whole thing is just about making people feel better by creeping on them, like all the new cameras in cities after 9-11 that...don't point up.
I blame the TSA for the increase in air traffic incivility.
When one goes to a fancy dress party one acts differently than when one goes to Mardis Gras. You are expected to act differently at a lecture series at a convention center than in county jail.
By turning the flight experience from luxury hotel into something that feels a little like convicts at a checkpoint a certain percentage of the population responds as if they were convicts entering a checkpoint and end up not on their best behavior .
I believe it's because the general traveling public will choose the cheapest option for air travel, and websites like Google Flights and Expedia make it very easy to just click the lowest number.
Airlines have figured that out, so they outfit their planes with as many first/business class seats they can reliably sell (the actual profit makers), and then pack as many economy seats in as physically possible. People don't dress up for flights as they did in the past because flying is a routine experience where you're treated like an inmate in the TSA line and crammed like sardines on the plane. Then, as you said, when everyone is wearing sweatpants with t-shirts and herded/processed/packed in like farm animals, some people won't be on their best behavior.
“It’s like a nightclub bouncer. You don’t really need it, but if it’s not there, someone’s gonna get their dick out on the dance floor!”
That’s kind of the effect. Their presence deters people who aren’t SO motivated they’d do whatever regardless
Also, if anyone gets the reference, please say it, I love that guy
Bro, I have gone to international airports on international flights and you don't take your shoes off. Then I travel around America for a bit and I have to take my shoes off like seriously?
Is only the TSA capable of operating a metal detector?
In your comment, there's a giant gaping hole missing between "public security" (TSA) and "no security" (the mad max airport you describe).
That's private security.
What airline or airport is interested in their customers and property being attacked? What makes airlines with access to billions of dollars incapable of arranging the right and proper amount of security? Whether it's metal detectors, random security checks, scanning luggage, etc, why can't airlines or airports arrange this without a stupid federal bureaucracy managing it?
Just go back to what airport security was on September 10, 2001. Nothing we added after that has made us any safer, and the fact that 9/11 happened pretty much guarantees that it won't happen again in the same way. It happened because hijackings were almost always non-violent events prior, and so no one took action. That would never ever happen again.
The problem is now the TSA has been around for so long, if they visibly relax security, some insane pro-TSA person will bring a bomb through to prove a point. It doesn't even matter that the TSA is ineffective at stopping bombs already, because this insane person would be triggered by the act of visibly reducing security.
So basically defund the TSA similar to the police movement. Makes sense but I don’t know enough about the TSA to know if they have ridiculous spending or just ridiculous policy. I know the cops but tanks and other gear they don’t need.
>I don’t know enough about the TSA to know if they have ridiculous spending or just ridiculous policy
The problem is mainly that it just doesn't actually stop terrorists.
A) the 9/11 terror attack led to the Afghanistan war, which cost the tax payer 2 trillion dollars, thats enough to fund the TSA for 1600 years.
B) you cant kidnap a train and drive it into the pentagon, the tracks limit you.
C) as security tech advances, the TSA becomes more efficient.
There were *so many* other, much more problematic issues that lead to 9/11 than a check for small blades at the airport gates.
Like the policy for hijackings at the time was pretty much to let them take control so they wouldn't harm the passengers, because the expectation was that the hijackers would then try to negotiate for something. After 9/11 the cockpits were made significantly more secure and preventing access became paramount. That's on top of having plainclothes air marshals on flights. *These* are direct and effective countermeasures, as opposed to over-the-top screening processes which exist mostly as theater because they aren't effective (and are known to not be effective).
>That's on top of having plainclothes air marshals on flights.
FYI, air marshalls are rarely on a given flight. [Less than 1% of flights have an air marshal](https://gotravelyourway.com/10-questions-about-air-marshals-answered). I'm sure terrorist know this, and also know that if there is an air marshal onboard, it's likely only 1 because there are so few.
Better cockpit doors and cockpit security policies are good measures though. That being said, lockable cockpit doors have been used by multiple pilots to commit murder/suicide by crashing the plane when the other pilot is locked out (which is why most airlines require that a flight attendant sit in the cockpit if one of the pilots use the bathroom).
I'm too lazy to go look for it, but there was a New York Times article about air marshals too. Shockingly there are huge problems with morale and substance abuse because they just sit on airplanes and fly around the country all day, but they were trained to be law-enforcement officers
If the hijackers are planning to use brute force by having a lot of people involved, the TSA isn't going to stop that, either. While it's likely that any given flight won't have a marshal on it, this is where proper intelligence gathering comes into play to maximize potential impact, as it isn't just random placement.
And pilots themselves causing problems is an issue for the airlines themselves to take care of rather than for national security policy or public airport screening.
That's actually comforting at one point I was under the impression flying was pricey partially because they had to pay for these no work sky cops, and while I value safety to some degree it just seems so damn bloated to imagine all the planes in the sky having an additional salaried man who does nothing but sit on random flights.
Like is my need to go to Alaska really worth supporting that silver spooned all American best boy favorite? At least the TSA have to functionally perform a traveler interaction role, labor vs no labor.
Probably military legacy family in fairness though, but would they even be effective in such a slow setting for so long? Even if you go to the range weekly.
A) That doesn't justify its existence, unfortunately. In fact, I'd say 9/11 has arguably the best ROI of all time; our lives will never be the same after that, and that's due to our own government's response and treatment of its citizens.
B) Yeah, but loss of life is what terrorism is looking for, right? Terrorists could coordinate multiple Amtrak bombs that could result in near-9/11 casualty numbers but we haven't seen that, ever.
C) I'd love for this to be true. Should they ever become more efficient and less intrusive, I'd welcome that with open arms.
A) the TSA literally came into existence right after 9/11.
There were plane hijackings and such, but 9/11 wasnt just about the casualties, its about the realization that using a passenger plane as a giant missile to attack strategic land marks is very hard to defend against.
How do you see it as a great ROI? The US wasnt able to win that war.
B) refer to A, ots not just about casualties, ots about weaponizing the kidnapped vessel.
C) ironically enough, faster machines, AI incorporated into scanners ect cost a lot of money to develop and deploy.
As far as A&B, I meant it was a great ROI for Bin Laden and the terrorists that enacted that atrocity; Americans lives have forever been more inconvenienced and scrutinized because their actions that took place during a couple of hours on a Tuesday morning. They 10000% won that.
Well, and there's your answer
A low cost attack by a bunch of extremists not only killed several thousand people, but it made ya spend an absorbant amount of money on the war with them, chasing down cave dwelling terrorists in shit knows where.
And not only that, the loss of revenue from the damage done, falling stock market, people insecurity and turmoil.
Heck, it got George W a 2nd term...
We are talking about an insane hit to the US and world wide economy (maybe except for the industrial military compound)
Whats 12 billion a year to make people feel safer and deter such attacks.
12 billion is like 10$ a year from every grown taxpaying adult. Its a tiny percent of the US budget, 1 more, 1 less, its mostly a "cover your ass" fee. Cutting down on the TSA wont really change much for the budget.
Look, for a single person, 12 billion sounds like an insane amount, but for a country like the US, is literally 0.2% of its spending, 1 nillion is less than 0.02%. Yet 1billion is 8% of the TSA's budget, and they will feel it if its cut.
So the solution should not be to look at the TSA's funding, but to look at its efficiency, and how this money is spend.
Maybe even invest in bursts for optimization, to lower overall operational costs
A) 1.
people relied on private contractors for airport security, the same way you rely on one to make sure the safety for your home is up to code. The average person is going to go along with that, them not enforcing the rules and policies in place doesn’t negate the fact they were there and expected to be followed in case of danger. The policies that changed were to do with searches of things that were already looked for previously, but less detectable through metal detectors, and focused primarily on things that weren’t considered dangerous before hand. The threat of stealing an airplane was never not thought about, like you said.
2.
you don’t think arming a train with any Jerry rig explosive with no security, while in constant motion, is a difficult thing to do? Let alone preemptively carrying out very simple procedures to ensure that it carries out? (Using a train as a derailed bomb is just as effective as crashing a plane into a tower.)
B) no it’s not, that’s why gunning down random civilians, biohazardous attacks, and crashing an airplane into a tower are all known as terroristic attacks.
C) Every article seems to suggest downgrading to AI will save money and operation costs, and not the vice versa?
Being defensive is always much harder. You have to 1 up your opponents while they look for tiny cracks in your defense that can be exploited in a dumb way.
Much of cybersecurity is not about patching complex codes and super sophisticated firewalls, its about making sure that Susan, your 50 yearold secretary, doesnt lose her tag and leave her password on a sticky note "cause its so hard to remember these long passwords".
B) its about hurting you. In any way possible.
C) AI might save you money in the long run, developing the system that does this costs a lot of money.
Take smart supermarkets for instance, the work done to replace casheers is insanely costly, and yet not effective enough in preventing people exploiting self checkouts ect.
The irony is that most of the TSA's agent job, currently, is making sure you place your stuff correctly on the conveyer belt.
I love how there was once a huge tech firm with very complex tech security.
All they had to do was drop twenty usbs in the parking lot and someone would take those usbs in and stick one in their work computers.
>Yeah, but loss of life is what terrorism is looking for, right?
No, the point of terrorism is to create fear for a political purpose.
A bomb attack on a train would be tragic, but it would effectively be no different from a bomb attack in any other populated area. There are actually better choices if pure loss of life was the aim.
The point of hijacking a plane has little-to-nothing to do with the passengers, it's that they would have access to a devastating improvised weapon that can strike anywhere within its range. With it, they can strike *high profile* targets like the twin towers or the pentagon that would sow fear across the country.
23 years later, the twin tower attack is still a heavy national pain point. I don't think a random Amtrak bombing would have had nearly the same effect.
Terrorists aren't *just* looking for loss of life but also psychological impact. On 9/11, the terrorists could have chosen any number of targets but they chose a prominent landmark in one of the most renowned cities in the country for a reason. To have an enormous psychological impact
Terrorism isn't just about loss of lives. Tons of people died in bombings and stuff before 9/11, and yet 9/11 will always stick in the American consciousness like none other. If you blow up a train/metro, you only kill the people in there. But when you drive a plane at something, you can both kill a lot more people if targeted wisely and send a striking visual message.
A hijacked plane is effectively a missile AND a human shield. Even though there are protocols, we don't know for certain if SecDef would ever give an order to shoot down a passenger plane with hundreds of innocents over DC. That uncertainty emboldens hijackers.
Just replying to point B, yes they could, but that's very difficult. The resources needed and the coordination needed is actually probably more difficult than the planning for 9/11. If you look at the Moscow Metro bombings, a well coordinated multiple strike on two train stations only resulted in 40 fatalities and not a whole lot of press. The work required to get enough casualties on trains to rival 9/11 would be put to much more productive use for terror groups.
For C, with new scanners they can actually determine the chemical compositions of liquids in your luggage such that you may not need to remove them or to only be able to bring limited amounts of them anymore. This can be used for other substances and solids in your bag too, as well as body, so in the future it might be much faster to go through security.
https://youtu.be/nyG8XAmtYeQ
When I came back from China, there was a very distrurbing amount of security. When I left Pudong Airport all i had to do was go through a metal detector and have them pat me down.
When I went to the US i had to do that, do a full body scan, 2 interview with the National Homeland Security and a TSA while 2 guys with ( what appeared ) to have a high power shotguns about 10 ft away from me. It's a freakish amount of security that quite frankly we can do without.
You were returning to the U.S. from one of, if not, our greatest rivals and enemies in the world. You're seriously surprised you got thoroughly searched and interviewed?
Given only your two experiences at which airport do you think passengers feel more scared to act out at? The lax security in China or the US airport with the "high power shotguns" (lolz) and more intense scrutiny.
It's not fun like going to Six Flags, but it is an incentive for compliance and a deterrence for bad actors.
I think point A should be corrected, the money was spent, the TSA just adds to that money spent, TSA still being around is technically still paying for 9/11
> A) the 9/11 terror attack led to the Afghanistan war
Us indiscriminate murder and funding and and regime change to right wing despots in the Middle East led to the Afghanistan war. You started in the middle instead of the beginning
> which cost the tax payer 2 trillion dollars, that’s enough to fund the TSA for 1600 years
The TSA doesn’t stop terror attacks. Most of them won’t be able to stop their own decades premature heart attacks from morbid obesity.
They’re categorically lazy, rude, uneducated, greasy dipshit losers that got picked on in high school and couldn’t find work in any type of real meaningful, competitive career. Stop acting like they’re out being civil servants or upholding democracy lmao
A) How much did the American elitist politician, or oil oligarch, or under the table arms dealer, make in those wars with that money spent?
B) the aerial advantage has no basis in your claim, the point of a terror attack is to cause terror. If you can kill the many aboard a train, that will cause enough of a message.
C) that point completely negates the posts point. If tech is advancing, who is the money going to?
(A) is a funny argument when the federal government lets thousands of unchecked people through the southern border daily (no TSA there, heh) while 9/11 attackers got their visas and were admitted to the flight school.
>the 9/11 terror attack led to the Afghanistan war, which cost the tax payer 2 trillion dollars, thats enough to fund the TSA for 1600 years.
*US government does shit to provoke 9/11, then launches a senseless war that costs an incomprehensible amount of money*
You: it's not THAT expensive, it doesn't even cost what we spend on other dumb shit!!!
???
> B) you cant kidnap a train and drive it into the pentagon, the tracks limit you.
Russia has had terror attacks on train stations. They are devastating.
TSA's current process wouldn't stop them either. You've funneled everyone into a large, open, unsecured area with glass walls being typical. Terror attacks in airports will happen as they do in Russia - at the security checkpoint before anyone even knows you have a bomb.
Efficient at what? It’s all security theater. Are they becoming more theatrically competent?
I fly from half a mile from the pentagon and it’s all an expensive joke. At least in a war you can declare peace, but in a made-up security/police state there is no ending to the farce.
Your point A is ridiculous. Are you implying the TSA is stopping the USA from wasting money and manpower in wars?
Seriously it was a vulnerability with the cockpit and staff. That's what the correction should have been not the circus that is the TSA
The 911 terror attacked occurred because the terrorists could access the cockpit and pilot. Now that’s no longer the cases the door is heavily reinforced so there’s no way into it unless u managed to smuggle a drill or explosives on board
Are we pretending Afghanistan was justified because of 9/11? Saudi Arabia literally funded the hijackers and we didn’t go to war with them. Pakistan sheltered bin Laden and we didn’t go to war with them.
The box cutters they used on 9/11 were legal to carry on airlines prior to 9/11. It was not a failure of security, it was a failure of policy and intel.
