The sensible fix for long TSA lines is to eliminate the TSA and stop engaging in this silly security theater. It is demonstrably the case that the TSA security procedures are so porous that they can't stop regular people from accidentally bringing weapons on board that they forgot about. The idea that they have prevented any terrorist attacks is ludicrous, yet they have imposed an enormous cost on air travel.
Eliminate the TSA and replace them with nothing. Cockpit doors are now reinforced, so the worst thing someone could do is blow up a plane, and if all you want to do is blow up a hundred people or so, you don't need to be on a plane to do it.
>so the worst thing someone could do is blow up a plane, and if all you want to do is blow up a hundred people or so, you don't need to be on a plane to do it.
There is a reason we had security on airplanes before 9/11. We aren't willing to accept this risk.
Plus airplanes are a carnage and terror multiplier. A bomb that could take down a plane would do less damage on the ground. And people are irrationally fearful of flying. One 737 blown up every 3 months would still make flying less risky than driving, but it would send the airline industry into a tailspin and TSA would come back stronger than ever.
So, I was definitely once one of those people arguing for lax airline security on the basis that fear of terrorism is irrational and resources would be better spent on actual, mundane, every-day threats (like automobile safety).
But I think you're actually right about this; my original argument ignored human psychology to an extent that makes it nonsensical. Actual threats are important, but so are perceived threats. It's not entirely irrational to protect against the things we fear the most, even if those aren't actually the most likely things to kill us.
This also comes up a lot in arguments about city living. I know a lot of people for whom urban living is frightening to an extent that is not supportable by crime statistics. But so what? If they were to move to the city, they'd be constantly afraid. That matters. Rational or not, their perception greatly impacts their quality of life. And if you want those people to move back from the suburbs, then you need to address their concerns.
There is a reason, after all, that airplanes are such an attractive target for those who'd like to cause terror.
This represents a pretty fundamental reasoning error, I think that a lot of people make - and your argument about city living is the perfect manifestation of it.
While some people do stop living in cities out of fear, obviously most people do not, because otherwise they would not be cities. You could argue that the government needs to come in in a very heavy-handed way and say in order to assuage the fear of the minority, we must pat down everyone that lives in the city hourly and check for weapons. But we don't do that, because it is irrational and unnecessary, and people will take the amount of risk that they feel is comfortable. We trust people to figure that out for themselves.
With airplanes, before the doors were reinforced, the planes could be used as a weapon against people who weren't even flying. That represents an externality. That is a place for the government to come in and say "this is too dangerous to others who cannot protect themselves against this weapon by voting with their wallet". The people who are on the plane, however, can choose to pay a premium to fly on an airline with more stringent security procedures. If people care enough, they will do that. If they don't, they won't, and they should be allowed to make that determination for themselves.
If I don't see terrorism on my flights as a risk, I shouldn't have to socialize those who do. And alternatively, if I do see terrorism as a risk, I damn sure want better security procedures than what the TSA has on offer, and if there were a private market for better secured planes, I don't doubt for a second that it would be substantially safer than what the TSA is able to provide.
Great comment. One thing in regard to this (that's getting off topic, so ignore if you're not interested):
"You could argue that the government needs to come in in a very heavy-handed way and say in order to assuage the fear of the minority, we must pat down everyone that lives in the city hourly and check for weapons. But we don't do that, because it is irrational and unnecessary, and people will take the amount of risk that they feel is comfortable. We trust people to figure that out for themselves."
The reality in most large metros in the U.S. is that the core city competes with its suburbs for resources, the largest of which is people. The region I live in has 2.8 million people, only 300k of which live in the (widely-abandoned) anchor city that gives the region its name. Yes, people are figuring it out for themselves, to the benefit of some interests and the detriment of others. "Let the people figure it out" isn't very useful advice to the losers in that battle.
> Actual threats are important, but so are perceived threats
Like the airplane that was downed because a passenger felt threatened by a math professor solving equations? I'm sorry but catering to ignorance is not the way forward. We have real problems as a society, let's not solve imaginary ones.
It's not merely "catering to ignorance." You can sit these people down and tell them the numbers. It won't matter. They'll no longer be ignorant, but they'll still be scared.
The other problem with the argument that "terrorism death rates are very low" is that terrorism is intelligently adaptive, while cancer, auto accidents, etc are not. If a terrorist group finds that it can burn 20 members to get 3000 enemy deaths, and no security measures change, they will quickly ramp up to doing e.g. 2000 to 300,000.
