In the investigation, undercover agents were able to get prohibited items through security checkpoints in 67 of 70 instances.
I don't understand this. As the majority of the intelligent people I talk to seem to understand that the TSA is essentially theatre, why seek to prove that fact to the rest of the population? Are these organizations actually buying what they're selling?
I guess I just figured all these agents knew they didn't really serve any practical purpose other than keeping people feeling "better".
To justify bigger budgets and further invasion of the right to privacy, of course. This is a power game, and always has been. Making people more afraid to travel is just one aspect of it.
I'm not sure what's worse. Assuming that people knowingly and deliberately work dead-end jobs with no purpose, or assuming that people are too stupid to not know anything. I remember standing in line to go through baggage checking. A lady in front of me chatted it up with the TSA worker. She said thank you for the work, can't imagine how frustrating it must be sometimes. He replied thank you for appreciating it.
Hanlon's Razor is useful here. I believe most people out there are just trying to do their job as well as they can and make a living. They aren't thinking about the bigger picture, and it's easy for many of them to think their jobs have meaning. In fact, I think that's a requirement for not getting depressed.
No need to demean anyone. Most of the intelligent people I know don't even know what security theatre is when I discuss it with them. I think people who have concerns about security theatre are in the minority, judging from my own sampling. I haven't seen any official studies on the question as to how many people even understand or have heard of the term security theatre. I would love to review them if the studies exist.
> She said thank you for the work, can't imagine how frustrating it must be sometimes. He replied thank you for appreciating it.
To be fair, I'm 100% sure of the fact that it is theater, but I still chat up the agent and thank them for their hard work. It makes my time in line go faster as I'm asking for an opt-out.
I agree with you that for the people hired to carry out these policies, they are just regular folks who take great pride in doing/having a job.
However, after watching those PBS Frotline documentaries "Top Secret America" and seeing that Lindsay Graham speech this morning, it's clear to me that many of the people who head these agencies are paranoid and delusional. I don't know how they keep amassing so much power and influence.
While they are rearranging the chairs on the deck of titanic, they will ask for a huge check for improved training and better equipment and increased staff in the DC to monitor, evaluate and rectify the short-comings. The result for the passengers would be more invasive practices and more hoops to jump as well as big lines. Failing upwards is an Art, DC has perfected.
I thought this too. Not exactly that it's theatre, but it will deter smaller groups / less motivated individuals from doing anything. A coordinated group could bypass almost anything they put up anyway, just that they don't.
I think there was a "do you trust the TSA to keep you safe?" study about a year ago, and I think something like 55% said "yes".
Most people must believe that it "feels safer" when the TSA is seemingly "checking everything". And would probably be "worried" if tomorrow the TSA didn't exist anymore, even if that fear is irrational in this context considering the facts that the TSA is already useless.
because if TSA leadership is like that of any other failing institution they truly don't think they are doing it wrong. No one in a position of authority is allowed to question them and they simply laugh at all the "conspiracy" and such on the internet.
Sadly this is pretty much how all government works, they think they are the smartest people they know and everyone else just needs to shut up and do what they are told. When presented contrary evidence the rebuttal will be "you don't know the big picture" and when irrefutable evidence is provided a sacrificial lamb or two is trotted out under the idea "it was really just one person" and they continue doing what they do
The sane reponse should probably be: "TSA doesn't work. It has never stopped a single red handed bomber in all these years. It has to be reduced and defunded."
Sadly, the response will probably be an increase in funding, longer lines, doubling down on groping and more naked pictures.
Over all this time, it has found and took away snow globes, nail clippers, water bottles, delayed lots of people, xrayed them and so on. Sure it also provided employment for many, who might have a hard time finding any. All those things it is has done. But it hasn't done its main job. FBI might have. Maybe CIA. Passengers, pilots and flight attendants sure did.
> It has never stopped a single red handed bomber in all these years.
I doubt that is true, although I haven't seen any evidence either way. I guess it stops people indirectly, as any would-be terrorist has to be more creative, and in so doing probably alerts security authorities in other ways.