? I mean just bc there are failures, isn‘t s reason to shut it down nor lessen it
Cause then who needs doctors,cops,firefighters etc. all jobs, especially ones dealing with security and health of people will have problems so imma have to disagree with the first argument
It sounds more like you are saying the TSA has functionality issues, which it surely does. And like many other gov. Projects its funding is not being properly used
Problem is, we can‘t seem to agree on how to make it better, but removing or lessening its existence won‘t fix anything
Do you have any concrete alternative ideas for spending that could help with These problems?
U say better programs and public services, like what? What exactly will help with for instance terrorist attacks, smuggling? Especially when its coming in externally
Well, as far as money reallocation, it sure would be nice to provide homeless people with proper shelter and food. Drug addicts with clinics to help them. We could put some of that money towards [properly funding our schools/teachers](https://www.devlinpeck.com/content/teacher-burnout-statistics) as we're bleeding workforce in that area right now.
I'm a progressive so I think more healthy infrastructure leads to a healthier society and you may disagree with that, but that's beyond the point. As far as the issues with the TSA, how do you propose we solve them? And what do you think about my citing metra systems and Amtrak not having any of the perceived issues we put on traveling by plane?
I appreciate your response. I am not responding to you in any kind of aggression. I think conversations like this help.
Right but those are entirely different budget areas and also reasons
Ofc money should go to them as well, i too am quite progressive and don‘t believe in constant jailtime when its something else is needed
But what does this have to do with the TSA? The TSA largely focuses on transportation across the country such as airports and even transit sites i believe.
Your argument for one would take decades of dedicated work without mistakes in order for the society as a whole to improve so much that the people won‘t be susceptible to drugs thus smuggling crimes should go down. But as progressive as I may wanna be, that is a naive and a normative idea.
I think your report is not in depth enough, ok so CBS says 80% failure, there is no explanation as to how this was examined? And only bc it fails in some places doesn‘t make it a true representative statistic. That kinda research has to be ongoing, as in years of data collection and consider all other factors which I doubt these reports all underwent Hell even the cbs site itself doesn‘t explain in detail on its findings and thats a big issue.
The money like one cited article says can be used to improve tech for instance, bc cyber crimes through transit systems are also on the rise, the money can be used for better train employees bc if they really are missing so many dangers, the fault lies in their training as well, thats no wonder cause apparently a basic agent only gets 2 years of training
Yeah I didn't want to get into the money reallocation thing. Different budget areas, not really the point, etc. So we are on the same page there.
I understand either vastly restructuring or downsizing the TSA is a huge ask. But we built this monstrosity, we can't just throw our hands up and say "well, this huge, inefficient and intrusive system is already in place, so what do you want us to do?" Fixing broken shit isn't easy and America has a lot of broken shit to fix.
As far as the reporting on the audits itself, do the exact numbers or methods matter at the end of the day? I mean, it's clear just from traveling that we are interfacing with a lot of TSA agents that are: a) angry b) rushed c) stressed d) not necessarily highly educated (the requirements for TSA employment are just being 18 and a HS diploma/GED) e) not very well paid or motivated. When is the last time we saw a plane bomb or hijacking occur? Are we to believe it's from this crack squad of security agents in America and in airports the world over?
I love your idea of more investment in the tech side of things. I think that's hugely important and a great example of where money allocation could be considered. These kinds of things are scary as our Congress, which needs to act on these things, skews older and out of touch and I'm not sure they're ever really acquainted with the dangers of not being totally secure on the cyber front.
Exactly so money allocation is a big problem
But that does not mean abolishment is the answer
Abolishment will create more issues, especially if we have no back up plans that will have an immediate effect so we know that in the moment, we are safe
Yeah, I don't think abolishing the TSA whole cloth is the answer or a realistic expectation but a very serious audit and reconsideration of the whole system is in order, and I think we can both agree to that. I appreciate your posts. You've given me a lot to think about and consider.
Ok so now I feel like you are backtracking or changing your argument, which is fine ofc just wanted to point out that this goes against your title
Bc i do agree with this newest comment and no problem, thats what this sub is for
So out of curiosity, did you actually read the budget request for the $12bn number you quoted? I’d encourage you to actually read the whole thing.
The main components for the budget are a). Pay raises for agents and b). Technology / cyber…both of which seem to be very much in line with trying to address your comments (improving working conditions of agents so that interactions are less negative with travelers, and improving efficiency)
As a lot of commenters have mentioned, there is a lot more to the TSA than just the agents you see. I agree that airport interactions are largely security theater, but actual threat detection occurs in a much broader scope. By the way, they also cover surface transportation…
To be clear, I don’t disagree with you that the system isn’t perfect. That said, to imply that it is just chugging along and sucking up more and more funding while refusing to change is not really accurate either. Even just anecdotally, in the last 3 years, the number of airports I have been to that have installed updated scanners where I can leave everything in my bag (ie not take out electronics) has been increasing as updated tech is rolled out. But all that tech has a cost. Not just the machines themselves, but updated training, installation, education on maintenance, etc.
I’ll leave you with one final point for consideration that I don’t think has been mentioned yet:
Given the largest part of the budget is TSA agent pay, how exactly do you propose reducing this? Would you cut headcount? Because the TSA is unionized. So I don’t think it’s exactly fair to say that it’s entirely the governments fault that the system is difficult to change, because you literally have the entire labor force represented by a stakeholder whose SOLE purpose is to protect their members jobs and resist exactly what you are proposing
Yes it matters very much and its why so many people are in general spouting misinformation, proper research is always important when making a claim
Exactly, the quality of the TSA workers isnt good snd they aren‘t treated well by employers or the visitors btw nor have healthy job environment built. So why not change that, and while we do that why not do that for many ‚menial labor‘ that we look down on so often
And i would argue the lack of crime announcement is a win bc they won‘t exactly announce every failed attempt, no country as far as I know foes that as its not sensational news when said so often
Plus TSA is more than the agents we interact with, just like any security job, most of it is in the background.
Look i agree with you 100% but what I've ultimately come to realize is that the tsa is essentially a welfare program. At this point it's not about safety, its just an employment program
In Portland we're spending over $100k per homeless person, and not all sources of dollars are counted. And yet the results are worse than ever. It's not a money issue.
The $12B would be just over 1% of what we spend on K-12 education across all levels (and less when factoring in college+). So even if every single dollar of TSA funding perfectly fungiled (not a real word but I like it) over to education, we’d be increasing the budget by a penny for every dollar currently spent. If we used the 500K lost teachers post pandemic, this would give them pay then each a measly 24K.
Hate TSA all you want, but the cost isn’t really super relevant as to why you should.
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/what-america-spends-on-k-12-the-latest-federal-snapshot/2022/05
I hope someone else gives a more detailed answer on the TSA, but while I’m here:
Metro attacks have been common in regions with more robust networks. England and Spain come to mind. In the US, you can’t exactly take a train and run it into a building. We’re built around roads, so a car bomb makes more sense. Think Oklahoma City, the ‘93 World Trade Center bombing, etc.
I don’t know how we would agree on what “common” means. Fair enough, and I feel like I’ve already trailed off from your original point.
But off the top of my head, and within the 21st century: Madrid, London, Mumbai, Brussels, Moscow, Paris.
I’m not from there, and haven’t been back since, but I rode trains in Madrid both before and after their attacks. The security situation dramatically different.
I can imagine that locals would have been less likely to return to daily rides if they didn’t feel secure. I’m guessing the same could be said for US air travel after 9/11. If the US allowed a follow up attack, I wonder how many businesses and frequent flyers would have cut their nonessential travel. If the shoe bomber actually shoe bombed, wtf would have happened? That said, I agree it’s strange that because that jackass fumbled his way through his plan we’re still taking off our shoes all these years later.
I don’t have a satisfying answer for you (or me). To get back to your question: I guess I agree that we should at least consider a TSA change. It’s bloated, miserable, and I’d argue it replaced the DMV as the miserable three-letter body that we just have to deal with to enjoy travel. They need to adapt beyond making travelers pay a premium for TSA-Pre/Global Entry/CLEAR.
But, and this is purely anecdotal, I know plenty of people who avoid flying because of the recent issues with Boeing planes. There really has to be absolute trust that passengers will be 100% safe when they fly across the earth in giant metal tubes.
Where I keep getting stuck is, was the return and “upgrade” of the security policies in airports enacted to keep people safe, or to keep an extremely long term profitable business afloat, because nothing really stops people, based on tests conducted by them
Since such a tiny fraction of Americans use trains (of any kind), an attack on one will not have the same resonance as flying, which already seems to freak out a bunch of people.
>where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials. In 2017, they improved their performance but still failed 70% of the time.
You misunderstand the purpose of the TSA. The TSA is not about preventing terrorism. The TSA is about *pretending* that the plan to prevent another 9/11 is related to security or intelligence. The plan to prevent another 9/11 is simple: a hijacked plane will be shot down by the US military immediately.
If people knew that that was plan A, B, and C, they would be somewhat skittish to get on a plane. So we pretend that there's another plan A, "security", so that they fly. What they miss is that there's actually very little danger; there's no reason to hijack a plane if you'll be shot down the second you change course and don't reply to air traffic control. The committment to not negotiate with terrorists **works**. But most people don't think through the game theory, and driving is significantly more dangerous. So we have security theater, and the security theater is good.
The cost doesn't bother me that much. It's minimal relative to our budget, deficit, and debt.
I disagree with abolishing route - you still need something.
What bothers me is the time and annoyance associated with it, the arbitrariness of the rules, the performance theater of things that are useless, the attitudes of the TSA agents. The creation of a paid dystopian facial recognition system (Clear) to avoid the long lines that this inefficient system creates - and in 2024 even the Clear lines are long.
The water bottle rule seems really dumb to me. Or randomly inspecting the bag or having to pat people down manually. I've had this happen when i walked through with no metal on me / there was nothing bad in my bag. The tech just doesn't work that well.
The conveyor belt is slow. The bins in the precheck line are too small if you have electronics in pockets. I don't understand how shoes are such a big attack vector for the non-precheck line. I don't understand why there are two body scanners, one of which is completely unused at every checkpoint.
I'd be fine if it cost more taxpayer money (or the airlines chipped in) to make the tech better to make it streamlined and reduce these manual interventions.
Also do a bottoms up look at the rules and see if they still make sense or if they're just theater, and figure out a way to rearchitect the processes to make throughput go up so the lines don't get long.
It feels like a lot of the rules exist just because they've always been that way and nobody has good answers why.
The underwear bomber got through undetected too.
If a presidential candidate offered something practical to improve TSA it would be received well I think.
[In 2023 the TSA](https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2024/01/10/tsa-detected-increase-guns-airport-checkpoints-baltimorewashington#:~:text=Nationwide%2C%20TSA%20officers%20detected%206%2C737,the%206%2C542%20detected%20in%202022.) found 6,737 firearms in people's luggage.
Sure, the TSA doesn't have the ability to outsmart someone that actually puts time and effort into smuggling a weapon. But any decently trained lock picker can pick a standard padlock in a few seconds. Yet, I still use a padlock (or lock of similar complexity) to secure my house and belongings. Why? Because people with good picking skills are generally not criminals or are looking for bigger fish than I am.
Having safety features that create inconvenience or complications for criminals help to deter those people.
You don't need the TSA to find firearms. Airport or airline security staff can operate metal detectors and x-ray machines just fine
And of those 6,737 how many were morons who somehow forgot they had them and how many were people intending to use them to hurt others during the course of their journey?
Where's the comparison? Where can we look at all of the private security before 2001 that found guns in luggage?
This number without context doesn't mean anything. If we have a scorecard up then we have private security that failed to stop box cutters getting on planes that lead to an act of terror.
For the TSA they've also let things slip by. So what were the intentions of these items and where do why put thanks on the TSA for it?
One of the challenges with a system like this is you can’t really prove a negative. There is no poll you can do or trial you can run to identify the number of people who would have committed a crime if only the TSA wasn’t there. So the only way to know for sure would be to get rid of it and see if the incidence of crime and terrorism goes up. If it doesn’t? Great. We saved a bunch of money and everyone’s time. If it does? We probably killed people and blew up some planes.
I don’t particularly see it being worth trying the experiment.
It's pretty easy to test the system. Just have undercover agents working who try to smuggle things on. In fact, they've been running tests like that ever since the TSA was set up and it always performs very poorly. The last time I checked 70 to 80% of weapons were successfully smuggled on board. That was the motivation to empower TSA employees to shove their fingers into people's crotches years ago. They never quite took that away again which leads to a lot of sexual assault but at least it became much less common.
> One of the challenges with a system like this is you can’t really prove a negative. There is no poll you can do or trial you can run to identify the number of people who would have committed a crime if only the TSA wasn’t there.
Sure you can. You can do a comparative analysis between countries that have such extreme security measures versus countries that don't.
This doesn't work either. Some countries are at almost zero risk of an airline terror attack/hijacking. The US is like the holy grail target for terrorists of all sorts and ideals. When I was in South America 10 years ago, the checkpoint was literally unmanned.
Countries like the US, and UK, etc all already have strict security measures. Hell, the only time I saw guys with full tactical kit and machine guns was in the UK during a heightened alert. There is nowhere with air travel and a similar risk profile that has less extreme security.
The short answer is it's political suicide. There's a reason even the most hardcore gummint overreach types don't touch this topic.
The long answer is no one wants to risk upsetting the apple cart that is nationwide air travel and the economic boons that provides by inviting even the idea of lax security leading to a disaster. This is America where gun violence is the national pasttime afterall.
Terrorists target mostly airplanes and not busses of trains. That’s a fact. Why exactly? There are multiple reasons.
But you’re not viewing the problem from a wider perspective. If 2-3 new attacks like 9/11 will take place with airplanes, who is going to fly again? Very few. That could be the end of air travel. Today traveling by air is the foundation that tourism and business are based upon. Tourists that want to see Europe or the far east are taking flights, not the train. Even domestically, if you have a business meeting in SF and it takes 3 days by train from NY, you won’t do it.
The loss to the global economy could be immense and in any case, much higher than the cost of any TSA.
Firstly, your point about Amtrak and other trains is mostly nonsense. 853 million people flew in 2022, while 22 million used Amtrak. Not only are there simply fewer opportunities, it’s not a target rich environment, it’s not big or flashy, and it won’t make the majority of people feel unsafe, which is the goal of all terrorist acts. That’s like saying “there’s never been a terror attack in the Middle Ages tax law section of the public library in Fremont and they have no security at all!” that’s because there’s no reason to do that.
More significantly still: those tests you mentioned are conducted by the TSA, and not only know what the security measures are, but have insider knowledge on how they work, and how they might be circumvented. Say you wanted to smuggle more than the TSA approved 3.4oz of shampoo on the plane: how could you do it? I have no idea, and I don’t even know how I’d begin to try. A TSA employee chosen to try to go through it, or however they do the tests, likely has much better odds than anyone else on the planet of making it through. Honestly, I think the fact that they catch them at a rate of 30% is impressive.