There is no similar dynamic for cancer or car accidents.
>This also comes up a lot in arguments about city living ... is frightening to an extent that is not supportable by crime statistics.
The (other) problem with the "cities are statistically safe" argument is: you have to account for the presence of countermeasures.
Sure, the crime rate is about the same ... but that's only because of a) much denser police presence, b) locking up your stuff a lot more securely, c) being a lot more distrusting of strangers.
If you fail to keep up these measures, your fear of crime will be totally justified!
(You can think of it as being the opposite argument of "hospitals must be unsafe because so many people die there".)
The total number of terrorists is very low. 9/11 was a major operation and was not something they could ramp up.
PS: Hospitals are dangerous even for healthy people. Much like how trench warfare lead to the 1918 pandemic which killed between 50 and 100 million. Simply being around those with a compromised immune system represents a risk.
>The total number of terrorists is very low. 9/11 was a major operation and was not something they could ramp up.
There is enormous support for terrorism and they have a lot of recruits. If they found something that worked, and nothing changed to make it stop working, you can bet they'd double down.
>PS: Hospitals are dangerous even for healthy people. Much like how trench warfare lead to the 1918 pandemic which killed between 50 and 100 million. Simply being around those with a compromised immune system represents a risk.
I'm aware, and yes, there's a tradeoff between the benefit of the hospital vs the risk of picking up something even worse. Point taken. But if you have a gunshot wound, you should probably go to a hospital. It would be a severe error of logic to say, "most gunshot deaths are in a hospital, so if I have a gunshot wound, I should stay away from a hospital" -- because that figure is an artifact of dumping a disproportionate fraction of living victims there.
It's likewise wrong to say, "cities are safe, look how the crime rate is the same as the suburbs" -- there is much more risk, they just work harder to control it.
Over seven years Iraq had 1003 suicide bomb attacks. That's far from zero, but hardly and endless tide. When you consider 9/11 where preceded by an early 'failed' attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot Which included a test bomb that killed one person but failed to down the aircraft. And out of 26 people that attempted 9/11 only 19 where part of the attack you find they actually got somewhat lucky even before heightened security.
Read the claim again: they will significantly ramp up attacks if they git a high kill ratio and security fails to change in response. The Iraqi forces certainly adapt security in response to the attacks, or they would be much worse.
It's not a refutation to point to zero rampup after a failed attack.
Nothing is stopping those people from paying more for an "experience airline" that will feel them up, perhaps even with a happy ending.
Airplanes are such an attractive target for those who'd like to cause terror, because they're a favorite setting of terrorists - those in the media and government who sensationalize tragedies for their own benefit. These hucksters are the essential problem, and they need to be shunned, disempowered, and repudiated.
There are vastly more efficient methods for dealing with stupidity than playing along. The cheapest would probably just be propaganda talking up real safety features.
For the 0.01% who still will not fly... let them stay on the ground.
It's this type of realization that I think many people lack. Someone's perceived reality is reality to them.
Take a lot of those Someones with a perception of rampant terrorists and security failures, you get a substantial group of people reacting to a false reality. And though false it may be, these Someones still vote, pay taxes and fly (or not) on those planes.
Remove the top-down requirements and let airlines run their own security screenings. Those people who are very afraid of terrorism can pay a little extra and wait in line longer in exchange for the psychic benefit, and those who aren't worried at all can breeze through a minimal security process.
Right, but the reason for the TSA's existence isn't blowing planes out of the skies, but using them to attack buildings. Hence it became a national security matter. However, the solution to that particular problem was the reinforced cockpit doors.
As for the exploding aircraft, as you seem to imply, airports and airlines have a vested interest in preventing that from happening. But unlike the TSA, they also have an interest in efficiency and happy travelers. And they're spending customer money rather than federal tax dollars.
So I'm for no government security, if that's not what the GP meant. But I doubt the airlines really want that, since it opens them up for liability if something were to happen.
Right, but the reason for the TSA's existence isn't blowing planes out of the skies, but using them to attack buildings.
I don't think that is true. Maybe the threat of kamikaze hijackings was behind some of the push, but it is far from the only reason.
Plus TSA isn't all that different from the old private security guard system we used have have pre-911. The extra screenings are entirely related to specific bomb--not hijacking--threats. Shoes off? because of the shoe bomber. No liquids because of the liquid bomb plot.