We all hate airport security, but without hard facts, it's very difficult to work out what you would use instead of TSA-style security.
To get terrorists to be more creative, you have to convince them that the TSA would notice so it's not worth trying to walk through security with a kalashnikov in your hand luggage.
However, I accept your point that given the cost and inconvenience, it would be great if the TSA actually did notice.
One could, for example, take a look at other countries that does not have the same level of security theatre. I have no data obviously (this being the Internet and all) but I wouldn't be surprised to see that there is no measurable difference between countries that have a more sane approach to security and the ones that follow the US lead with the security theatre.
what risk profile? The administration has never presented a credible risk profile to justify these intrusions, has it?
The usual response is to keep repeating the same mantras to downplay the severity of these intrustions, not to substantiate (or worse, quantify) any of the perceived threats.
There are a couple of hundred countries on the world that manage to run airports without the TSA being there.
There's without doubt a lot of people who've already done the "difficult working out", and not all of them ended up with "The TSA", or even anything vaguely similar.
(Can I point out that from outside the USA, while I greatly admire things about your civil liberties - it _astounds_ me that those same people put up with the TSA. I have no choice, the privilege of visiting requires it, but pornoscanners and gropings for domestic travel, and Kafka-esque no-fly lists? I can't quite understand how "the land of the free" ended up there...)
Not like the TSA they don't. I'm an American with a Hungarian wife and we travel a lot. For the last ten years or so, every year entering the United States has been more and more like entering an armed camp. Really it's a whole lot like Eastern Europe used to be - the looks of suspicion, the whole "why did you even leave?" attitude.
That's not TSA so much - on the contrary, TSA workers are, nearly without exception, pretty upbeat, efficient people enforcing rules they know are kind of silly. But Homeland Security as a whole is just one mistake after another, old-school Stalinist wannabes trying to bring back the good old Cold War gravy train.
Entering Europe, on the other hand? Nobody cares. Hi, you're here, need a taxi? Just the way America used to be.
I feel ya. I'm an American citizen based in Eastern Europe (grew up in Milwaukee, let's say I don't pose an enormous "presence" or have much of an accent). Last time I came into Washington DC the border guide asked me "how long are you staying?" I very desperately wanted to just say "as long as I want."
If the TSA or Homeland Security doesn't report on how many terrorist attacks their invasive measures have stopped, then nobody will believe terrorism in the US is still a threat - and they will call for the disbandment of the TSA, cut in funding to Homeland Security and the other agencies like the NSA, etcetera.
The police report on crime too - why should those organizations be exempt from that?
How about nothing? We don't have security getting on a bus, we don't have security getting on a train, entering a mall, and barely have it entering a stadium. Why do we need it getting on a plane?
Yet there's been no epidemic in using planes as guided missiles, despite a long string of hijackings after 9/11.
Even including the 9/11 hijackings, your odds of surviving a plane hijacking if you stay down and don't antagonise the hijackers are very good as most of them have goals that does not involve killing themselves or the planets unless absolutely necessary.
A guided missile is a an airframe packed with high explosives designed to destroy heavily fortified buildings and vehicles. A passenger plane is a lightweight airframe designed to carry people, cargo, and fuel. Besides the fact they both fly it is a world of difference.
A passenger plane carrying 1/2 of its fuel capacity damaged the Pentagon. 2 passenger planes carrying 1/2 their fuel capacity obliterated the WTC towers. This says more about the design of the towers, and resulting engineering shortcuts, than it does about the planes themselves. .
You bet we do. Trains, buses, stadiums, everything. Think of the upside: If you ever thought it might be interesting to visit a police state, traveling there costs a lot less than it used to.
well we just need to wait until the first terrorist does strike one of those targets and I am quite sure Homeland Security will step in and correct the short fall.
While we do not have admission security to a mall like a plane the idea you are not watched in the mall and that there aren't guards around is a bit far fetched. You aren't searched unless you enter a store which has a bag policy because of a theft issue.