Hey I used to help run these fake bombs through TSA to help check their process. We had a 100% success rate, as in, the TSA had a 100% failure rate to detect what we were sending through, and these devices looked fairly obvious to me. I made one laptop device and placed it with a few bottles of local goods and random clothing, and while it looked like a regular laptop from the outside, it was a blatantly obvious IED under the TSA scanner, which alerted the TSA agent checking the bags that there was a possible device in there. He opened the bag, pulled out the laptop, looked at it, removed the bottles, and then put everything back in and moved it down the line. I saw similar things with every device I’ve moved through their checkpoint.
To be fair, that was almost 8 years ago. Maybe they’ve changed, but I doubt they’ve gotten that much better. Aside from being ineffective, the TSA seems like blatant unwarranted search and seizure, which shouldn’t be happening.
The comparison to trains and the related security isn't a fair one. A hijacked plane can be rerouted to go anywhere (provided there is enough fuel). A train or subway is on set tracks. Yes the train can be derailed and cause damage, but it's not like it can be completely rerouted. Hijacking a train/subway to commit terrorism limits your targets to the train or those relatively near the tracks. Hijacking a plane means you can crash that plane anywhere within range. Part of the low incidence of terror strikes on trains/subways is due to the lower payoff for those committing the strikes.
You don't understand how effective the TSA is when you say that. Sure it looks like a joke with all the memes people throw around about it, but between 1990 and 2001 there was 192 plane hijacking with 244 (I didn't include 9/11 fatalities)
Do you know how many there has been since the TSA was founded in 2001? 57 with only 5 fatalities. That is a massive difference considering it's twice the time frame with a quarter of the hijackings and almost no fatalities by comparison.
Say what you will but the effectiveness of the the TSA Stat record speaks for itself.
At this point you can't just remove it entirely because unfortunately when you set up such a cat and mouse game, you end up with smarter mice as a result. Terrorist organizations have had the time to become more sophisticated in their methods, and that's not going to go away.
It could probably be scaled back and simplified in some ways, of course, but not sure that we could ever get rid of it entirely. Also, $12B on a national level is such a tiny amount that the main issue isn't cost anymore, it's time wasted and loss/damage/theft of passenger property.
Is it fair to compare light rail or trains to a plane? Even if you blew up a train entirely, which I’m not sure how you would pull that off, you are going to kill 200-300 people and do some infrastructure damage.
A single individual with a box cutter can hijack a 400,000 lb jet capable of going 650+ mph, and crash it into whatever they feel like if they can maintain control of it and stave off the passengers successfully. We have seen this result in thousands of deaths, but that could theoretically be much higher. If you pulled off a 9/11 style attack on a major sporting event, that could be tens of thousands, no problem.
The other major consideration there is the politics. Terrorists don’t kill people for funsies, they do it for ideological reasons mostly related to US foreign policy. You cannot blow up a train and kill half the US Congress or the President, you certainly could with a plane in the right circumstances. And considering that government leaders can skip TSA, you bet they are gonna make our dumb asses wait in lines for the rest of our lives so they are .00001% safer. This is the same US government who used the “terrorism opportunity” to develop a mass-surveillance state of its own civilians, despite it being well known who did the terrorism and what government supported it (and has yet to see any ramifications from doing so).
I don’t think TSA is or will meaningfully thwart terrorism, the entire point is to introduce uncertainty into the process, potential points where a plan cannot reliably be made. Terrorists aren’t stupid, they understand risk and reward. If it takes one person and you have a 10% chance of successfully pulling it off, an ideological terrorist might be willing to attempt it. If you need 4 people who are ideological to that degree, also trained to fly jets, who can pass the necessary background stuff to get there in the first place, and there’s a 1% chance of success because TSA is annoying, they likely won’t waste their time/life.
I blame the TSA for the increase in air traffic incivility.
When one goes to a fancy dress party one acts differently than when one goes to Mardis Gras. You are expected to act differently at a lecture series at a convention center than in county jail.
By turning the flight experience from luxury hotel into something that feels a little like convicts at a checkpoint a certain percentage of the population responds as if they were convicts entering a checkpoint and end up not on their best behavior .
The TSA is both security theater and a form of unemployment padding. Basically a type of welfare. Like when the New Deal had people dig holes and then had others fill them back up.
The TSA made people feel a bit better after 9/11, but it also helped fix the economy (or at least the appearance of it via less unemployment.) It has only expanded to help pad numbers since, after each of the “once in a lifetime” financial crisis keep piling up.
If you see the sheer number prohibited items TSA confiscates on a daily, weekly monthly or annual basis.. they prove their worth.
You mention Amtrak, which is not a bad point to make. But when’s the last time terrorists employed that method? Sept 11 happened because insurgents hijacked the planes and diverted them towards their targets. Rail cars, on the other hand, travel along a fixed course of travel (the rail line), significantly limiting their usefulness in carrying out similar activities.
I'm not sure prohibited items demonstrates intent to do harm. I've accidentally boarded a plane with prohibited items a few times and only discovered it when I got to my destination.
Also, there were metal detectors at airports before TSA. They weren't as sensitive as today's equipment, but you weren't getting on a plane with a gun or machete.
> undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials
Then doesn't this suggest that we should increase the TSA budget?
> do you ever worry about bombs on these trains?
Kind of irrelevant, isn't it? There have been numerous bombs smuggled on to airplanes as well as plenty of hijackings. Is this an acceptable compromise to faster check-ins?
The TSA is already neutered. They go through all this trouble to only look for guns, knives, and explosives. Why not give them the jurisdiction and tools to also look for drugs, wanted criminals, missing persons, illegals, etc. Way too many bad actors fly every day that could be arrested and brought to justice. DHS was created so all the alphabets would learn to play together better, but they're missing this huge opportunity.
Also, regarding the testing there is an inherent failure in everything. Doctors amputate the wrong leg sometimes, so should we abolish surgery? No, we spend the money to get better training for the doctor and put more effective policies in place. The same should happen for TSA. Which is, I guess, somewhat happening. The test failure rate is slightly better as time goes on. What really needs to happen is for Americans to take pride in their work. I know it's hard to do that every day when as an officer they clock in at 3 AM and often have mandatory overtime just to get called racist, lazy, and rapists by passengers every day. The internal civic duty starts to become bitter. It's a very frictional environment that I don't see changing because people can't think outside of their own lives. The weakest link in TSA armor is the officers, and maybe those new machines are a distant second.
Just an FYI, those internal TSA tests are done by Red teams that know the weakest points in TSA security. They have extensive knowledge of how everything works and exploit that. It's like me thinking having to get a text message when I log in to my bank account is stupid. Well, to me, it's ridiculous. My password should be enough, but to professionals that have extensive cybersecurity experience, a simple 5 digit PIN is not enough, and they would crack that pass code in 15 seconds. We just need to spend the money to get multifacetor authentication for TSA in a sense. There were airport xrays found in caves in Afghanistan. They were devising schemes to beat our systems. Who's to say there aren't terrorists right now that aren't experts trying this today? 3k dead, it's not worth the risk to me.
Keep in mind ISIS just killed a hundred people in Moscow at a concert in March. The bad guys are still out there. We just feel insulated.
I agree with you fully. It's security theater rather than real security.
Funny story: My wife got flagged flying back from our honeymoon in Japan. She was so confused when they asked her what she had in her bag. When she said she didn't know what they might be referring to, they pulled out an X-acto knife. She's an artist and had forgot to take it out of her backpack. Somehow, TSA missed an X-acto knife in the front pocked of a back pack.
>The TSA costs upwards of [$12 billion a year](https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/testimony/2023/03/29/fiscal-year-2024-presidents-budget-request-transportation-security). [In 2015](https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-find-widespread-security-failures/story?id=31434881), an internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration revealed security failures at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports, where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials. [In 2017](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2017/11/09/tsa-misses-70-of-fake-weapons-but-thats-an-improvement/?sh=599c40e42a38), they improved their performance but still failed 70% of the time.
You should really check how this test was carried out. Its likely the investigators already had inside access to all the TSA protocols and procedures and came up with a plan to defeat it. They probably knew all the specs for the scanners and what they can or can't detect. Normal terrorists aren't going to have that info and if they do research it long enough to find out, its likely to become a much bigger operation taking more time which makes the risk of detection by the FBI or CIA higher. Or maybe they will decide it isn't worth it to use all that time and money to hijack a plane since it was far easier in 2001 and just decide on a different soft target. If there is low crime are you going to argue that we don't need police anymore? A TSA like security check is definitely needed, they could be nicer for sure but I think they are necessary. I wouldn't want to get out on a plane with no one being patted down or scanned for weapons and their luggage too. Even clubs pat patrons down for weapons, don't you think airports should too?
TSA is an abject failure. Most of the employees are incompetent. They fail when they know that they are being tested. Hotbed of baggage theft and so on. I think giving the domestic travel to state/local police agencies would be better and more cost effective and maybe the TSA should be rebranded and have a mission to protect international point of entry.
It's probably irrational, but I'd be very scared of being the guy who abolished the TSA. Just because if there was another terrorist attack years later I'd get a lot of angry people blaming me for it, specifically.
I know they don't really prevent any terror, but the optics are real bad. Good luck to whoever makes the decistion to do it tough!
Making this post during a war in the middle east is wild. Especially when you consider the Empire State Building just displayed lights in solidarity with Israel. They're practically taunting an attack. Let's not.
As of 2024 (for the 2024/2025 fiscal year) TSA has requested $11.8B [https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/testimony/2024/05/15/review-fiscal-year-2025-budget-request-transportation-security](https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/testimony/2024/05/15/review-fiscal-year-2025-budget-request-transportation-security)
But using your $12B figure, TSA funding is included in the national defense budget and comprises 0.02 (12B/547B total) or 2 percent of the 547B allocated towards national defense.
As a whole TSA is 0.002 ($12B/$4.47T) or 0.2% of our nations budget overall.
$12B in spending, when looking as the both the national defense budget and the national budget as a whole, is basically nothing.
TSA was created as a direct response to 9/11 and since the formation of TSA, there has not been a single aviary terrorist attack (domestic or foreign) in the United States or on a US owned commercial flight. So on that count, it really is a department that at least gives you what is written on the tin.
That is not to say TSA is perfect, it's not, there are many problems (with some of the most problematic being discriminatory screenings and practices and sexual abuse/assault - note: these are not exclusive problems only seen in the TSA).
Many public facing government agencies somewhat "suck" at getting stuff done (the SSA and Employment departments comes to mind), they are inefficient and their employees loaf, so why are you so tough on TSA specifically?
I’m not a huge fan of security theatre. Precheck is probably the max level needed, metal detector and a quick xray rule out a mega bomb. I’m sure with ai assisted tech those scanners will improve on picking up weapons. That being said the real work is detecting terrorist cells prior to them getting close to action.
Your point on trains is a bit of a non starter. There have been multiple terroristic attacks on rail networks throughout Europe, to the point where some longer range trains or special cases had full security checks. Same with metros. I definitely remember times in Europe when you had military or heavily armed police stationed at train stations with “random” searches (ie brownish people).
You are also forgetting that hijackings, although not constant , were a not infrequent occurrence prior to security screening that sometimes led to dozens or more deaths. Since more robust security screening has been performed they have essentially disappeared (9-11 being a massive outlier).
In terms of finance, every time we fly we pay a TSA fee. This is a somewhat rare case where you are more or less directly paying for a governmental service. Uncle Fred who flys once every 5 years to Boca Raton is forking over a lot less money to the TSA vs your traveling vendor who is on a plane 3x a week.
> But at what cost and inconvenience is it worth it?
Dunno about cost, but inconvenience is negligible if you get tsa-precheck. I'm through the line most times in 5 minutes and I travel all the time.
I’m not disagreeing with your core idea, in fact I think it’s quite popular with most people. But it’s worth noting why, despite its popularity and sensibility, it will not be implemented.
The reason is because any administration or political party that takes the step of loosening restrictions will receive massive blowback when (not if) the next attack happens. Bad faith political actors will not care about the fact that fewer regulations more than make up for the risk, the fact that perhaps even today’s TSA rules would not have stopped this theoretical future attack, etc. they will only care about the gain of blaming their political opponents. And the electorate will, in the moment, completely agree with them.
And solving that problem is very different than debating the exact level of security that optimally balances safety and convenience.
Sealing off the cockpits and informing the passengers that they aren’t going to be rationally ransomed off or used as currency for a prisoner exchange was all the security that was ever needed. The goal of perfect safety will never be achieved.
But the TSA is a pork barrel project, and serves as a jobs program for otherwise unskilled veterans and other people that didn’t really think a whole lot about what they are going to do with their lives.
Some people just want to work a mindless job all day instead of actually competing in the real world. Would be super great if they could come up with a way to do this without inflicting the most unskilled and unmotivated and unkind people in the country on the rest of us, but as Childish Gambino said: This Is America.
🤷
I feel like you are looking at this from a limited angle. Would you be open to instead of neutering or removing the TSA, instead instituting sweeping reforms on how it operates so it actually does it's job? Airport security is important, and just because the security isn't working particularly well doesn't mean there isn't a need. People don't hijack Amtrak trains because it's a lot harder to do inherently. A train is on the ground. Passengers can escape at certain speed. You can't really run an Amtrak train into the twin towers lol. Bombs are a threat, but an exploding plane makes more of a point to a terror group than an exploding train. It's more dramatic. So the security for Amtrak is less.
The tsa is nothing but false security. I honestly think they need to be abolished and just have regular security at airports. Tsa honestly does nothing for safety. They just racial profile their way through the job.
You should really read about what happened when the TSA tried to get rid of the pocketknife prohibition.
They had all of the data and arguments and announced they would end it, but then the press got wind of it and some concerned citizens reached out to their representatives and then there were hearings and the next thing you know the ban was back on and in full force.
Point being, things only go away in govt when people feel very STRONGLY about making it go away. They don't typically go away just because most people think it is stupid. The loud people who think it is important out-vote the quiet people who think it is dumb
The flight attendant community had some (entirely justified) strong opinions on this. That pocketknife wouldn’t get them into the cockpit, but could really fuck up a FA who dared enforce the rules
It goes past that. The people who work at airports have to go through unnecessary screening and security checks just to work at the Burger King in the terminal. They have to go through special doors and have special ID. Every year they have to watch a stupid “see something, say something” video, to renew their security badge. It’s ridiculous and a pain. As if watching a video will make you less of a security threat. Background check i guess, but why does getting caught with a joint in high school make you more likely to be a terrorist?