I'm not sure your position is consistent, since, if the TSA is filling the role that private security used to fill, there must be some explanation for the change, and the TSA was created in direct response to the 9/11 attacks. (I'm not even sure sentiment would have been in a place to create something like the TSA without 9/11 either.)
However, my point wasn't whether the TSA was created specifically for one type of attack, but that it was created for a problem that 90% solved to begin with and the remaining 10% could have been filled with government serving as intelligence and advisor (e.g. requiring airlines to reinforce cockpit doors, or informing them of specific plots or new techniques to defend against); which, of course, it was failing to do pre-9/11, but that's a separate problem also not solved by the TSA.
Sure, they were common but the media wasn't as prevalent. For example, I know of none of those before 2000s. But post-2000 I know of every single hijack and plane crashed because the internet and media shoved it on my face because it's always on every website. I bet that if there is a hijacking tomorrow, it will in HN front page (even though it's a tech website). That's how much these things multiply. Whereas, a bus crash or some other bombing will never make it to HN web page.
Doesn't your point cut the other way? I.e. if we got rid of all airline security and went back to the days of a dozen airline hijackings a year, wouldn't the pervasiveness of the media make the impact much worse than it was in the 1970s?
Sure, but the pilot isn't going to hand over control of the plane or fly it into a building no matter how many hostages are taken or what the hijackers do to them.
I never liked the line of reasoning that driving is more dangerous than flying, and therefore people shouldn't be afraid of flying. It's flawed reasoning. It doesn't take into account the actual reasons people are afraid of flying and not of driving.
Sure, statistically more people die in car accidents. True. But each one of us has some measure of control over that. We all believe (even if erroneously) that we can avoid this because we control the wheel, and we can choose to pay close attention to the road and make good decisions and we trust in our own ability to avoid an accident.
In a plane, there is nothing we can do but pray. The outcome is in the hands of pilot and we can do nothing. And that's what's terrifying: not statistics, but helplessness.
Indeed, when I get in the car as a passenger with a young driver who I haven't driven with before, my misgivings are definitely greater than those I have getting on a plane. Same principle.
Don't forget too that pretty much everybody thinks they're a better-than-average driver, which implies that pretty much everybody thinks that their risk of dying in a car accident is lower than the statistical risk.
"..everybody thinks they're a better-than-average driver..."
Of course, it is possible that most of them are correct. I would love to see data on the distribution of driving skill; perhaps most people are reasonably good or great drivers, but the presence of a small percentage of catastrophically bad drivers skews the average.
I know that when I think "drivers are horrible around here" I tend to be thinking of the ones that did something inconsiderate/dangerous/bafflingly stupid, not the vast majority who seem to get by just fine. And of the people with whom I've ridden, almost all of them drive fine, but I've got a couple of friends who I hesitate to get in the car with.
Perhaps it's because I spent an inordinate amount of time on a motorcycle on the highways, but I think it's more that lots of drivers are simply distracted/texting/not paying attention (and I spent a few months incapacitated by one of them) than that they are inherently "bad" drivers.
After spending a few months commuting to/from work via electric scooter (https://scoot.co), it became really apparent just how many drivers are constantly driving dangerously. My biggest pet peeve was the fact that apparently 95% of drivers don't know how to use turn signals, either not using them at all, or only flicking them on once they've already begun turning. And in those months of scooting, I literally only ever saw 1 car use its turn signal before exiting the rotary.
I'm inclined to agree. My wife got hit riding to work nearly a year ago and she still gets pain in her wrist now and then. The driver apparently didn't see the need to check for anyone in the lane before moving in to it.
Yeah, motorcycles are very popular in my area (rural Midwest) and literally every day (not an exaggeration) I'm out riding I see at least one driver doing something that could potentially have devastasting consequences.
I, myself, have been hit head-on twice on a motorcycle in the last 10 years.
The first time I was lucky, had a split-second of warning, and managed to escape any major injuries.
The last time, on 2013-10-13, I ended up with two broken wrists, a broken leg, and numerous contusions, scrapes, and scratches (initially, they also thought my ankle and nose were broke). It was four months before I could walk normally (the first three I couldn't walk at all). Because of how my arms were wrapped up (from my fingertips to the upper bicep), I couldn't bend them at my elbows and couldn't even wipe my ass for the first two afterwards. After the surgeries on my wrist, I was at least able to do that. I wasn't allowed to lift anything over one pound for the first six weeks.
