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This is beyond security theatre. We are now firmly in the realms of security panto.

"But where are the guns?"

"They're behind you!", etc...

I once stood in line at an airport for an hour to pass through a checkpoint watching an entire large pallet of boxes marked "bakery goods" go through a pass through lane without any checks of any kind. It doesn't surprise me that workers don't go through security checks because it's "too hard". Why would you lock your front door with 5 locks and then leave your back door wide open and claim your house is secure?
Why would you lock your front door with 5 locks and then leave your back door wide open and claim your house is secure?

Because locks serve two purposes. One is to make your house secure. The other is to tell other people that security is important to you. What happens at airports is entirely about politicians telling the public security is important to them. It has nothing to do with actually making anything secure. Schneier's term "security theatre" is completely appropriate for what happens because you're not supposed to look behind the scenes, or you'll see how fake it all is.

I was told by a pilot that in the industry a common term for the TSA is "Thousands Standing Around".
I wonder if the next time this happens it will involve a third person, the TSA screener that is in on it.

Short of making the employee screening random (in the sense of who screens who and where), I'm not sure how they can mitigate that risk.

Of course.

In other "news" the FBI has never found one single shooting by any one of their agents to be in the wrong.

Never, ever. Over decades. They have perfect people.

Power breeds corruption, each and every time.

In other news, the NTSB has no record of a U.S. commercial airline pilot ever intentionally crashing a plane. They must be hiding something!

> Occasionally, the F.B.I. does discipline an agent. Out of 289 deliberate shootings covered by the documents, many of which left no one wounded, five were deemed to be “bad shoots,” in agents’ parlance — encounters that did not comply with the bureau’s policy, which allows deadly force if agents fear that their lives or those of fellow agents are in danger. A typical punishment involved adding letters of censure to agents’ files. But in none of the five cases did a bullet hit anyone.

> Current and former F.B.I. officials defended the bureau’s handling of shootings, arguing that the scant findings of improper behavior were attributable to several factors. Agents tend to be older, more experienced and better trained than city police officers. And they generally are involved only in planned operations and tend to go in with “overwhelming presence,” minimizing the chaos that can lead to shooting the wrong people, said Tim Murphy, a former deputy director of the F.B.I. who conducted some investigations of shootings over his 23-year career.

Why does the title say the guns were smuggled by a corrupt TSA employee? That isn't what the article says. It doesn't say who they worked for.
I don't get it. Wouldn't it be simpler, cheaper and less 'dangerous' to just drive from Atlanta to New York?
Security theater indeed. Although this bit in the NYT strikes me as BS:

The district attorney described how Georgia’s “lax gun laws” allowed the baggage handler to buy weapons online without a background check.

There's no such legal thing, except using the net to connect yourself with private sellers in your state (and they can't sell too many guns per year, or otherwise be "in the business" of doing so).

As for the whining about gun smuggling into NYC, if the city trusted as many people as Soviet Georgia did in its capital Tbilisi there wouldn't be as much motivation to do this. Less than 60K legal licences each for handguns and long guns (I personally counted the number when the lists were leaked a few years ago). An estimated 2 million "illegal" guns in the general population of 8 million.

A question: lots of you have lived in both NYC and SF, the latter of which is infinitely more liberal ^_^ when it comes to gun ownership (California law due to state preemption prevents de facto or de jure bans like NYC's). Does this make much of a difference that you've noticed? I might expect one with burglaries of unoccupied residences vs. robberies when occupied, but that's probably as much a function of regimes like the U.K.'s where effective self-defense is simply outlawed to begin with.