As for buses and trains, I am quite sure there are guards and cameras, just no oppressive searching of luggage or your person.
Once they can make it like "The Running Man" portrayed I won't have much of a problem with it but I don't think the tech is quite there yet
Well given the criticism if they actually stopped someone credible you betcha they'd blow the trumpet all over the news patting themselves on the back.
We have this weird idea in the US that the world changed fundamentally on 9/11/2001. But it didn't, really; the risk of terrorist attacks didn't skyrocket just because one happened. That doesn't really even make sense. It's us that changed. With that in mind, one question to have is, if the TSA stops terrorist attacks, where were all the attacks before 2001?
Certainly, there were some. But a) they didn't cause us to create the TSA anyway, b) they often involved bombs in luggage which isn't what we're talking about here, c) they usually weren't in the US anyway, and d) they were rare in any case. Even if the TSA were effective -- and it's clearly laughable -- it would still be massive overreaction to a very rare event.
yeah, for the most of the world (read - outside US, roughly 95% of mankind), 9/11 isn't anything significant - vast amounts of people die/are murdered all around the world, all the time, and very few really care.
sad part is, and this is subjective but for me very visible pattern, the immediate seizure of this opportunity to radicalize/permanently install of fear into US population, pushing for surveillance policies, unjustified wars, mass killings of civilians for money&power equation (Iraq/Afghanistan, you can call it how you like it, I call it like this since it's pretty damn obvious). And american society swallowed this as a whole, without questions, even proudly.
The interesting thing is, contrary to what I expected would happen, hijackings still "work". As in: Plane hijackers succeed at taking control of planes about as often as before, in general without passengers risking their lives to overpower them.
For a while I thought that the biggest reason to not get into hysteria over security measures was that passengers would from then on see a hijacker as likely to kill them, and so taking control of a plane would get drastically harder either way.
I was wrong - apart from the odd inept wannabe bomber (the "shoe bomber" for example), passengers generally don't overpower hijackers.
Yet most passengers still survive hijackings, because just as before 9/11 most hijackers have no interest in committing suicide.
Things might be different if a bunch of muslims tried to hijack another plane in a major US city, or headed for one, but that scenario was an aberration when it happened, and still is.
9/11 is noteworthy for how little it changed hijackings despite what a major event it was: It didn't spawn a long range of copycats. It didn't cause passengers to risk their lives to stop future hijackers. It didn't cause any large drop in hijackings as a result of new security measures. It didn't cause any large increase in hijackings by "inspiring" others.
I wouldn't want to trust 3/4 of the TSA folks I've encountered to run a cat house let alone exercise their independent judgement when it came to my safety or the safety of my friends and family getting on an airplane. While this isn't very polite, this screwup pretty clearly indicates that the TSA isn't exactly made up of "A-players."
Like most people pontificating/bitching about the TSA I of course have zero legit expertise in airport security, but I do have a bit of first hand experience at Ben Gurion airport in Israel where the threat level is generally pretty high.
The first thing you notice is that the security people always look like they are playing on game day. Unlike joe-blow TSA agent, these folks are alert, speak multiple languages, and likely get some specialized training to detect if someone is lying or was tricked/coerced into carrying a bomb.
It's weird-- the vibe is at times both more tense and also more relaxed than an American airport. The security people at Ben Gurion seem less like bureaucrats following procedures and more like smart people empowered to exercise their judgement (ex grandma isn't getting yanked out of line.)
Once you're in, you get asked some almost chit-chatty questions about what you're up to while they review your travel documents but the whole time it also feels like you're talking to an observant doctor or physician examining you for symptoms of an illness. If you "pass" their filter you're done & on your way in quite literally a minute or two (and it being Israel there's naturally some controversy about who gets selected for "extra" scrutiny and why.)
I've read that the problem in the US is that it's too big to cost-effectively implement a system like this everywhere and that's probably true. But maybe at least at the big/major airports there ought to be some equivalent specially-trained "hunters" who know their stuff.