I now have a titanium rod ("intermedullary nail") from my right hip to my knee, two steel plates in my left wrist, and one steel plate in my right wrist.
My life was forever changed -- and I was the equivalent of a helpless baby for almost three months -- all because an 18-year-old kid was texting on his phone and made a left turn in front of me at an intersection.
I hope your wife's wrists eventually stop giving her pain. Mine is sporadic and intermittent but will likely never go away completely, so they tell me.
Thanks for sharing your harrowing story. I really think we should treat texting and driving at least as harshly as drunk driving, possibly even considering draconian measures like disabling phone access while in motion. I'm not typically a fan of draconian, totalitarian measures, but we clearly haven't evolved the cultural or legal framework to handle this.
And for that matter, there are at least cursory security inspections at all sorts of government facilities, among other places. One doesn't need to be a fan of current TSA procedures--I'm certainly not--to believe that it probably makes sense to have a modicum of airport security in place.
It might be worth having a small panel or advisory committee with good intelligence clearance, which periodically evaluates aviation threats and realistic ways to handle them. In cases where there are no good solutions, as you suggest, no security theater will be engaged in.
I'm not suggesting an audit of the TSA, since the TSA does nothing useful. I'm suggesting an audit of the likely threats, likely solutions, costs, etc. I.E. the thinking that led to reinforcing cockpit doors. The TSA doesn't enter into this, since they are much MUCH worse than flipping a coin.
I flew on about a dozen flights (including 4 flights in europe) over a 6 month period before TSA discovered that I had a prohibited multitool with a 1.5" blade. I asked him if I could use the bigger multitool in his discard bin to snap the blade off the tool and he said that no one is allowed to touch anything in the discard bin, and even if I did, I'd have to go out of the secure area and be completely re-screened. So I let him take my $20 tool and drop it in the bin with the rest of the tools.
If I really wanted to threaten someone, I think the metal pen in my bag would be more of a threat than a tiny multi-tool knife that would probably fold back and cut my own finger if I tried to use it as a weapon.
I think deep down a lot of people there realize the stupidity of what they are saying. But they also know any lapse or any deviation from the "rules" would put them back on the street or back to flipping burgers.
I had an interesting encounter with a TSA agent. He flagged my bag because I had 10 notebooks in there ( I took them with me to read over my notes over a couple of years back ). He thought it was strange. So I told him, yeah, it is programming stuff. He said he likes programming, and would like to do it again sometime, asked what languages a popular these days (he knew about C++ only). I told him to try Python for example.
At first I was annoyed at him for bothering me over stupid notebooks, it was ridiculous. But then felt kind of sorry. Here he is, thinking he wants to develop software, yet he has to flag down bags and look for shampoo bottles, notebooks, multi-tools sift through people's dirty laundry and so on.
I mean, TFA says basically that, with a recognition that you still have to have bits of security. I liked the idea about shipping off people to consult at foreign airports.
We had virtually no airline security in the 1970s and there were hijack attempts every couple of months..including innocent people dying and a plane that was eventually blown up with no passengers on board.
I sure as hell wouldn't fly if this was going on now.
The real problem is that we aren't allowed to profile.
Because we can't focus on a specific subset of travelers that are suspicious (based on data or behavior), everyone is treated as a threat and we get long lines as a result.
They probably have more terrorist threats than anyone else in the world and have prevented nearly all attacks without the long lines. Mostly through a combination of profiling and hiring specially trained agents instead of $10/hour rent-a-cops to handle security. There's a reason why European Airports are targeted for attack, even though Israel is the main target.
At some point we need to make a choice: political correctness or safety.
Tying profiling to political correctness means you want racial profiling or similar, which would have such a huge false negative and false positive rate as to be worse than useless. Besides, I'm sure the TSA already de facto does it, because sentiments like yours are so common.
If you want to profile, ignore political correctness and do it based on something other than race, religion, or national origin.
This x1000. I generally concur that there will need to be sacrifices in terms of false positives inconveniencing people by "profiling" them, but I seriously doubt that race, religion, and/or national origin is the best metric we can come up with for profiling reasons. Honestly, I think there's a strong parallel with the way we see neural networks "play" games without following the heuristics that work best for our brains (which we have seen historically that human generated heuristics are not optimal heuristics).
And what else is the intention of profiling except to create a good enough "heuristic"? Let's strive for a better heuristic please.