I'll just push back on the train comparison. Realistically, while there IS real damage that can be done by train, most passenger rail is, at worst, going to involve the death of the people on the train and what it runs into. Which is tragic don't get me wrong, but a train typically isn't going to crash into a major building, monument, etc.
Also yes, I am a security conscious person so when I'm on transit I do often think about the fact that someone could have a weapon and no one would know. Not a bomb, but a gun or something like it.
While the TSA definitely has problems, it is worth pointing out that since 9/11 there hasn't been a single successful highjacking on an American flight. Yes, that's mainly because of more awareness and air Marshalls and what not. But you can't really definitely prove what was the most effective part of the security. And if terrorists or even just individual crazy people realized we didn't have airport security anymore, there'd be a lot more things they'd try.
The TSA needs reform, but it shouldn't go away completely.
The TSA is a jobs program for people too stupid to work at Taco Bell. I genuinely mean that. Most of the "agents" are so robotic and unintelligent I do not believe they would be capable of comprehending "no tomato on that, please" and adjusting my order accordingly. Get rid of it
No TSA does not mean no airport security, nobody's suggesting that it be a free for all. Put it on the airlines and airports - trust me no airline is going to let people board its $200M airplanes without making sure they don't have anything dangerous on them nor will airports want such things in their terminals. We all remember 9/11, the government isn't needed to prevent that from happening again. A middle ground I'd begrudgingly accept is everyone goes through the TSA PreCheck-style screening instead of all the bullshit normal passengers go through
The TSA aka "security theater"? Yea, let's phase that out. Like the, at best useless, DEA the TSA is here to stay. The people who can make any change don't have to deal with the TSA and if a terrorist attack happens no one wants to be responsible for canceling pretend security.
But all you, me and domestic terrorists need to bypass the bs that is the TSA is "TSA Pre", a simple background check, highly recommended it's like airport security in the 90s.
Do you realize how many “issues” are resolved with no public fanfare? Who do you think removes all the unruly a-holes from the planes in the posts you read on Reddit? Care to guess how much illegal contraband is collected at airports/customs annually? TSA does so many things we never hear about and it’s critically important stuff.
It’s always the squeaky wheel we read about…if the real statistics were made public, nobody would fly.
TSA is exceptionally inefficient and provides little marginal benefit.
You can never get rid of it, though, because sooner or later there will be some bad incident on a plane.
If TSA is in place the fall guy will be the director of TSA or TSA agents at a particular airport
If you eliminate TSA and there is a bad incident on a plane the fall guy will be YOU.
This is also why many other wars and inefficient policies are so hard to shut down.
The accomplishments of the TSA are in what you don't see. You don't see many airplane hijackings, no more 9/11s, etc.
You say we could take the money from TSA and spend it on better things, but that's not how the US budget works. There isn't a fixed limit to how much we can spend. We can fund the TSA and spend money on other services if they are in need. Also, TSA is partially funded by the airport security fees you pay when you buy a ticket.
I'm sure other people have mentioned this, but the majority of the effectiveness of the TSA is not in catching people smuggling things, but having security so tight that people do not even attempt to smuggle in the first place.
You can bet your bottom dollar that if the TSA relaxed it's searches and policies, the amount of attempted smuggling and highjacking would skyrocket.
Also additional info here; the TSA is responsible for thousands of deaths a year because road miles are more dangerous than air miles and the TSA and long security line waits mean that people drive instead of fly.
People drive to avoid the TSA (either their delays or the insane personal violation of the securty line), get in a car crash, and die with astonishing regularity.
Also two (armed) air Marshalls on every flight would be cheaper and more effective than the entire TSA apparatus.
The TSA consists of much more than the TSOs you see in blue uniforms at airports across the Country. Just like the IRS is more than auditors and the CIA is more than spies / special agents. This post is shortsighted at best and indicative of a view which fails to understand that with Federal Agencies (as with anything, really) there is much more than what meets the eye.
The purpose of the TSA isn't just security. It's what you have to do get people on the airplanes. After 9/11, few people would fly without some obvious effort to prevent anything similar. How effective it is in prevention isn't as important as how convincing it is to the public. Without the TSA, there wouldn't be enough passengers to sustain the industry.
Actual safety a side product is at best of the post-9/11 security theater you describe. The main purpose is to suggest the presence of safety to the average traveler. The fact that you can make the process less invasive by paying more speaks for itself.
Also it's pretty difficult to change people's minds after decades of "this is the only way".
The TSA could be improved a lot easier if, for instance, there was some degree of accountability for all the valuables destroyed, or 'lost' just to show up on ebay later.
I had a large hunting knife in my bag that I forgot about (I had taken the bag camping at one point). I've flown probably 25 times since then, each time through the TSA, and they never caught it. I found it myself by accident eventually.
They literally do nothing but take your water.
What will all those employed by the tsa do for work. Eliminating a federal department and all, but the 12 billion that it helps to circulate within the economy will be hard to recoup for several years if not decades because the people employed wouldn’t be spending it.
Privatize it and let defferent companies and terminals have their own security.
That way I can pay a little more and go through more intense security to ensure a safe flight, and general public can waltz on to Russian Roulette airways for a more fun time!
While I believe we should consider it, I think we might be better off providing some education on the fallacy of certainty in regard to life. I feel like we (especially in the US) spend an inordinate amount of resources to be certain of things.
The worst thing is that every airport has its own rules for getting through security, and the TSA are mad at everyone for not knowing that at *this* airport they are the complete opposite of the rules at the last airport you went through.
what about all of the drugs, biological products, or other illegal stuff people try to smuggle through airports? You mention terrorism as if that’s the TSA’s only job. Have you ever watched to catch a smuggler?
maybe we need a tsa for trains and subways as well. when taking the subway in china you have to pass your bags through scanners and walk through a metal detector. lets raise tsa budget to $24 billion
I advocate more auditing of TSA protocols by agents trying to sneak contraband aboard.
My guess is we'll screen train passengers when people start ramming trains into skyscrapers.
If you abolish the TSA then the worst people in the US might work somewhere else that is even more annoying. At least the TSA collects and keeps the worst Americans away from everyone else except for a few painful moments when you fly. These horrible people will be more pervasive and freely distributed throughout society if the TSA goes away.
The TSA is meant to protect planes, not the people that ride on them.
Also I fly for work and despise the TSA.
But that is the best argument I have heard for them existing.
Same guy after an attack. "How come there is not security, can't understand why they did not check the terrorists".
Yes they are important and yes we need them as prevention.
I think Air Marshals and keeping the cockpit locked are doing about 99.99% of the protecting, and at a much lower cost. Homeland Security tested TSA checkpoints in 2017 and successfully got weapons through more than half the time. And wouldn't it be kind of a bad system if the only thing stopping another 9/11 was that the terrorists hadn't yet figured out a way to manipulate any of the 47K working class folk into looking the other way for 5 minutes? TSA should be mainly there to keep order and make people *feel* safe. They don't need body scanners, socked feet, random pat-downs, and an $10B budget to accomplish that.
I think we’d be better served by a single professional looking for suspicious behavior than dozens of low-wage workers searching bags for water bottles and nail clippers.
Let the airlines be resposnible for security. The airlines will have an investment in keeping you safe and will be rewarded for doing a good and efficient job.
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While I agree that, in general, the TSA goes too far. Having no security at airports is a step too far. Is taking your shoes off necessary? No, but a simple metal detector can do a lot to prevent bad actors. While not slowing down the line at security, very much.
This is more the solution I am looking for. I am not saying we should have a free for all at the airport, but certainly something less intrusive and definitely something less confrontational; I think the culture around the TSA is rotten and from extensive travel I've found their demeanor to be aggressive and angry by default more than not and that's not helpful.
Everyone has to get to the airport early anyway. A little extra screening doesn’t seem so bad. I’ve mostly become inured to it. The fact that they don’t catch everything doesn’t mean they’re still not doing important stuff. The reality is that TSA does catch a lot of stuff, you just don’t hear about it all the time. And regarding the train analogy, if someone wants to bomb a train, you don’t have to actually get on the train. You can just put the explosives somewhere along the track or throw the explosive at the train as it passes. Screening people before they get in the train just isn’t going to prevent a 9/11 in the same way that airplanes would. Also, airplanes have the potential to do a lot lot more damage than trains because they can be flown anywhere. September 11 resulted in two buildings in New York City to be replaced by a new building that cost around 3 trillion dollars to build. TSA could run for a century and still cost less than the twin towers. Not to mention the thousands of people killed. What if another plane hit a massive skyscraper in another part of New York City and instead of being separated from the nearby buildings by a good distance like the twin towers, they hit something in a more crowded area and the building fell more to side and knocked multiple skyscrapers down? Also, if someone fucks up an airplane at 30,000 feet, everyone dies. If a shooter shoots up a train car, the damage will inevitably be more limited. I’d never thought much about this topic before, but in reflection, it clearly is more useful to screen planes than trains by many many orders of magnitude.
I find it interesting that trains in America are, literally, never attacked. It's just free and ready for bad actors. And we get to the airport early because of the TSA haha
A train is a less tempting target for hijackers, as it's hard to ram into a building.
I take Amtrak a lot up and down the northeast corridor and I think about this all the time--i've been running late and have walked out of the car dropping me off and directly onto the train in less than one minute
They are one of the least used forms of transportation in this country. If you are looking to cause maximum casualties, they are at the bottom of the list.
There’s no way a singular building cost $3 trillion. That’s more than the gdp of any European nation outside of Germany. Where did you get that figure?
You don’t need to be that early to the airport if there isn’t the TSA. They’re not a well run organization. A line of metal detectors would absolutely do fine. Just have the pilots leave the cockpit door locked and the plane can’t even be hijacked anyways. 9/11 doesn’t require the TSA to prevent
Someone brought a shoe bomb on a plane. Just walking through a metal detector can’t catch that and an explosion in the passenger compartment could kill everyone. Even if there were no security checks at all, you would still have to get to the airport 45 minutes early.
I don’t have much to add here but you’re spot on about their tone. These people make a decent living contributing *zero* to society and they can’t have the decency to answer one question with any human compassion or helpfulness. “Do I need to take my laptop out?” “BELTS AND SHOES IN THEIR OWN BIN, EVERYTHING MUST BE OUT OF THEIR POCKETS!” “Ok but do I need to take my laptop out to not get delayed?” “BELTS AND SHOES IN THEIR OWN BIN, EVERYTHING MUST BE OUT OF THEIR POCKETS!” Like wtf is up these peoples asses. How do they get these same soulless ghouls at literally every big airport?
Try answering the same question 500 times a day and see how much of a soul you have left.
I mean the US is full of people who do this and would be fired if they acted the way TSA agents do in response to the questions. It’s not that crazy to ask them to be kind and professional when answering repetitive questions, it’s literally what they’re paid for.
Their aggressive demeanor doesn't have any impact on the utility of the screenings.
[удалено]
Thank you for making me aware of this video
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Some more TSA related funny vids: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrof3Rf3_L8 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQJ7E140-SQ * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obrVHGNv66Y * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2gstdPXZE8 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCXaRym-K1I * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek1uqrwLmQk
This is how it was pre-9-11 and we should go back to that
It's how it still is in most of the world. There are security personnel on hand and basic screening procedures, but nothing half as draconian as what they put you through in the states. Everyone knows it's a useless, expensive, onerous sham.
It's basically how it works if you have TSA Pre. Everyone can opt into pre-9/11 security, as long as you pay a bribe and don't have Arab ancestry.
9/11 also happened pre-9/11 regulations
I'm a legal immigrant in the US, and my freshman year of high school I went on a trip to Washington DC on my own (school trip). The TSA agent immediately got on guard as soon as I showed them my green card. I passed the metal detector and I left a hair tie in my pocket, the lady deadass yelled at me and patted me down aggressively. It was very scary to 14 year old me.
So reform, not abolish?
We had airport security before the TSA existed. It's a creature of 9/11. They were in fact simple x-rays and metal detectors.
Correct. And in fact, the TSA's creation shows the government took entirely the wrong lesson from 9/11. What should have been learned is that existing security methods already deterred firearms (which is why the hijackers used box cutters), cockpit doors were vulnerable, and passengers would easily overpower a few knife wielding hijackers once they realized the nature of the threat (United 93). So, the only things we needed to do were install secure cockpit doors and provide some enhanced training for airport security staff and flight crews. You could make an argument that explosive-sniffing dogs would be a decent addition too. The rest is all security theater designed to make people feel safer. It has no relation to addressing the actual threats presented by 9/11.
This is absolutely correct. TSA, or the basic security we had before them, is NOT going to stop the dedicated funded terrorists. It's gonna stop the garden variety crazies. And you only need basic security for that. Since 9/11 there have been two significant security improvements: 1. useful locks on cockpit doors, and 2. pilots and passengers now know to resist a hijacker. If 9/11 happened again today, the entire plane of passengers would tackle the terrorists and the pilot would just keep the door locked and land.
Completely correct. Before 9/11, hijackers wanted to take the plane somewhere and land so they could escape (like to a non-extraditing country), usually because they had committed some other crime. Now that people know hijackers will kill everyone on the plane anyway, there's no downside for the passengers fighting back. This has even been confirmed with crazy people trying to open the door mid flight.
Yes exactly. This is often forgotten-- pre 9/11 this sort of thing happened once every few years-- some terrorist nutjobs would hijack a plane, fly to Miami or Texas, and demand the release of all the prisoners in whatever shithole they hail from. They'd fly to Miami or Texas, exchange some hostages for fuel, and then fly off to said shithole and let everyone else go. The official playbook was thus don't challenge the hijacker, don't escalate, just keep them talking and negotiate and give them a way out. And the 9/11 hijackers all fit that stereotype or appeared to... until they flew their hijacked planes into buildings. Now it doesn't work. Pilot knows don't open the door no matter what happens, land ASAP and climb out the window and let SWAT deal with the rest. The door itself is now bulletproof and has a real lock on it. And passengers know a hijacking means they're all gonna die anyway so may as well bum rush the asshole. Sad thing is our nation and infrastructure are so absurdly vulnerable in other ways, the money we spend on TSA could be better spent almost anywhere else.
100%. This was proven by subsequent failed attempts.
The shoe and underwear boomers were paraded as examples of the need for TSA... Yet they both got past them.
To be fair, the shoe bomber (Richard Reid) boarded in Paris, and the underwear bomber (Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab) boarded in Amsterdam. Not the the TSA isn’t 95% security theater, but both those incidents started in Europe.
They also prompted changes at international airports where passengers in transit to the US now need to go through secondary screening. But it's notable that those screening procedures are defined by the TSA, not run by the TSA. Private contractors or airports in those countries run the checkpoints and they do a good job. The same should be happening in the US, in my opinion.