It's a good thing that the agency head resigned because the TSA flunked a practice test instead of the real thing.
The idea from start was not whether TSA is capable or not to produce good results. The idea was to climatize the Americans to the notion of someone spraying you with harmful x-ray radiation or gropping your private area and then accept it as normal. America, a nation of idiots, letting the police state take over their lives on false terrorism stints. That's what at stake here.
Can I just point out that we have definitive proof here of a giant organization that has never worked, AND NOTHING BAD HAS HAPPENED. So now they're going into CYA mode and all it will do is make traveling in the U.S. an even worse experience than it has been for 14 years.
"We're horrible at our job, but if you give us a few billion more dollars and let us force people to remove their underwear at checkpoints, we promise to do better!"
I used to fly twice a week, and one time one of the screeners shoved a lighter in my shoe as it was going onto the belt. I started yelling at him and he turned to me with the "shush" gesture, and whispered that he was testing the screener to see if he'd catch it.
As a dark-skinned man I did not want to participate in this exercise so I started loudly shouting "He put a lighter in my shoe, does everyone see this?" The other passengers in the line murmured their agreement, the "tester" seemed miffed, and I kept loudly pronouncing the fact that I was not responsible for the lighter in my shoe.
Sitting six feet away from my loud rant, the screener still missed it.
- all of the FBI forensic hair matches of the past two decades were faked
- none of the NSA programs they claim keep us safe have been shown to stop a single terrorist attack
- no executives from the large banks that laundered billions money for mexican drug lords or conspired to rig LIBOR and exchange rates, and plead guilty, went to jail or faced criminal charges
- you are more likely to drown in your bathtub than be killed by a terrorist
please stop taking the federal government seriously until they stop with all this nonsense
I worked briefly for the federal government and realized that the bureaucratic system has two primary functions:
1. accumulate power
2. diffuse responsibility
Regarding the latter, occasionally the system build up too much responsibility which needs to be released to maintain stability. This is solved by picking an individual of power equal to the build up responsibility that needs to be released and punishing that individual by removal of all their individual power. Thus the overall system is restored to balance and only the individual, easily replaced, suffers.
It happened here, and I've seen it happen from the lowest to the highest levels of power in the government.
Several times, I have accidentally left prohibited items in my bag. I was only stopped once, and that was in the Cleveland airport where they proudly display every interesting weapon they have confiscated on the wall next to the checkpoint. They stole an expensive knife from me after a short interrogation (I guess to determine the degree of intent) and let me through the checkpoint. I think Peter Thiel had a bit about the TSA where he explained it as "security theater" that makes people feel safe, while any sophisticated actor could easily get through the checkpoints. I have to agree given my own experience with forgetting that lighters and knives are in my bag
I also never really understood the 'throw it away' (or stealing) mentality. If you forget to pull your laptop or iPad out of your bag, they lecture you and run it through again. If you leave a small pocketknife on your keyring, or you forget to put your cologne in the plastic bag, the seize it and throw it away. It seems to me like the proper thing to do is delay you slightly (to encourage you to comply to the instructions next time - just like they do with laptops) but allow you to put your cologne in a bag, finish your orange juice, or pay a small fee to mail your restricted item back home.
It would be incredibly easy to have some flat-rate boxes and charge 2x what the post office charges. Given how many items they confiscate it's probably a decent revenue source!
Its all anecdotal but Ive personally flown with: folding knives, box cutters, propane cylinders, lighters, tent stakes, fireworks, and ammunition in my carry on baggage. Id hazard 6-8 lapses out of ~50 flights in the past few years. The best was an international flight where I put all my dangerous/camping stuff in a checked bag and clothes/book/etc in a carry on. Then I accidentally checked the wrong bag and didnt notice until I was through security.
Missed items 95% of the time. Wow. How much money, time, and heartache have we all gone through? How much of a smudge on our national reputation as a free country? And all for a 95% false negative rate?