Let's look at the terror watch list: I can bet 9/10 people on the list are from similar middle eastern countries, similar skin color and are from the same or similar religion.
Profiling based on this information isn't profiling based on any of these things, but based on risk factors and previous history.
The problem is that you can't even profile based on obvious history without also being accused of profiling based on religion or skin color.
This is what I'm talking about when I refer to 'political correctness'. Suspicious people can't be singled out without the PC police coming out in full force.
"ignore political correctness and do it based on something other than race, religion, or national origin."
I wish the terrorists bombing planes and killing innocent people were from different countries with different religions, but it's just not reality.
It can't possibly have a higher false positive rate than literally treating every person the same. When the first old white lady commits an act of terrorism, then let's screen them, but until then, let's not.
That's an extreme example, but if you agree that we don't need to look at old white ladies, then we both agree that profiling is preferable. All that's left to discuss are the boundaries.
So why, I asked, are we still allowed to board airplanes at Ben-Gurion International Airport with bottles and tubes of liquid brought from home, while in Heathrow or JFK they confiscate our face cream and toothpaste?
"Oh, that's simple," he answered matter of factly. "We use racial profiling, they don't."
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/in-israel-racial-profiling-doesn-t-wa...
This is exactly wrong. Profiling does not increase safety whatsoever. Bruce Schneier argues it much better than I would:
> If the choice is between random searching and profiling, then random searching is a more effective security countermeasure. But Dunn is correct above when he says that there are some enormous trade-offs in liberty. And I don't think we're getting very much security in return.
"This is exactly wrong. Profiling does not increase safety whatsoever. Bruce Schneier argues it much better than I would:"
You may say it doesn't 'increase safety', but Israel is a great example of it working. The attacks, hijacks, and deaths have nose dived to nearly 0. They have a hybrid system that involves both random checking and profiling.
I'm not saying we should lock up anyone that fits a specific racial profile. The problem is that when we use data and risk assessment to question specific people that may be suspicious, it's seen as racist if the person is anything but white.
The two articles you linked mention hijackers that happened pre-911. I don't think people are hijacking planes and diverting them to central america nor do we have IRA militants bombing planes.
We need a hybrid system between random checking and profiling. Random checks work so far, but will not help with long lines because everyone needs to be checked equally.
To reduce long lines, we either need to scale-back security (which is a bad idea) or use information and data to make the process more efficient (IE: profiling).
Some profiling is a good thing, but we can't completely rely on it.
Israel is also a fairly close ethnicity, nothing like the diversity here in the US. And they are engaged in a struggle with a specific ethnicity that they can identify.
The US has so much more diversity in population and enemies that profiling would be less effective, more annoying/discriminatory, because the "us/them" divide is less clear here.
Israel profiles single white young European women as higher risk than "middle-eastern" young men based on past experience.
Israel is also very diverse ethnically even if you take the Jewish population, N. African, Black, Arab, European, Asia, Indian all Jews of various ethnic backgrounds.
The vast majority of airline related attacks against Israel were not perpetrated by Arabs, and the only one on Israeli soil was executed by a Japanese.
While I'm sure Israel's profiling metrics do take in ethnicity by all accounts it has little to no weight and metrics based on past attacks, your behavior and more importantly your general background and travel history play a much bigger role.
But that said the US can't adopt the Israeli approach, the security check at Ben Gurion might look fast but it's because they have more security staff than JFK and a 3 (4 if you count the fact that Israeli security gets the passenger manifest before any flight takes place) layered security screening that starts way before you even reach the terminal.
Israel's approach can work in the US and everywhere else but it would cost billions to implement and bloat the size of the TSA to rival the size of the US Armed forces, the TSA is already about twice the size if not bigger than the FBI, it's bigger than the CIA and NSA combined but it's not even remotely big enough to do the same thing Israel does given number of passengers US airports handle each year.
V interesting, thank you for your comment! It sounds like you have some knowledge in this area. Anything you'd recommend for me to read in the 30 minute timeframe that would level my knowledge up?
My GF used to be singled out on every flight to Israel, so I did some checking; the last attempted attack on an Israeli airline was a when a Syrian agent got a British woman pregnant and convinced her to fly to Israel not knowing that she had a bomb in her suitcase, in the majority of previous attacks European women often disguised as pregnant were used to smuggle the weapons past security (allot of Arab terrorist organizations of the from the 60's till the 80's were socialist and were aligned with the various left wing terrorist organizations in Europe).