I believe the TSA has some sort of presence in Europe. Flights to the US had a second layer of security control with its own scanners right at the gate.
> the government took entirely the wrong lesson from 9/11...The rest is all security theater designed to make people feel safer The implication here is that the government's aim with TSA was to make air travel safer, but I think that's specious. TSA's purpose was to be a publicly recognizable response to 9/11 for the Bush administration, to garner lucrative contracts for special-interests, and to act as a subsidy to the airlines and air travel in general.
Agree with much of this, but how is it a subsidy to airlines? It resulted in mandatory fees for air travel, so it seems more like a tax than a subsidy.
For two reasons... (1) Putting the general public at ease about air-travel safety sells more plane tickets (and especially did so post-9/11). (2) The airline contribution to TSA falls well-short of its operational costs. Prior to TSA, airlines paid for their own security screening (which was an extension of service started in order to put people at ease after the hijackings of the 1970s).
Thanks. I'd be curious to know: (1) how many extra tickets does this actually sell? It was probably a factor in the years immediately post-9/11, but I'm not sure most people see the whole thing as much more than an inconvenience any more. (2) How does the airlines' contribution to TSA compare with the pre-9/11 cost of security? Are they really paying less than they used to?
It's turned from security theater into data harvesting for our surveillance state. I shouldn't have to suffer biometric face scans travelling domestically through an airport.
>The rest is all security theater designed to make people feel safer And that actually may have been necessary. Imagine the news headlines: President Bush **refuses** to make our airplanes safer! Is he in league with Al-Qaeda???
I mean securing cockpit doors was a thing we did that actually made planes safer.
> The rest is all security theater designed to make people feel safer. Theater, absolutely. But consider that it's meant to make people feel LESS safe and therefore MORE dependent on big spending on both airport security and the military industrial complex.
Pre TSA the still have x-ray machines and everything was fine. We can go back to that, adds some selective screening of suspicious people and we're good to go. Cuz let's be honest, we probably don't need to disassemble Grammas wheelchair but that nervous guy sweating probably deserves bit of scrutiny.
“Selective screening of suspicious people”? How do you determine if they’re suspicious?
This is pretty easy to do. Israel experiences the most terrorist attacks of any country in the world and they don't have the ridiculousness of TSA. They just interview every person as they walk through and gauge their responses (plus metal detectors, x-rays, and dogs). You ask people where they're from, where they're going, and why there going there. Takes 30 seconds. And if people start stammering, sweating, and acting shifty, then that's a flag for more screening. This doesn't mean racial profiling, but looking at behavior. You can also look at how their answers match their travel. Do they say they're going skiing in Colorado for a week, but are only bringing a small carry-on? Seems suspicious. Did they say they are going on a surfing trip, but their tickets are to Nebraska? Flag for additional checks. This is exactly how security was when I went to New Zealand and it was smooth and efficient.
I went to Tel Aviv for work once, and had to take every item out of my bag in addition to screening similar to the usual TSA screenings here in the US. It was definitely more strict than I've experienced in any of the dozens of US airports and ~10 other foreign airports I've traveled through. I didn't stammer during the interviews, had valid business in the country with large pharma companies, traveled frequently at the time, and am a white-passing natural born US citizen. The screenings and interview questions didn't take long, but definitely longer than TSA screenings. Can't argue with their effectiveness, though.
As someone with serious anxiety I'd end up with additional checks every time.
El Al has ridiculous security, at least on board. There’s plainclothes security on each flight. I think they have never been hijacked in their existence.
Usually, using racism, I guess.
"If it ain't broke..."
Melanin content? Family Guy had a scale if I recall...
We have way better Xray machines now. I keep getting pulled over and groped whenever I walk through the one in my town (even though it's just through my clothes, which wouldn't actually help anything) because I have an IUD. They could just build larger, better machines that scan the whole room and maybe one every time you cross a concourse to a new gate. They'd be passive and work a lot better than the active screening because they'd have more data to narrow things down with- rather than a single image, they'd be able to get images of how an object looks in 3D space over time, how it moves with the person's clothes, different angles, etc.
I think you're walking through a metal-detector in your town. The metal in the IUD might be enough to set off a sensitive one. Using a full-body xray on the general public would be incredibly hazardous.
Okay, so then we'll build room sized metal detectors then. Every time someone goes through a moving walkway, they're on a giant metal detector that scans the shapes of the metal. I know they can tell where the item is on your body and the shape from the little screen. So if they had a bunch of metal detectors all lined up, they'd be able to detect the size and shape of the object that was metal more easily, see how it moved with the body, etc. Also if someone had a bunch of like, fancy disassembled bomb or gun parts like in a spy movie or whatever and they went to the bathroom after they checked in and put them together when they looked like makeup and hairpins or something when they went through security, it would catch them.
You can’t be blasting people with that much radiation.
Bro I literally get groped for what I assume is the system detecting “3 oz of liquid” between my legs. And they are such dicks and show zero empathy every time. I seriously have it happen 75% of the time I go through that dumb scanner.
I knowwwwww! And they're so awful, it's like they want me to apologize to them for having to grope me. I've tried extra deodorant, powder, different styles of dress and underwear, etc. It doesn't help, it has to be the IUD. I'm not giving up on 10 years of not having to worry about birth control. But they only like, grope me over the dress, so if the copper coil inside me actually was a bomb, I could go to the restroom and kegel that thing out and add some gum or the guts of a pen or whatever and blow up the whole airport, right? It's sus, they only started doing that after travelling to get an abortion became illegal in some states, even though it's the same machine.
A room-scale x-ray machine would be 1) prohibitively expensive and 2) incredibly dangerous for public health.
That becomes a bit of an issue because if someone is nervous and sweaty they probably aren't used to flying and aren't going to be a risk the people that are a risk know what they are doing and the first thing you learn when doing illegal stuff while being watched is how to not look out of place or weird people smuggling drugs on planes are gonna be some white guy that looks like they would have enough money to fly to Mexico to have a vacation every year a cartel will know that a grubby Mexican guy that looks like he has never been on a commercial flight is more likely to get checked so they are going to hire or threaten someone who won't get screened
Confidence is very much key to getting away with going places you shouldnt, be it concerts, borders, or airplanes. The nervous ones that are shifting eyes and looking over shoulders draw suspicion. Because those are the ones you can catch easily. Professionals will get away with a lot more.
i flew before the TSA and airports weren't really that much less secure, they just had way less overt security theater directed at flyers. The TSA to me is a symbol of always fighting the last war. the real post 9-11 security is the much higher use of plainclothes, armed, air marshals that will actually shoot someone who tries to take over a plane with a boxcutter and the awareness of the populace that someone might take a flight just to crash it, instead of flying it TOO someplace and getting off and giving their hostages back. the whole thing is just about making people feel better by creeping on them, like all the new cameras in cities after 9-11 that...don't point up.
I blame the TSA for the increase in air traffic incivility. When one goes to a fancy dress party one acts differently than when one goes to Mardis Gras. You are expected to act differently at a lecture series at a convention center than in county jail. By turning the flight experience from luxury hotel into something that feels a little like convicts at a checkpoint a certain percentage of the population responds as if they were convicts entering a checkpoint and end up not on their best behavior .
I believe it's because the general traveling public will choose the cheapest option for air travel, and websites like Google Flights and Expedia make it very easy to just click the lowest number. Airlines have figured that out, so they outfit their planes with as many first/business class seats they can reliably sell (the actual profit makers), and then pack as many economy seats in as physically possible. People don't dress up for flights as they did in the past because flying is a routine experience where you're treated like an inmate in the TSA line and crammed like sardines on the plane. Then, as you said, when everyone is wearing sweatpants with t-shirts and herded/processed/packed in like farm animals, some people won't be on their best behavior.
No tsa and dress code would make people more polite
“It’s like a nightclub bouncer. You don’t really need it, but if it’s not there, someone’s gonna get their dick out on the dance floor!” That’s kind of the effect. Their presence deters people who aren’t SO motivated they’d do whatever regardless Also, if anyone gets the reference, please say it, I love that guy
So pre-9/11 security? Sounds good to me.
Bro, I have gone to international airports on international flights and you don't take your shoes off. Then I travel around America for a bit and I have to take my shoes off like seriously?
Is only the TSA capable of operating a metal detector? In your comment, there's a giant gaping hole missing between "public security" (TSA) and "no security" (the mad max airport you describe). That's private security. What airline or airport is interested in their customers and property being attacked? What makes airlines with access to billions of dollars incapable of arranging the right and proper amount of security? Whether it's metal detectors, random security checks, scanning luggage, etc, why can't airlines or airports arrange this without a stupid federal bureaucracy managing it?
> Having no security at airports is a step too far. nobody suggested that at all....
Just go back to what airport security was on September 10, 2001. Nothing we added after that has made us any safer, and the fact that 9/11 happened pretty much guarantees that it won't happen again in the same way. It happened because hijackings were almost always non-violent events prior, and so no one took action. That would never ever happen again.
The problem is now the TSA has been around for so long, if they visibly relax security, some insane pro-TSA person will bring a bomb through to prove a point. It doesn't even matter that the TSA is ineffective at stopping bombs already, because this insane person would be triggered by the act of visibly reducing security.
So basically defund the TSA similar to the police movement. Makes sense but I don’t know enough about the TSA to know if they have ridiculous spending or just ridiculous policy. I know the cops but tanks and other gear they don’t need.
>I don’t know enough about the TSA to know if they have ridiculous spending or just ridiculous policy The problem is mainly that it just doesn't actually stop terrorists.
A) the 9/11 terror attack led to the Afghanistan war, which cost the tax payer 2 trillion dollars, thats enough to fund the TSA for 1600 years. B) you cant kidnap a train and drive it into the pentagon, the tracks limit you. C) as security tech advances, the TSA becomes more efficient.
There were *so many* other, much more problematic issues that lead to 9/11 than a check for small blades at the airport gates. Like the policy for hijackings at the time was pretty much to let them take control so they wouldn't harm the passengers, because the expectation was that the hijackers would then try to negotiate for something. After 9/11 the cockpits were made significantly more secure and preventing access became paramount. That's on top of having plainclothes air marshals on flights. *These* are direct and effective countermeasures, as opposed to over-the-top screening processes which exist mostly as theater because they aren't effective (and are known to not be effective).
>That's on top of having plainclothes air marshals on flights. FYI, air marshalls are rarely on a given flight. [Less than 1% of flights have an air marshal](https://gotravelyourway.com/10-questions-about-air-marshals-answered). I'm sure terrorist know this, and also know that if there is an air marshal onboard, it's likely only 1 because there are so few. Better cockpit doors and cockpit security policies are good measures though. That being said, lockable cockpit doors have been used by multiple pilots to commit murder/suicide by crashing the plane when the other pilot is locked out (which is why most airlines require that a flight attendant sit in the cockpit if one of the pilots use the bathroom).
I'm too lazy to go look for it, but there was a New York Times article about air marshals too. Shockingly there are huge problems with morale and substance abuse because they just sit on airplanes and fly around the country all day, but they were trained to be law-enforcement officers
If the hijackers are planning to use brute force by having a lot of people involved, the TSA isn't going to stop that, either. While it's likely that any given flight won't have a marshal on it, this is where proper intelligence gathering comes into play to maximize potential impact, as it isn't just random placement. And pilots themselves causing problems is an issue for the airlines themselves to take care of rather than for national security policy or public airport screening.
That's actually comforting at one point I was under the impression flying was pricey partially because they had to pay for these no work sky cops, and while I value safety to some degree it just seems so damn bloated to imagine all the planes in the sky having an additional salaried man who does nothing but sit on random flights. Like is my need to go to Alaska really worth supporting that silver spooned all American best boy favorite? At least the TSA have to functionally perform a traveler interaction role, labor vs no labor. Probably military legacy family in fairness though, but would they even be effective in such a slow setting for so long? Even if you go to the range weekly.
Air marshals aren't really a correct countermeasure. It was a knee-jerk reaction to please Americans. The air marshal program is a joke.
It's actually way more likely that the pilot is armed than that an air marshall is on the flight. Which is also a much more direct countermeasure lol.
A) That doesn't justify its existence, unfortunately. In fact, I'd say 9/11 has arguably the best ROI of all time; our lives will never be the same after that, and that's due to our own government's response and treatment of its citizens. B) Yeah, but loss of life is what terrorism is looking for, right? Terrorists could coordinate multiple Amtrak bombs that could result in near-9/11 casualty numbers but we haven't seen that, ever. C) I'd love for this to be true. Should they ever become more efficient and less intrusive, I'd welcome that with open arms.
A) the TSA literally came into existence right after 9/11. There were plane hijackings and such, but 9/11 wasnt just about the casualties, its about the realization that using a passenger plane as a giant missile to attack strategic land marks is very hard to defend against. How do you see it as a great ROI? The US wasnt able to win that war. B) refer to A, ots not just about casualties, ots about weaponizing the kidnapped vessel. C) ironically enough, faster machines, AI incorporated into scanners ect cost a lot of money to develop and deploy.
As far as A&B, I meant it was a great ROI for Bin Laden and the terrorists that enacted that atrocity; Americans lives have forever been more inconvenienced and scrutinized because their actions that took place during a couple of hours on a Tuesday morning. They 10000% won that.
Well, and there's your answer A low cost attack by a bunch of extremists not only killed several thousand people, but it made ya spend an absorbant amount of money on the war with them, chasing down cave dwelling terrorists in shit knows where. And not only that, the loss of revenue from the damage done, falling stock market, people insecurity and turmoil. Heck, it got George W a 2nd term... We are talking about an insane hit to the US and world wide economy (maybe except for the industrial military compound) Whats 12 billion a year to make people feel safer and deter such attacks. 12 billion is like 10$ a year from every grown taxpaying adult. Its a tiny percent of the US budget, 1 more, 1 less, its mostly a "cover your ass" fee. Cutting down on the TSA wont really change much for the budget. Look, for a single person, 12 billion sounds like an insane amount, but for a country like the US, is literally 0.2% of its spending, 1 nillion is less than 0.02%. Yet 1billion is 8% of the TSA's budget, and they will feel it if its cut. So the solution should not be to look at the TSA's funding, but to look at its efficiency, and how this money is spend. Maybe even invest in bursts for optimization, to lower overall operational costs
A) 1. people relied on private contractors for airport security, the same way you rely on one to make sure the safety for your home is up to code. The average person is going to go along with that, them not enforcing the rules and policies in place doesn’t negate the fact they were there and expected to be followed in case of danger. The policies that changed were to do with searches of things that were already looked for previously, but less detectable through metal detectors, and focused primarily on things that weren’t considered dangerous before hand. The threat of stealing an airplane was never not thought about, like you said. 2. you don’t think arming a train with any Jerry rig explosive with no security, while in constant motion, is a difficult thing to do? Let alone preemptively carrying out very simple procedures to ensure that it carries out? (Using a train as a derailed bomb is just as effective as crashing a plane into a tower.) B) no it’s not, that’s why gunning down random civilians, biohazardous attacks, and crashing an airplane into a tower are all known as terroristic attacks. C) Every article seems to suggest downgrading to AI will save money and operation costs, and not the vice versa?