Political systems of people exist for political reasons. So, of course, if the entire effort looks useless, it can't be that the effort itself is idiotic. Nope. The real crime here is that somebody made us look bad. In a political system, this is the ultimate crime.
So we fire the head honcho and bring in a new one. Cue up lots of speeches about how seriously we take all of this and how some new regime will make a huge difference over the last one.
The TSA needs to be abolished. Immediately. There are viable and reasonable replacement options. Even if you don't care about the money and prestige we've lost, we can't keep sinking money down a hole on security theater when the hole is endless.
> Even if you don't care about the money and prestige we've lost, we can't keep sinking money down a hole on security theater when the hole is endless.
Sure we can. It's a terrible idea, but our capacity to produce more value to sink into the hole is also endless.
A couple years back, TSA found a multitool that I had forgotten about. The funny part is that I was on the second leg of my flight - they completely missed it the first time and only found it at all because I was switching airlines and had to go through security a second time.
Example of how different countries are: A plane was hijacked in local flight in New Zealand a couple of years ago. Somebody called for tighter airport security and the prime minister said something along the lines of "if you wanted to kill a couple of dozen people you could hijack a bus, so no, there's no need to increase security"
I liked the airport security in India. Everyone was searched quickly and efficiently and your luggage did not get on the airplane until you identified it as you got on the plane.
Would it cost too much to do this in the USA?
I always find the TSA employees to be polite and I don't blame the shortcomings of TSA on the people working at the airports. They just need better procedures, and that is a TSA Corporation issue.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 78.7 ms ] threadI don't understand this. As the majority of the intelligent people I talk to seem to understand that the TSA is essentially theatre, why seek to prove that fact to the rest of the population? Are these organizations actually buying what they're selling?
I guess I just figured all these agents knew they didn't really serve any practical purpose other than keeping people feeling "better".
Hanlon's Razor is useful here. I believe most people out there are just trying to do their job as well as they can and make a living. They aren't thinking about the bigger picture, and it's easy for many of them to think their jobs have meaning. In fact, I think that's a requirement for not getting depressed.
No need to demean anyone. Most of the intelligent people I know don't even know what security theatre is when I discuss it with them. I think people who have concerns about security theatre are in the minority, judging from my own sampling. I haven't seen any official studies on the question as to how many people even understand or have heard of the term security theatre. I would love to review them if the studies exist.
To be fair, I'm 100% sure of the fact that it is theater, but I still chat up the agent and thank them for their hard work. It makes my time in line go faster as I'm asking for an opt-out.
However, after watching those PBS Frotline documentaries "Top Secret America" and seeing that Lindsay Graham speech this morning, it's clear to me that many of the people who head these agencies are paranoid and delusional. I don't know how they keep amassing so much power and influence.
So presumably they feel they should at least be able to detect the threats tested against.
the laws that Obama and the majority whip called to be passed, weren't. Now they will have to dismantle several parts of TSA and NSA.
This is just to say "I didn't even want it anyway"
Most people must believe that it "feels safer" when the TSA is seemingly "checking everything". And would probably be "worried" if tomorrow the TSA didn't exist anymore, even if that fear is irrational in this context considering the facts that the TSA is already useless.
Sadly this is pretty much how all government works, they think they are the smartest people they know and everyone else just needs to shut up and do what they are told. When presented contrary evidence the rebuttal will be "you don't know the big picture" and when irrefutable evidence is provided a sacrificial lamb or two is trotted out under the idea "it was really just one person" and they continue doing what they do
Sadly, the response will probably be an increase in funding, longer lines, doubling down on groping and more naked pictures.
Over all this time, it has found and took away snow globes, nail clippers, water bottles, delayed lots of people, xrayed them and so on. Sure it also provided employment for many, who might have a hard time finding any. All those things it is has done. But it hasn't done its main job. FBI might have. Maybe CIA. Passengers, pilots and flight attendants sure did.