About 5 years ago when I was living in Israel I've had an encounter with airport security myself I flew out to Amsterdam for a project, the project was canceled but as the flight was at 4am and the news arrived over the weekend I wasn't notified until I've actually landed.
So I didn't even leave the airport I just went to the KLM counter and booked a flight that left 3 hours later. When I landed 3 security agents were waiting for me at the door of the aircraft they had my details and they pulled me aside and questioned me about why did i book the flight last moment and why did i book the flight one way and some other details and it took me about 15 min to clear everything up.
To me this shows that they get notifications of last minute changes to the passenger lists as well as flag anyone who buys a one way ticket, both combined with potentially the fact that I flew out less than 12 hours before I got back probably raised enough red flags to come and question me immediately.
On that flight my carry on was searched after I landed and I was notified that my checked in baggage was not put on the flight and will be delivered to me later that day or the day after.
My personal theory is that they've suspected that I went to another airport that might have been compromised to get something that could be used in an attack at Ben Gurion.
The airline security is definitely top notch but the entire intelligence apparatus behind it won't be sustainable on any larger scale.
The TSA can't afford hire 200,000 agents, the TSA can't afford to hire agents from elite military units and US intelligence and the TSA can't afford to have a college degree as a requirement for all but the most entry level jobs which them selves would require a hefty LEO/Military service background, and I don't think that running a background check on virtually every passenger in the US would be doable on both practical and legal grounds.
Flyer beware eh? My dad suggested a button in the cockpit that would de-pressurize the plane and not drop oxygen in the event of an emergency. Then bad thing starts "boom" turn off the air and everyone passes out. I pointed out that bad guys probably would have some sort of portable oxygen if they knew about it. So maybe it works once.
I agree with the author's thesis that if it costs flyers 10x the effort to fly than it does the evil doers to do evil, then the evil doers are winning that battle. And the existing practices are due for a new look over. But not sure that eliminating them completely will achieve what you want.
This would kill an unknown amount of your passengers, likely the elderly and very young. The typical terrorist, if we even have enough data on them to say such a thing, is an adult male in good physical form. They have the strength and endurance to provide a threat at they very least, not something a sizable percentage of the other passenger may have. The passengers that do survive such a sudden exposure to hypoxia would be at a very increased risk of long term health and mental issues. This is very dependent on the time in hypoxia.
Your father thinks that blacking-out is similar to the movies, in that there are fast acting tranqs and other things that will 'knock out' a person and then they wake up with a headache. Anesthesiologists take at a minimum about 12 years of training before they touch a patient, even for 'low risk' dental procedures. Trying to black out a plane full of highly agitated people until the pilots can land or 'do something' about terrorists in the act is a total fantasy and may cause more deaths from false alarms and faulty wiring than the terrorists would have caused.
Didn't the Russians try that (mass anesthetic) a few years back when they were trying to clear some terrorists out of a theater? IIRC, it worked, but it did kill a lot of innocent people as well...oh yeah, here we go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis#...
Let's be clear, my dad and I disagree on a lot of things[1]. I do not advocate passenger hostile systems in airplanes.
The interesting thing for me, reading the comments is that my actual comment (that if security costs 10x to defend and 1x to perpetrate, then the system will by definition fail) has no feedback. I think about ways to "even" the cost on these things. Biometric security is one (although it too has its issues). Using something like Clear[2] at an air port to insure people are who they say they are, and having vetted that person via other mechanisms prior to their flight, seems more efficient and harder to subvert than the current system. It converts the problem from "150 unknown actors are getting on a plane" to "150 known actors are getting on a plane." Does it make it difficult enough for the attackers? They have to forge biometrics and disguise the actual flight they are taking. Not sure if it completely levels the field but it raises the cost for the attacker.
[1] He also thinks that every state should allow and encourage people to carry hand guns so that "crooks and crazy people would think twice."
[2] See http://clearme.com basically at signup biometrics and other data are used to confirm identity and to take a picture. When you arrive at the airport your boarding pass is scanned (an presumably validated) and the operator gets a picture of what you should look like given your biometrics. So if you steal someone else's fingerprints you don't look like them.
> that if security costs 10x to defend and 1x to perpetrate, then the system will by definition fail)
That's only if you have an infinite supply of evil doers. The cost in operational experience and manpower can deplete the number of operatives that can pull off a complicated attack.