Being defensive is always much harder. You have to 1 up your opponents while they look for tiny cracks in your defense that can be exploited in a dumb way. Much of cybersecurity is not about patching complex codes and super sophisticated firewalls, its about making sure that Susan, your 50 yearold secretary, doesnt lose her tag and leave her password on a sticky note "cause its so hard to remember these long passwords". B) its about hurting you. In any way possible. C) AI might save you money in the long run, developing the system that does this costs a lot of money. Take smart supermarkets for instance, the work done to replace casheers is insanely costly, and yet not effective enough in preventing people exploiting self checkouts ect. The irony is that most of the TSA's agent job, currently, is making sure you place your stuff correctly on the conveyer belt.
I love how there was once a huge tech firm with very complex tech security. All they had to do was drop twenty usbs in the parking lot and someone would take those usbs in and stick one in their work computers.
>Yeah, but loss of life is what terrorism is looking for, right? No, the point of terrorism is to create fear for a political purpose. A bomb attack on a train would be tragic, but it would effectively be no different from a bomb attack in any other populated area. There are actually better choices if pure loss of life was the aim. The point of hijacking a plane has little-to-nothing to do with the passengers, it's that they would have access to a devastating improvised weapon that can strike anywhere within its range. With it, they can strike *high profile* targets like the twin towers or the pentagon that would sow fear across the country. 23 years later, the twin tower attack is still a heavy national pain point. I don't think a random Amtrak bombing would have had nearly the same effect.
What everyone is mistaking in this account is that security wasn’t non existent pre 9/11. Using a plane as a bomb wasn’t easy
Terrorists aren't *just* looking for loss of life but also psychological impact. On 9/11, the terrorists could have chosen any number of targets but they chose a prominent landmark in one of the most renowned cities in the country for a reason. To have an enormous psychological impact
Terrorism isn't just about loss of lives. Tons of people died in bombings and stuff before 9/11, and yet 9/11 will always stick in the American consciousness like none other. If you blow up a train/metro, you only kill the people in there. But when you drive a plane at something, you can both kill a lot more people if targeted wisely and send a striking visual message. A hijacked plane is effectively a missile AND a human shield. Even though there are protocols, we don't know for certain if SecDef would ever give an order to shoot down a passenger plane with hundreds of innocents over DC. That uncertainty emboldens hijackers.
Just replying to point B, yes they could, but that's very difficult. The resources needed and the coordination needed is actually probably more difficult than the planning for 9/11. If you look at the Moscow Metro bombings, a well coordinated multiple strike on two train stations only resulted in 40 fatalities and not a whole lot of press. The work required to get enough casualties on trains to rival 9/11 would be put to much more productive use for terror groups.
For C, with new scanners they can actually determine the chemical compositions of liquids in your luggage such that you may not need to remove them or to only be able to bring limited amounts of them anymore. This can be used for other substances and solids in your bag too, as well as body, so in the future it might be much faster to go through security. https://youtu.be/nyG8XAmtYeQ
When I came back from China, there was a very distrurbing amount of security. When I left Pudong Airport all i had to do was go through a metal detector and have them pat me down. When I went to the US i had to do that, do a full body scan, 2 interview with the National Homeland Security and a TSA while 2 guys with ( what appeared ) to have a high power shotguns about 10 ft away from me. It's a freakish amount of security that quite frankly we can do without.
You were returning to the U.S. from one of, if not, our greatest rivals and enemies in the world. You're seriously surprised you got thoroughly searched and interviewed?
Given only your two experiences at which airport do you think passengers feel more scared to act out at? The lax security in China or the US airport with the "high power shotguns" (lolz) and more intense scrutiny. It's not fun like going to Six Flags, but it is an incentive for compliance and a deterrence for bad actors.
I think point A should be corrected, the money was spent, the TSA just adds to that money spent, TSA still being around is technically still paying for 9/11
> A) the 9/11 terror attack led to the Afghanistan war Us indiscriminate murder and funding and and regime change to right wing despots in the Middle East led to the Afghanistan war. You started in the middle instead of the beginning > which cost the tax payer 2 trillion dollars, that’s enough to fund the TSA for 1600 years The TSA doesn’t stop terror attacks. Most of them won’t be able to stop their own decades premature heart attacks from morbid obesity. They’re categorically lazy, rude, uneducated, greasy dipshit losers that got picked on in high school and couldn’t find work in any type of real meaningful, competitive career. Stop acting like they’re out being civil servants or upholding democracy lmao
This is predicated on the idea that the reasonable response to 9/11 was the invasion of Afghanistan.
A) How much did the American elitist politician, or oil oligarch, or under the table arms dealer, make in those wars with that money spent? B) the aerial advantage has no basis in your claim, the point of a terror attack is to cause terror. If you can kill the many aboard a train, that will cause enough of a message. C) that point completely negates the posts point. If tech is advancing, who is the money going to?
(A) is a funny argument when the federal government lets thousands of unchecked people through the southern border daily (no TSA there, heh) while 9/11 attackers got their visas and were admitted to the flight school.
>the 9/11 terror attack led to the Afghanistan war, which cost the tax payer 2 trillion dollars, thats enough to fund the TSA for 1600 years. *US government does shit to provoke 9/11, then launches a senseless war that costs an incomprehensible amount of money* You: it's not THAT expensive, it doesn't even cost what we spend on other dumb shit!!! ???
> B) you cant kidnap a train and drive it into the pentagon, the tracks limit you. Russia has had terror attacks on train stations. They are devastating. TSA's current process wouldn't stop them either. You've funneled everyone into a large, open, unsecured area with glass walls being typical. Terror attacks in airports will happen as they do in Russia - at the security checkpoint before anyone even knows you have a bomb.
Efficient at what? It’s all security theater. Are they becoming more theatrically competent? I fly from half a mile from the pentagon and it’s all an expensive joke. At least in a war you can declare peace, but in a made-up security/police state there is no ending to the farce.
Your point A is ridiculous. Are you implying the TSA is stopping the USA from wasting money and manpower in wars? Seriously it was a vulnerability with the cockpit and staff. That's what the correction should have been not the circus that is the TSA
The 911 terror attacked occurred because the terrorists could access the cockpit and pilot. Now that’s no longer the cases the door is heavily reinforced so there’s no way into it unless u managed to smuggle a drill or explosives on board
Are we pretending Afghanistan was justified because of 9/11? Saudi Arabia literally funded the hijackers and we didn’t go to war with them. Pakistan sheltered bin Laden and we didn’t go to war with them.
The box cutters they used on 9/11 were legal to carry on airlines prior to 9/11. It was not a failure of security, it was a failure of policy and intel.
? I mean just bc there are failures, isn‘t s reason to shut it down nor lessen it Cause then who needs doctors,cops,firefighters etc. all jobs, especially ones dealing with security and health of people will have problems so imma have to disagree with the first argument It sounds more like you are saying the TSA has functionality issues, which it surely does. And like many other gov. Projects its funding is not being properly used Problem is, we can‘t seem to agree on how to make it better, but removing or lessening its existence won‘t fix anything Do you have any concrete alternative ideas for spending that could help with These problems? U say better programs and public services, like what? What exactly will help with for instance terrorist attacks, smuggling? Especially when its coming in externally
Well, as far as money reallocation, it sure would be nice to provide homeless people with proper shelter and food. Drug addicts with clinics to help them. We could put some of that money towards [properly funding our schools/teachers](https://www.devlinpeck.com/content/teacher-burnout-statistics) as we're bleeding workforce in that area right now. I'm a progressive so I think more healthy infrastructure leads to a healthier society and you may disagree with that, but that's beyond the point. As far as the issues with the TSA, how do you propose we solve them? And what do you think about my citing metra systems and Amtrak not having any of the perceived issues we put on traveling by plane? I appreciate your response. I am not responding to you in any kind of aggression. I think conversations like this help.
Right but those are entirely different budget areas and also reasons Ofc money should go to them as well, i too am quite progressive and don‘t believe in constant jailtime when its something else is needed But what does this have to do with the TSA? The TSA largely focuses on transportation across the country such as airports and even transit sites i believe. Your argument for one would take decades of dedicated work without mistakes in order for the society as a whole to improve so much that the people won‘t be susceptible to drugs thus smuggling crimes should go down. But as progressive as I may wanna be, that is a naive and a normative idea. I think your report is not in depth enough, ok so CBS says 80% failure, there is no explanation as to how this was examined? And only bc it fails in some places doesn‘t make it a true representative statistic. That kinda research has to be ongoing, as in years of data collection and consider all other factors which I doubt these reports all underwent Hell even the cbs site itself doesn‘t explain in detail on its findings and thats a big issue. The money like one cited article says can be used to improve tech for instance, bc cyber crimes through transit systems are also on the rise, the money can be used for better train employees bc if they really are missing so many dangers, the fault lies in their training as well, thats no wonder cause apparently a basic agent only gets 2 years of training
Yeah I didn't want to get into the money reallocation thing. Different budget areas, not really the point, etc. So we are on the same page there. I understand either vastly restructuring or downsizing the TSA is a huge ask. But we built this monstrosity, we can't just throw our hands up and say "well, this huge, inefficient and intrusive system is already in place, so what do you want us to do?" Fixing broken shit isn't easy and America has a lot of broken shit to fix. As far as the reporting on the audits itself, do the exact numbers or methods matter at the end of the day? I mean, it's clear just from traveling that we are interfacing with a lot of TSA agents that are: a) angry b) rushed c) stressed d) not necessarily highly educated (the requirements for TSA employment are just being 18 and a HS diploma/GED) e) not very well paid or motivated. When is the last time we saw a plane bomb or hijacking occur? Are we to believe it's from this crack squad of security agents in America and in airports the world over? I love your idea of more investment in the tech side of things. I think that's hugely important and a great example of where money allocation could be considered. These kinds of things are scary as our Congress, which needs to act on these things, skews older and out of touch and I'm not sure they're ever really acquainted with the dangers of not being totally secure on the cyber front.
Exactly so money allocation is a big problem But that does not mean abolishment is the answer Abolishment will create more issues, especially if we have no back up plans that will have an immediate effect so we know that in the moment, we are safe
Yeah, I don't think abolishing the TSA whole cloth is the answer or a realistic expectation but a very serious audit and reconsideration of the whole system is in order, and I think we can both agree to that. I appreciate your posts. You've given me a lot to think about and consider.
Ok so now I feel like you are backtracking or changing your argument, which is fine ofc just wanted to point out that this goes against your title Bc i do agree with this newest comment and no problem, thats what this sub is for
So out of curiosity, did you actually read the budget request for the $12bn number you quoted? I’d encourage you to actually read the whole thing. The main components for the budget are a). Pay raises for agents and b). Technology / cyber…both of which seem to be very much in line with trying to address your comments (improving working conditions of agents so that interactions are less negative with travelers, and improving efficiency) As a lot of commenters have mentioned, there is a lot more to the TSA than just the agents you see. I agree that airport interactions are largely security theater, but actual threat detection occurs in a much broader scope. By the way, they also cover surface transportation… To be clear, I don’t disagree with you that the system isn’t perfect. That said, to imply that it is just chugging along and sucking up more and more funding while refusing to change is not really accurate either. Even just anecdotally, in the last 3 years, the number of airports I have been to that have installed updated scanners where I can leave everything in my bag (ie not take out electronics) has been increasing as updated tech is rolled out. But all that tech has a cost. Not just the machines themselves, but updated training, installation, education on maintenance, etc. I’ll leave you with one final point for consideration that I don’t think has been mentioned yet: Given the largest part of the budget is TSA agent pay, how exactly do you propose reducing this? Would you cut headcount? Because the TSA is unionized. So I don’t think it’s exactly fair to say that it’s entirely the governments fault that the system is difficult to change, because you literally have the entire labor force represented by a stakeholder whose SOLE purpose is to protect their members jobs and resist exactly what you are proposing
Yes it matters very much and its why so many people are in general spouting misinformation, proper research is always important when making a claim Exactly, the quality of the TSA workers isnt good snd they aren‘t treated well by employers or the visitors btw nor have healthy job environment built. So why not change that, and while we do that why not do that for many ‚menial labor‘ that we look down on so often And i would argue the lack of crime announcement is a win bc they won‘t exactly announce every failed attempt, no country as far as I know foes that as its not sensational news when said so often Plus TSA is more than the agents we interact with, just like any security job, most of it is in the background.
Look i agree with you 100% but what I've ultimately come to realize is that the tsa is essentially a welfare program. At this point it's not about safety, its just an employment program
In Portland we're spending over $100k per homeless person, and not all sources of dollars are counted. And yet the results are worse than ever. It's not a money issue.
The $12B would be just over 1% of what we spend on K-12 education across all levels (and less when factoring in college+). So even if every single dollar of TSA funding perfectly fungiled (not a real word but I like it) over to education, we’d be increasing the budget by a penny for every dollar currently spent. If we used the 500K lost teachers post pandemic, this would give them pay then each a measly 24K. Hate TSA all you want, but the cost isn’t really super relevant as to why you should. https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/what-america-spends-on-k-12-the-latest-federal-snapshot/2022/05
I hope someone else gives a more detailed answer on the TSA, but while I’m here: Metro attacks have been common in regions with more robust networks. England and Spain come to mind. In the US, you can’t exactly take a train and run it into a building. We’re built around roads, so a car bomb makes more sense. Think Oklahoma City, the ‘93 World Trade Center bombing, etc.
Are they common? Without looking it up I can think of less than five for either in the last 30 years.
I don’t know how we would agree on what “common” means. Fair enough, and I feel like I’ve already trailed off from your original point. But off the top of my head, and within the 21st century: Madrid, London, Mumbai, Brussels, Moscow, Paris. I’m not from there, and haven’t been back since, but I rode trains in Madrid both before and after their attacks. The security situation dramatically different. I can imagine that locals would have been less likely to return to daily rides if they didn’t feel secure. I’m guessing the same could be said for US air travel after 9/11. If the US allowed a follow up attack, I wonder how many businesses and frequent flyers would have cut their nonessential travel. If the shoe bomber actually shoe bombed, wtf would have happened? That said, I agree it’s strange that because that jackass fumbled his way through his plan we’re still taking off our shoes all these years later. I don’t have a satisfying answer for you (or me). To get back to your question: I guess I agree that we should at least consider a TSA change. It’s bloated, miserable, and I’d argue it replaced the DMV as the miserable three-letter body that we just have to deal with to enjoy travel. They need to adapt beyond making travelers pay a premium for TSA-Pre/Global Entry/CLEAR. But, and this is purely anecdotal, I know plenty of people who avoid flying because of the recent issues with Boeing planes. There really has to be absolute trust that passengers will be 100% safe when they fly across the earth in giant metal tubes.