I doubt that is true, although I haven't seen any evidence either way. I guess it stops people indirectly, as any would-be terrorist has to be more creative, and in so doing probably alerts security authorities in other ways.
We all hate airport security, but without hard facts, it's very difficult to work out what you would use instead of TSA-style security.
[0] http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/01/28/tsa.bombtest/
However, I accept your point that given the cost and inconvenience, it would be great if the TSA actually did notice.
The usual response is to keep repeating the same mantras to downplay the severity of these intrustions, not to substantiate (or worse, quantify) any of the perceived threats.
There's without doubt a lot of people who've already done the "difficult working out", and not all of them ended up with "The TSA", or even anything vaguely similar.
(Can I point out that from outside the USA, while I greatly admire things about your civil liberties - it _astounds_ me that those same people put up with the TSA. I have no choice, the privilege of visiting requires it, but pornoscanners and gropings for domestic travel, and Kafka-esque no-fly lists? I can't quite understand how "the land of the free" ended up there...)
That's not TSA so much - on the contrary, TSA workers are, nearly without exception, pretty upbeat, efficient people enforcing rules they know are kind of silly. But Homeland Security as a whole is just one mistake after another, old-school Stalinist wannabes trying to bring back the good old Cold War gravy train.
Entering Europe, on the other hand? Nobody cares. Hi, you're here, need a taxi? Just the way America used to be.
The police report on crime too - why should those organizations be exempt from that?
Even including the 9/11 hijackings, your odds of surviving a plane hijacking if you stay down and don't antagonise the hijackers are very good as most of them have goals that does not involve killing themselves or the planets unless absolutely necessary.
A passenger plane carrying 1/2 of its fuel capacity damaged the Pentagon. 2 passenger planes carrying 1/2 their fuel capacity obliterated the WTC towers. This says more about the design of the towers, and resulting engineering shortcuts, than it does about the planes themselves. .
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/us/tsa-expands-duties-beyo...
While we do not have admission security to a mall like a plane the idea you are not watched in the mall and that there aren't guards around is a bit far fetched. You aren't searched unless you enter a store which has a bag policy because of a theft issue.
As for buses and trains, I am quite sure there are guards and cameras, just no oppressive searching of luggage or your person.
Once they can make it like "The Running Man" portrayed I won't have much of a problem with it but I don't think the tech is quite there yet
Certainly, there were some. But a) they didn't cause us to create the TSA anyway, b) they often involved bombs in luggage which isn't what we're talking about here, c) they usually weren't in the US anyway, and d) they were rare in any case. Even if the TSA were effective -- and it's clearly laughable -- it would still be massive overreaction to a very rare event.
sad part is, and this is subjective but for me very visible pattern, the immediate seizure of this opportunity to radicalize/permanently install of fear into US population, pushing for surveillance policies, unjustified wars, mass killings of civilians for money&power equation (Iraq/Afghanistan, you can call it how you like it, I call it like this since it's pretty damn obvious). And american society swallowed this as a whole, without questions, even proudly.
14 years rewind, now look at current situation...
For a while I thought that the biggest reason to not get into hysteria over security measures was that passengers would from then on see a hijacker as likely to kill them, and so taking control of a plane would get drastically harder either way.
I was wrong - apart from the odd inept wannabe bomber (the "shoe bomber" for example), passengers generally don't overpower hijackers.
Yet most passengers still survive hijackings, because just as before 9/11 most hijackers have no interest in committing suicide.
Things might be different if a bunch of muslims tried to hijack another plane in a major US city, or headed for one, but that scenario was an aberration when it happened, and still is.
9/11 is noteworthy for how little it changed hijackings despite what a major event it was: It didn't spawn a long range of copycats. It didn't cause passengers to risk their lives to stop future hijackers. It didn't cause any large drop in hijackings as a result of new security measures. It didn't cause any large increase in hijackings by "inspiring" others.
Like most people pontificating/bitching about the TSA I of course have zero legit expertise in airport security, but I do have a bit of first hand experience at Ben Gurion airport in Israel where the threat level is generally pretty high.