If you think ischemia is bad, there is also something called reperfusion injury. Basically, if the lack of oxygen does not kill a cell directly, the spike in oxidative stress when the oxygen supply returns can cause it to become inflamed or even initiate apoptosis.
This is why medically induced hypothermia is sometimes used on heart attack patients, so that the brain doesn't swell up and kill itself after normal oxygenated blood circulation is restored.
So let's not casually mess around with air passengers' oxygen supply, mmkay? It would almost be better to just flood the passenger cabin with vaporized marijuana extract. The risk there is that someone might stage a fake attack just to turn the plane into a giant bong.
If there were a switch like you suggest, what is the probability that it will engage by accident, and prevent the masks from otherwise deploying as they should?
A strong president could probably do something here. I think the original intent of the law was that they'd issue guidelines for airports to follow, rather than do the inspections themselves. So a president might be able to fire everyone and replace them with a tiny agency that occasionally sends inspectors to Boeing to check that the windows and frame are bulletproof and that the cockpit is reinforced.
I'm pretty sure that Trump is going to be pro expanding anything that involves subcontractors, especially construction subcontractors. A vote for Trump is a vote for Berlusconi.
ISTM this comment originally had something about Trump? Anyway it isn't clear to me that even an imperial president unilaterally could fire most of the personnel in any agency, even one as useless as TSA or CIA.
That used to be exactly the case. They changed the laws since then since each president would fire everyone and replace them with his own people. Now you have to be hired for merit and can't be fired for political affiliation. This is the "Civil Service".
Restructuring an agency(and removing the positions) is different from replacing people, though. I'm sure there's something that could be done.
Sure that's what they tell us. In fact the spoils system served an important purpose: it limited the size of the executive branch, since you can only hire so many people at once. So much for that.
> I’d advocate that certain travelers, at TSA spotters’ discretion, be exempt from screening altogether. Personnel could be trained to choose certain passengers deemed lowest-threat, pull them out of line and allow them to pass.
Bruce Schneier's proposal is essentially do 0 profiling and do entirely random enhanced screening to minimize the potential for exploiting profiling.
Right. As I said in my comment to the original article:
'Most of this is good security advice. This is not: "certain travelers, at TSA spotters’ discretion, [should] be exempt from screening altogether." In security, that sort of middle-ground is dumb: either the barrier should exist or it should not; if it should exist we should not have a habit of whisking people through it. Perhaps you think that there should be a barrier which checks carry-on luggage for guns: your security expectation is that nobody should have a gun on the plane. Suppose a terrorist wants to violate this expectation and get on a plane with a gun. First, he's going to print fake boarding passes to test the security line. There is no gun; he's just going through security, going to the restroom on the other side, then coming back out. He wants to know who is pulled out and whisked through -- perhaps light-skinned women, perhaps pilots, perhaps people in suits. He will then make this pilgrimage in a pilot's uniform, or inviting a female terrorist as his accomplice, perhaps even dressing her as a flight attendant. Maybe he will find that sympathetic screeners always cave to a disheveled suited man with a story, "I slept in, I have a really important business meeting, my flight leaves in ten minutes, can you help me?" If he finds any reliable mechanism to be whisked through the line, it's game over. He only has one shot to bring the gun through the screening, but he has unlimited tries to figure out what will make him look respectable enough to get that free pass.'
Concern: Real randomness gives you streaks, which may cause unanticipated clogs and delays in the process. On the other hand, an "smoothed" system means attackers would try to slip in right after a "random" check occurs for an innocent.
True, but you could just tweak the odds down a bit once a streak hits a certain number if you've demonstrably slowed the line down (and turn them back up once the clog has been cleared).
True, but attackers could time their approach to occur in the safe-period after a major clog.
The devil's really in the details, particularly around how queues/buffers for travelers are handled and the basis used for doing the randomness. For example, randomly choosing check/don't-check per passenger is different than randomly choosing a passenger from the line whenever a searcher is free.
I'm not suggesting to turn the odds to zero, though. Simply lowering the odds until the clog is cleared would not appreciably improve an attackers chances of getting through. You could still get streaks at the lower odds, thus making the clog worse. Nevertheless, I think the average wait times would be vastly improved from what they are currently.