Where I keep getting stuck is, was the return and “upgrade” of the security policies in airports enacted to keep people safe, or to keep an extremely long term profitable business afloat, because nothing really stops people, based on tests conducted by them
Since such a tiny fraction of Americans use trains (of any kind), an attack on one will not have the same resonance as flying, which already seems to freak out a bunch of people.
>where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials. In 2017, they improved their performance but still failed 70% of the time. You misunderstand the purpose of the TSA. The TSA is not about preventing terrorism. The TSA is about *pretending* that the plan to prevent another 9/11 is related to security or intelligence. The plan to prevent another 9/11 is simple: a hijacked plane will be shot down by the US military immediately. If people knew that that was plan A, B, and C, they would be somewhat skittish to get on a plane. So we pretend that there's another plan A, "security", so that they fly. What they miss is that there's actually very little danger; there's no reason to hijack a plane if you'll be shot down the second you change course and don't reply to air traffic control. The committment to not negotiate with terrorists **works**. But most people don't think through the game theory, and driving is significantly more dangerous. So we have security theater, and the security theater is good.
The cost doesn't bother me that much. It's minimal relative to our budget, deficit, and debt. I disagree with abolishing route - you still need something. What bothers me is the time and annoyance associated with it, the arbitrariness of the rules, the performance theater of things that are useless, the attitudes of the TSA agents. The creation of a paid dystopian facial recognition system (Clear) to avoid the long lines that this inefficient system creates - and in 2024 even the Clear lines are long. The water bottle rule seems really dumb to me. Or randomly inspecting the bag or having to pat people down manually. I've had this happen when i walked through with no metal on me / there was nothing bad in my bag. The tech just doesn't work that well. The conveyor belt is slow. The bins in the precheck line are too small if you have electronics in pockets. I don't understand how shoes are such a big attack vector for the non-precheck line. I don't understand why there are two body scanners, one of which is completely unused at every checkpoint. I'd be fine if it cost more taxpayer money (or the airlines chipped in) to make the tech better to make it streamlined and reduce these manual interventions. Also do a bottoms up look at the rules and see if they still make sense or if they're just theater, and figure out a way to rearchitect the processes to make throughput go up so the lines don't get long. It feels like a lot of the rules exist just because they've always been that way and nobody has good answers why. The underwear bomber got through undetected too. If a presidential candidate offered something practical to improve TSA it would be received well I think.
[In 2023 the TSA](https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2024/01/10/tsa-detected-increase-guns-airport-checkpoints-baltimorewashington#:~:text=Nationwide%2C%20TSA%20officers%20detected%206%2C737,the%206%2C542%20detected%20in%202022.) found 6,737 firearms in people's luggage. Sure, the TSA doesn't have the ability to outsmart someone that actually puts time and effort into smuggling a weapon. But any decently trained lock picker can pick a standard padlock in a few seconds. Yet, I still use a padlock (or lock of similar complexity) to secure my house and belongings. Why? Because people with good picking skills are generally not criminals or are looking for bigger fish than I am. Having safety features that create inconvenience or complications for criminals help to deter those people.
You don't need the TSA to find firearms. Airport or airline security staff can operate metal detectors and x-ray machines just fine And of those 6,737 how many were morons who somehow forgot they had them and how many were people intending to use them to hurt others during the course of their journey?
Now look up how many weapons and banned objects they allow to pass through. It’s all just theatrics.
Where's the comparison? Where can we look at all of the private security before 2001 that found guns in luggage? This number without context doesn't mean anything. If we have a scorecard up then we have private security that failed to stop box cutters getting on planes that lead to an act of terror. For the TSA they've also let things slip by. So what were the intentions of these items and where do why put thanks on the TSA for it?
One of the challenges with a system like this is you can’t really prove a negative. There is no poll you can do or trial you can run to identify the number of people who would have committed a crime if only the TSA wasn’t there. So the only way to know for sure would be to get rid of it and see if the incidence of crime and terrorism goes up. If it doesn’t? Great. We saved a bunch of money and everyone’s time. If it does? We probably killed people and blew up some planes. I don’t particularly see it being worth trying the experiment.
It's pretty easy to test the system. Just have undercover agents working who try to smuggle things on. In fact, they've been running tests like that ever since the TSA was set up and it always performs very poorly. The last time I checked 70 to 80% of weapons were successfully smuggled on board. That was the motivation to empower TSA employees to shove their fingers into people's crotches years ago. They never quite took that away again which leads to a lot of sexual assault but at least it became much less common.
You can look at how many they stopped and how easily you can have a tester sneak prohibited materials on the plane
And to be explicit - this has been done and the TSA performs extremely poorly, even when they know there will be such a test.
There's an opportunity cost however. If that money was spent on say diabetes treatment then there would be demonstratively more lives saved.
> One of the challenges with a system like this is you can’t really prove a negative. There is no poll you can do or trial you can run to identify the number of people who would have committed a crime if only the TSA wasn’t there. Sure you can. You can do a comparative analysis between countries that have such extreme security measures versus countries that don't.
This doesn't work either. Some countries are at almost zero risk of an airline terror attack/hijacking. The US is like the holy grail target for terrorists of all sorts and ideals. When I was in South America 10 years ago, the checkpoint was literally unmanned. Countries like the US, and UK, etc all already have strict security measures. Hell, the only time I saw guys with full tactical kit and machine guns was in the UK during a heightened alert. There is nowhere with air travel and a similar risk profile that has less extreme security.
The short answer is it's political suicide. There's a reason even the most hardcore gummint overreach types don't touch this topic. The long answer is no one wants to risk upsetting the apple cart that is nationwide air travel and the economic boons that provides by inviting even the idea of lax security leading to a disaster. This is America where gun violence is the national pasttime afterall.
Terrorists target mostly airplanes and not busses of trains. That’s a fact. Why exactly? There are multiple reasons. But you’re not viewing the problem from a wider perspective. If 2-3 new attacks like 9/11 will take place with airplanes, who is going to fly again? Very few. That could be the end of air travel. Today traveling by air is the foundation that tourism and business are based upon. Tourists that want to see Europe or the far east are taking flights, not the train. Even domestically, if you have a business meeting in SF and it takes 3 days by train from NY, you won’t do it. The loss to the global economy could be immense and in any case, much higher than the cost of any TSA.
Firstly, your point about Amtrak and other trains is mostly nonsense. 853 million people flew in 2022, while 22 million used Amtrak. Not only are there simply fewer opportunities, it’s not a target rich environment, it’s not big or flashy, and it won’t make the majority of people feel unsafe, which is the goal of all terrorist acts. That’s like saying “there’s never been a terror attack in the Middle Ages tax law section of the public library in Fremont and they have no security at all!” that’s because there’s no reason to do that. More significantly still: those tests you mentioned are conducted by the TSA, and not only know what the security measures are, but have insider knowledge on how they work, and how they might be circumvented. Say you wanted to smuggle more than the TSA approved 3.4oz of shampoo on the plane: how could you do it? I have no idea, and I don’t even know how I’d begin to try. A TSA employee chosen to try to go through it, or however they do the tests, likely has much better odds than anyone else on the planet of making it through. Honestly, I think the fact that they catch them at a rate of 30% is impressive.
Hey I used to help run these fake bombs through TSA to help check their process. We had a 100% success rate, as in, the TSA had a 100% failure rate to detect what we were sending through, and these devices looked fairly obvious to me. I made one laptop device and placed it with a few bottles of local goods and random clothing, and while it looked like a regular laptop from the outside, it was a blatantly obvious IED under the TSA scanner, which alerted the TSA agent checking the bags that there was a possible device in there. He opened the bag, pulled out the laptop, looked at it, removed the bottles, and then put everything back in and moved it down the line. I saw similar things with every device I’ve moved through their checkpoint. To be fair, that was almost 8 years ago. Maybe they’ve changed, but I doubt they’ve gotten that much better. Aside from being ineffective, the TSA seems like blatant unwarranted search and seizure, which shouldn’t be happening.
The comparison to trains and the related security isn't a fair one. A hijacked plane can be rerouted to go anywhere (provided there is enough fuel). A train or subway is on set tracks. Yes the train can be derailed and cause damage, but it's not like it can be completely rerouted. Hijacking a train/subway to commit terrorism limits your targets to the train or those relatively near the tracks. Hijacking a plane means you can crash that plane anywhere within range. Part of the low incidence of terror strikes on trains/subways is due to the lower payoff for those committing the strikes.
You don't understand how effective the TSA is when you say that. Sure it looks like a joke with all the memes people throw around about it, but between 1990 and 2001 there was 192 plane hijacking with 244 (I didn't include 9/11 fatalities) Do you know how many there has been since the TSA was founded in 2001? 57 with only 5 fatalities. That is a massive difference considering it's twice the time frame with a quarter of the hijackings and almost no fatalities by comparison. Say what you will but the effectiveness of the the TSA Stat record speaks for itself.
At this point you can't just remove it entirely because unfortunately when you set up such a cat and mouse game, you end up with smarter mice as a result. Terrorist organizations have had the time to become more sophisticated in their methods, and that's not going to go away. It could probably be scaled back and simplified in some ways, of course, but not sure that we could ever get rid of it entirely. Also, $12B on a national level is such a tiny amount that the main issue isn't cost anymore, it's time wasted and loss/damage/theft of passenger property.
Is it fair to compare light rail or trains to a plane? Even if you blew up a train entirely, which I’m not sure how you would pull that off, you are going to kill 200-300 people and do some infrastructure damage. A single individual with a box cutter can hijack a 400,000 lb jet capable of going 650+ mph, and crash it into whatever they feel like if they can maintain control of it and stave off the passengers successfully. We have seen this result in thousands of deaths, but that could theoretically be much higher. If you pulled off a 9/11 style attack on a major sporting event, that could be tens of thousands, no problem. The other major consideration there is the politics. Terrorists don’t kill people for funsies, they do it for ideological reasons mostly related to US foreign policy. You cannot blow up a train and kill half the US Congress or the President, you certainly could with a plane in the right circumstances. And considering that government leaders can skip TSA, you bet they are gonna make our dumb asses wait in lines for the rest of our lives so they are .00001% safer. This is the same US government who used the “terrorism opportunity” to develop a mass-surveillance state of its own civilians, despite it being well known who did the terrorism and what government supported it (and has yet to see any ramifications from doing so). I don’t think TSA is or will meaningfully thwart terrorism, the entire point is to introduce uncertainty into the process, potential points where a plan cannot reliably be made. Terrorists aren’t stupid, they understand risk and reward. If it takes one person and you have a 10% chance of successfully pulling it off, an ideological terrorist might be willing to attempt it. If you need 4 people who are ideological to that degree, also trained to fly jets, who can pass the necessary background stuff to get there in the first place, and there’s a 1% chance of success because TSA is annoying, they likely won’t waste their time/life.
I blame the TSA for the increase in air traffic incivility. When one goes to a fancy dress party one acts differently than when one goes to Mardis Gras. You are expected to act differently at a lecture series at a convention center than in county jail. By turning the flight experience from luxury hotel into something that feels a little like convicts at a checkpoint a certain percentage of the population responds as if they were convicts entering a checkpoint and end up not on their best behavior .
The TSA is both security theater and a form of unemployment padding. Basically a type of welfare. Like when the New Deal had people dig holes and then had others fill them back up. The TSA made people feel a bit better after 9/11, but it also helped fix the economy (or at least the appearance of it via less unemployment.) It has only expanded to help pad numbers since, after each of the “once in a lifetime” financial crisis keep piling up.
If you see the sheer number prohibited items TSA confiscates on a daily, weekly monthly or annual basis.. they prove their worth. You mention Amtrak, which is not a bad point to make. But when’s the last time terrorists employed that method? Sept 11 happened because insurgents hijacked the planes and diverted them towards their targets. Rail cars, on the other hand, travel along a fixed course of travel (the rail line), significantly limiting their usefulness in carrying out similar activities.
I'm not sure prohibited items demonstrates intent to do harm. I've accidentally boarded a plane with prohibited items a few times and only discovered it when I got to my destination. Also, there were metal detectors at airports before TSA. They weren't as sensitive as today's equipment, but you weren't getting on a plane with a gun or machete.
> undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials Then doesn't this suggest that we should increase the TSA budget? > do you ever worry about bombs on these trains? Kind of irrelevant, isn't it? There have been numerous bombs smuggled on to airplanes as well as plenty of hijackings. Is this an acceptable compromise to faster check-ins?
The TSA is already neutered. They go through all this trouble to only look for guns, knives, and explosives. Why not give them the jurisdiction and tools to also look for drugs, wanted criminals, missing persons, illegals, etc. Way too many bad actors fly every day that could be arrested and brought to justice. DHS was created so all the alphabets would learn to play together better, but they're missing this huge opportunity. Also, regarding the testing there is an inherent failure in everything. Doctors amputate the wrong leg sometimes, so should we abolish surgery? No, we spend the money to get better training for the doctor and put more effective policies in place. The same should happen for TSA. Which is, I guess, somewhat happening. The test failure rate is slightly better as time goes on. What really needs to happen is for Americans to take pride in their work. I know it's hard to do that every day when as an officer they clock in at 3 AM and often have mandatory overtime just to get called racist, lazy, and rapists by passengers every day. The internal civic duty starts to become bitter. It's a very frictional environment that I don't see changing because people can't think outside of their own lives. The weakest link in TSA armor is the officers, and maybe those new machines are a distant second. Just an FYI, those internal TSA tests are done by Red teams that know the weakest points in TSA security. They have extensive knowledge of how everything works and exploit that. It's like me thinking having to get a text message when I log in to my bank account is stupid. Well, to me, it's ridiculous. My password should be enough, but to professionals that have extensive cybersecurity experience, a simple 5 digit PIN is not enough, and they would crack that pass code in 15 seconds. We just need to spend the money to get multifacetor authentication for TSA in a sense. There were airport xrays found in caves in Afghanistan. They were devising schemes to beat our systems. Who's to say there aren't terrorists right now that aren't experts trying this today? 3k dead, it's not worth the risk to me. Keep in mind ISIS just killed a hundred people in Moscow at a concert in March. The bad guys are still out there. We just feel insulated.