The first thing you notice is that the security people always look like they are playing on game day. Unlike joe-blow TSA agent, these folks are alert, speak multiple languages, and likely get some specialized training to detect if someone is lying or was tricked/coerced into carrying a bomb.
It's weird-- the vibe is at times both more tense and also more relaxed than an American airport. The security people at Ben Gurion seem less like bureaucrats following procedures and more like smart people empowered to exercise their judgement (ex grandma isn't getting yanked out of line.)
Once you're in, you get asked some almost chit-chatty questions about what you're up to while they review your travel documents but the whole time it also feels like you're talking to an observant doctor or physician examining you for symptoms of an illness. If you "pass" their filter you're done & on your way in quite literally a minute or two (and it being Israel there's naturally some controversy about who gets selected for "extra" scrutiny and why.)
I've read that the problem in the US is that it's too big to cost-effectively implement a system like this everywhere and that's probably true. But maybe at least at the big/major airports there ought to be some equivalent specially-trained "hunters" who know their stuff.
It's a good thing that the agency head resigned because the TSA flunked a practice test instead of the real thing.
What possible context could make a failure rate of over 95% look good?
I used to fly twice a week, and one time one of the screeners shoved a lighter in my shoe as it was going onto the belt. I started yelling at him and he turned to me with the "shush" gesture, and whispered that he was testing the screener to see if he'd catch it.
As a dark-skinned man I did not want to participate in this exercise so I started loudly shouting "He put a lighter in my shoe, does everyone see this?" The other passengers in the line murmured their agreement, the "tester" seemed miffed, and I kept loudly pronouncing the fact that I was not responsible for the lighter in my shoe.
Sitting six feet away from my loud rant, the screener still missed it.
- all of the FBI forensic hair matches of the past two decades were faked
- none of the NSA programs they claim keep us safe have been shown to stop a single terrorist attack
- no executives from the large banks that laundered billions money for mexican drug lords or conspired to rig LIBOR and exchange rates, and plead guilty, went to jail or faced criminal charges
- you are more likely to drown in your bathtub than be killed by a terrorist
please stop taking the federal government seriously until they stop with all this nonsense
1. accumulate power
2. diffuse responsibility
Regarding the latter, occasionally the system build up too much responsibility which needs to be released to maintain stability. This is solved by picking an individual of power equal to the build up responsibility that needs to be released and punishing that individual by removal of all their individual power. Thus the overall system is restored to balance and only the individual, easily replaced, suffers.
It happened here, and I've seen it happen from the lowest to the highest levels of power in the government.
Although no people are killed, the financial damage done and the suffering inflicted on our population is gigantic.
It would be incredibly easy to have some flat-rate boxes and charge 2x what the post office charges. Given how many items they confiscate it's probably a decent revenue source!
At least 22 airports have this (including Cleveland).
http://www.airportmailers.com/airportlist.php
Political systems of people exist for political reasons. So, of course, if the entire effort looks useless, it can't be that the effort itself is idiotic. Nope. The real crime here is that somebody made us look bad. In a political system, this is the ultimate crime.
So we fire the head honcho and bring in a new one. Cue up lots of speeches about how seriously we take all of this and how some new regime will make a huge difference over the last one.
The TSA needs to be abolished. Immediately. There are viable and reasonable replacement options. Even if you don't care about the money and prestige we've lost, we can't keep sinking money down a hole on security theater when the hole is endless.
Sure we can. It's a terrible idea, but our capacity to produce more value to sink into the hole is also endless.
His predecessor left in October 2014 after serving in the post since 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/tsa-director-who-tighte...
I guess someone had to take the fall here, but it makes the whole thing seem even more farcical to fire this guy.
Would it cost too much to do this in the USA?
I always find the TSA employees to be polite and I don't blame the shortcomings of TSA on the people working at the airports. They just need better procedures, and that is a TSA Corporation issue.