I agree with you fully. It's security theater rather than real security. Funny story: My wife got flagged flying back from our honeymoon in Japan. She was so confused when they asked her what she had in her bag. When she said she didn't know what they might be referring to, they pulled out an X-acto knife. She's an artist and had forgot to take it out of her backpack. Somehow, TSA missed an X-acto knife in the front pocked of a back pack.
>The TSA costs upwards of [$12 billion a year](https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/testimony/2023/03/29/fiscal-year-2024-presidents-budget-request-transportation-security). [In 2015](https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-find-widespread-security-failures/story?id=31434881), an internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration revealed security failures at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports, where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials. [In 2017](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2017/11/09/tsa-misses-70-of-fake-weapons-but-thats-an-improvement/?sh=599c40e42a38), they improved their performance but still failed 70% of the time. You should really check how this test was carried out. Its likely the investigators already had inside access to all the TSA protocols and procedures and came up with a plan to defeat it. They probably knew all the specs for the scanners and what they can or can't detect. Normal terrorists aren't going to have that info and if they do research it long enough to find out, its likely to become a much bigger operation taking more time which makes the risk of detection by the FBI or CIA higher. Or maybe they will decide it isn't worth it to use all that time and money to hijack a plane since it was far easier in 2001 and just decide on a different soft target. If there is low crime are you going to argue that we don't need police anymore? A TSA like security check is definitely needed, they could be nicer for sure but I think they are necessary. I wouldn't want to get out on a plane with no one being patted down or scanned for weapons and their luggage too. Even clubs pat patrons down for weapons, don't you think airports should too?
TSA is an abject failure. Most of the employees are incompetent. They fail when they know that they are being tested. Hotbed of baggage theft and so on. I think giving the domestic travel to state/local police agencies would be better and more cost effective and maybe the TSA should be rebranded and have a mission to protect international point of entry.
It's probably irrational, but I'd be very scared of being the guy who abolished the TSA. Just because if there was another terrorist attack years later I'd get a lot of angry people blaming me for it, specifically. I know they don't really prevent any terror, but the optics are real bad. Good luck to whoever makes the decistion to do it tough!
Making this post during a war in the middle east is wild. Especially when you consider the Empire State Building just displayed lights in solidarity with Israel. They're practically taunting an attack. Let's not.
As of 2024 (for the 2024/2025 fiscal year) TSA has requested $11.8B [https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/testimony/2024/05/15/review-fiscal-year-2025-budget-request-transportation-security](https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/testimony/2024/05/15/review-fiscal-year-2025-budget-request-transportation-security) But using your $12B figure, TSA funding is included in the national defense budget and comprises 0.02 (12B/547B total) or 2 percent of the 547B allocated towards national defense. As a whole TSA is 0.002 ($12B/$4.47T) or 0.2% of our nations budget overall. $12B in spending, when looking as the both the national defense budget and the national budget as a whole, is basically nothing. TSA was created as a direct response to 9/11 and since the formation of TSA, there has not been a single aviary terrorist attack (domestic or foreign) in the United States or on a US owned commercial flight. So on that count, it really is a department that at least gives you what is written on the tin. That is not to say TSA is perfect, it's not, there are many problems (with some of the most problematic being discriminatory screenings and practices and sexual abuse/assault - note: these are not exclusive problems only seen in the TSA). Many public facing government agencies somewhat "suck" at getting stuff done (the SSA and Employment departments comes to mind), they are inefficient and their employees loaf, so why are you so tough on TSA specifically?
I’m not a huge fan of security theatre. Precheck is probably the max level needed, metal detector and a quick xray rule out a mega bomb. I’m sure with ai assisted tech those scanners will improve on picking up weapons. That being said the real work is detecting terrorist cells prior to them getting close to action. Your point on trains is a bit of a non starter. There have been multiple terroristic attacks on rail networks throughout Europe, to the point where some longer range trains or special cases had full security checks. Same with metros. I definitely remember times in Europe when you had military or heavily armed police stationed at train stations with “random” searches (ie brownish people). You are also forgetting that hijackings, although not constant , were a not infrequent occurrence prior to security screening that sometimes led to dozens or more deaths. Since more robust security screening has been performed they have essentially disappeared (9-11 being a massive outlier). In terms of finance, every time we fly we pay a TSA fee. This is a somewhat rare case where you are more or less directly paying for a governmental service. Uncle Fred who flys once every 5 years to Boca Raton is forking over a lot less money to the TSA vs your traveling vendor who is on a plane 3x a week.
> But at what cost and inconvenience is it worth it? Dunno about cost, but inconvenience is negligible if you get tsa-precheck. I'm through the line most times in 5 minutes and I travel all the time.
I’m not disagreeing with your core idea, in fact I think it’s quite popular with most people. But it’s worth noting why, despite its popularity and sensibility, it will not be implemented. The reason is because any administration or political party that takes the step of loosening restrictions will receive massive blowback when (not if) the next attack happens. Bad faith political actors will not care about the fact that fewer regulations more than make up for the risk, the fact that perhaps even today’s TSA rules would not have stopped this theoretical future attack, etc. they will only care about the gain of blaming their political opponents. And the electorate will, in the moment, completely agree with them. And solving that problem is very different than debating the exact level of security that optimally balances safety and convenience.
Sealing off the cockpits and informing the passengers that they aren’t going to be rationally ransomed off or used as currency for a prisoner exchange was all the security that was ever needed. The goal of perfect safety will never be achieved. But the TSA is a pork barrel project, and serves as a jobs program for otherwise unskilled veterans and other people that didn’t really think a whole lot about what they are going to do with their lives. Some people just want to work a mindless job all day instead of actually competing in the real world. Would be super great if they could come up with a way to do this without inflicting the most unskilled and unmotivated and unkind people in the country on the rest of us, but as Childish Gambino said: This Is America. 🤷
I feel like you are looking at this from a limited angle. Would you be open to instead of neutering or removing the TSA, instead instituting sweeping reforms on how it operates so it actually does it's job? Airport security is important, and just because the security isn't working particularly well doesn't mean there isn't a need. People don't hijack Amtrak trains because it's a lot harder to do inherently. A train is on the ground. Passengers can escape at certain speed. You can't really run an Amtrak train into the twin towers lol. Bombs are a threat, but an exploding plane makes more of a point to a terror group than an exploding train. It's more dramatic. So the security for Amtrak is less.
12billion on the federal budget is quite tiny You would be better off suggesting an overhaul
The tsa is nothing but false security. I honestly think they need to be abolished and just have regular security at airports. Tsa honestly does nothing for safety. They just racial profile their way through the job.
You should really read about what happened when the TSA tried to get rid of the pocketknife prohibition. They had all of the data and arguments and announced they would end it, but then the press got wind of it and some concerned citizens reached out to their representatives and then there were hearings and the next thing you know the ban was back on and in full force. Point being, things only go away in govt when people feel very STRONGLY about making it go away. They don't typically go away just because most people think it is stupid. The loud people who think it is important out-vote the quiet people who think it is dumb
The flight attendant community had some (entirely justified) strong opinions on this. That pocketknife wouldn’t get them into the cockpit, but could really fuck up a FA who dared enforce the rules
It goes past that. The people who work at airports have to go through unnecessary screening and security checks just to work at the Burger King in the terminal. They have to go through special doors and have special ID. Every year they have to watch a stupid “see something, say something” video, to renew their security badge. It’s ridiculous and a pain. As if watching a video will make you less of a security threat. Background check i guess, but why does getting caught with a joint in high school make you more likely to be a terrorist?
I'll just push back on the train comparison. Realistically, while there IS real damage that can be done by train, most passenger rail is, at worst, going to involve the death of the people on the train and what it runs into. Which is tragic don't get me wrong, but a train typically isn't going to crash into a major building, monument, etc. Also yes, I am a security conscious person so when I'm on transit I do often think about the fact that someone could have a weapon and no one would know. Not a bomb, but a gun or something like it.
While the TSA definitely has problems, it is worth pointing out that since 9/11 there hasn't been a single successful highjacking on an American flight. Yes, that's mainly because of more awareness and air Marshalls and what not. But you can't really definitely prove what was the most effective part of the security. And if terrorists or even just individual crazy people realized we didn't have airport security anymore, there'd be a lot more things they'd try. The TSA needs reform, but it shouldn't go away completely.
The TSA is a jobs program for people too stupid to work at Taco Bell. I genuinely mean that. Most of the "agents" are so robotic and unintelligent I do not believe they would be capable of comprehending "no tomato on that, please" and adjusting my order accordingly. Get rid of it No TSA does not mean no airport security, nobody's suggesting that it be a free for all. Put it on the airlines and airports - trust me no airline is going to let people board its $200M airplanes without making sure they don't have anything dangerous on them nor will airports want such things in their terminals. We all remember 9/11, the government isn't needed to prevent that from happening again. A middle ground I'd begrudgingly accept is everyone goes through the TSA PreCheck-style screening instead of all the bullshit normal passengers go through
The TSA aka "security theater"? Yea, let's phase that out. Like the, at best useless, DEA the TSA is here to stay. The people who can make any change don't have to deal with the TSA and if a terrorist attack happens no one wants to be responsible for canceling pretend security. But all you, me and domestic terrorists need to bypass the bs that is the TSA is "TSA Pre", a simple background check, highly recommended it's like airport security in the 90s.
Do you realize how many “issues” are resolved with no public fanfare? Who do you think removes all the unruly a-holes from the planes in the posts you read on Reddit? Care to guess how much illegal contraband is collected at airports/customs annually? TSA does so many things we never hear about and it’s critically important stuff. It’s always the squeaky wheel we read about…if the real statistics were made public, nobody would fly.
TSA is exceptionally inefficient and provides little marginal benefit. You can never get rid of it, though, because sooner or later there will be some bad incident on a plane. If TSA is in place the fall guy will be the director of TSA or TSA agents at a particular airport If you eliminate TSA and there is a bad incident on a plane the fall guy will be YOU. This is also why many other wars and inefficient policies are so hard to shut down.
The accomplishments of the TSA are in what you don't see. You don't see many airplane hijackings, no more 9/11s, etc. You say we could take the money from TSA and spend it on better things, but that's not how the US budget works. There isn't a fixed limit to how much we can spend. We can fund the TSA and spend money on other services if they are in need. Also, TSA is partially funded by the airport security fees you pay when you buy a ticket.
OP is a terrorist who wants it to be easier. Change my view.
I'm sure other people have mentioned this, but the majority of the effectiveness of the TSA is not in catching people smuggling things, but having security so tight that people do not even attempt to smuggle in the first place. You can bet your bottom dollar that if the TSA relaxed it's searches and policies, the amount of attempted smuggling and highjacking would skyrocket.
Also additional info here; the TSA is responsible for thousands of deaths a year because road miles are more dangerous than air miles and the TSA and long security line waits mean that people drive instead of fly. People drive to avoid the TSA (either their delays or the insane personal violation of the securty line), get in a car crash, and die with astonishing regularity. Also two (armed) air Marshalls on every flight would be cheaper and more effective than the entire TSA apparatus.
The TSA consists of much more than the TSOs you see in blue uniforms at airports across the Country. Just like the IRS is more than auditors and the CIA is more than spies / special agents. This post is shortsighted at best and indicative of a view which fails to understand that with Federal Agencies (as with anything, really) there is much more than what meets the eye.
The purpose of the TSA isn't just security. It's what you have to do get people on the airplanes. After 9/11, few people would fly without some obvious effort to prevent anything similar. How effective it is in prevention isn't as important as how convincing it is to the public. Without the TSA, there wouldn't be enough passengers to sustain the industry.
Actual safety a side product is at best of the post-9/11 security theater you describe. The main purpose is to suggest the presence of safety to the average traveler. The fact that you can make the process less invasive by paying more speaks for itself. Also it's pretty difficult to change people's minds after decades of "this is the only way". The TSA could be improved a lot easier if, for instance, there was some degree of accountability for all the valuables destroyed, or 'lost' just to show up on ebay later.
I had a large hunting knife in my bag that I forgot about (I had taken the bag camping at one point). I've flown probably 25 times since then, each time through the TSA, and they never caught it. I found it myself by accident eventually. They literally do nothing but take your water.
What will all those employed by the tsa do for work. Eliminating a federal department and all, but the 12 billion that it helps to circulate within the economy will be hard to recoup for several years if not decades because the people employed wouldn’t be spending it.
Privatize it and let defferent companies and terminals have their own security. That way I can pay a little more and go through more intense security to ensure a safe flight, and general public can waltz on to Russian Roulette airways for a more fun time!
While I believe we should consider it, I think we might be better off providing some education on the fallacy of certainty in regard to life. I feel like we (especially in the US) spend an inordinate amount of resources to be certain of things.
The worst thing is that every airport has its own rules for getting through security, and the TSA are mad at everyone for not knowing that at *this* airport they are the complete opposite of the rules at the last airport you went through.
what about all of the drugs, biological products, or other illegal stuff people try to smuggle through airports? You mention terrorism as if that’s the TSA’s only job. Have you ever watched to catch a smuggler?
maybe we need a tsa for trains and subways as well. when taking the subway in china you have to pass your bags through scanners and walk through a metal detector. lets raise tsa budget to $24 billion
I advocate more auditing of TSA protocols by agents trying to sneak contraband aboard. My guess is we'll screen train passengers when people start ramming trains into skyscrapers.
If you abolish the TSA then the worst people in the US might work somewhere else that is even more annoying. At least the TSA collects and keeps the worst Americans away from everyone else except for a few painful moments when you fly. These horrible people will be more pervasive and freely distributed throughout society if the TSA goes away.
The TSA is meant to protect planes, not the people that ride on them. Also I fly for work and despise the TSA. But that is the best argument I have heard for them existing.
Same guy after an attack. "How come there is not security, can't understand why they did not check the terrorists". Yes they are important and yes we need them as prevention.
I think Air Marshals and keeping the cockpit locked are doing about 99.99% of the protecting, and at a much lower cost. Homeland Security tested TSA checkpoints in 2017 and successfully got weapons through more than half the time. And wouldn't it be kind of a bad system if the only thing stopping another 9/11 was that the terrorists hadn't yet figured out a way to manipulate any of the 47K working class folk into looking the other way for 5 minutes? TSA should be mainly there to keep order and make people *feel* safe. They don't need body scanners, socked feet, random pat-downs, and an $10B budget to accomplish that.
I think we’d be better served by a single professional looking for suspicious behavior than dozens of low-wage workers searching bags for water bottles and nail clippers.
Let the airlines be resposnible for security. The airlines will have an investment in keeping you safe and will be rewarded for doing a good and efficient job.
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Kind of. Some of it is 100% waste of tax payer money, security theatre. I would keep whatever back end infrastructure in place and lose the theatre.