That solution is pretty silly anyway. TSA employees have already been found "connected to people on terrorist watch lists". Granted, those watchlists are mostly BS because they contain millions of people, where most are probably innocent. But if a terrorist group actually wanted to do an attack and that proposed policy was in place, I could see how they could get someone on the inside to just let them pass through.
But the point here isn't that this specific policy is terrible, but that any such type of policies are ineffective, much like the author says about the liquid bans and whatnot.
> Take a percentage of screeners now working at airport checkpoints and re-train them to work away from public view
When I was in London, I met a woman whose job was basically to hang around at Heathrow Airport and make note of "suspicious-looking individuals". She would make small talk and ask them if they needed help or directions.
She also told me they catch a surprising number of North Korean spies.
She didn't go into the details, unfortunately. I also doubt she was responsible for making the final call as to whether or not a person is a security risk -- more about allowing higher-up folks to keep their eyes in the right places. I imagine the North Korean spy thing was a trend she had corroborated with higher-ups rather than determined completely on her own.
The things that the TSA forbids can, in many cases, be picked up after the security check in various shops/restaurants in the airport. I used to make it a point to walk around, identifying things lying around in the open (like silverware in restaurants) that was forbidden just a few feet earlier. But it just became too frustrating.
The security procedures aren't' about logic they are more like a set of rituals that we have developed: kind of a collective superstition.
Ask most people on the street if we could just scale security procedures back to 1970s levels and they will feel uncomfortable and probably tell you that the security is needed today.[1]
Ironically, because the ritual is a difficult trial, it may increase our belief in its protective power.
[1] Similar to how they may feel uncomfortable letting kids play on the street even though stranger child abduction has been declining for decades.
Do you remember more examples? I'm curious, because I did something similar years ago and didn't really find much that would have been stopped – other than liquids, which don't count for obvious reasons.
I don't eat in airport restaurants that often, and when I do, it's just a public one, not an exclusive lounge. But I haven't seen a sharp metal knife in the airport for since 2001. I've seen plastic knives and rounded metal butter knives, but those should also be allowed through security.
Yeah, I guess I'll have to try it. I remember ordering a steak in 2005ish (though not at TGIF's), and I did in fact get a plastic knife. The memory sticks with me, because I got so frustrated that I ended up just biting off hunks with my teeth, much to the dismay of my traveling companion.
Many restaurants had steel silverware sitting in the open. Anyone walking by could just grab-n-go. Many of the little kiosks had tools sitting around (I've seen screwdrivers, for instance); behind the counter, but a little distraction, and it's yours. Hairspray? Use it with a lighter, and you have a nice flamethrower.
You can get much bigger quantities of such stuff inside the airport (past security). I'd love to document this, but I'm afraid of ending up on some list.
Yeah, and it doesn't really matter. Nobody's going to stop you from buying multiples of the smaller quantity hairspray, in different stores or with friends, etc.
Glass bottles? Heck, you could probably make some sort of explosive from the items you could buy in the shopping area post-security.
In my part of the world, their idea of "security" for the glass bottles you can buy at the airport shops is to seal them in a "security" bag made of...clear plastic. The only thing that clear-plastic (zip-locked even) bag would stop is spillage.
I'm pretty sure you can bring empty glass bottles through security in the US.
Anyway, like I said in a sibling comment, I'm not defending the asinine rules, just saying I actually found very few items that would/should have been stopped by TSA when I went through a similar exercise.
there is so many guides about making weapons with stuff that you can find after passing security that you would think someone would have used one in real life..
And we should set our expectations much higher. It should be possible for TSA throughput to be as good as Starbucks. They both have trained people do a complex operation involving special-purpose machines, and the revenue per customer is similar (Starbucks around $4, TSA gets $5.60 per passenger-leg), and the queue is rarely more than a few minutes at Starbucks.
If you look at the incentive structures, the results aren't surprising though:
Starbucks: longer lines => people go elsewhere => less revenue (daily)
TSA: longer lines => traveler complaints => more funding (yearly)
The queue at Starbucks has a natural curb on its length, though -- if I walk up and see the queue is pretty long then I'm likely to decide I didn't need a coffee that much, and walk away. Nobody approaching a TSA queue is going to make that decision, so the worst-case queue length is not really comparable.
I think you misunderstand the way this works. The TSA can have 2 employees instead of 12 and they still get the same amount of funding because people can't stop travelling like a coffee drinker can go to a competitor.
I'm not sure about where you are, but the Starbucks's I've been to go through lines a lot slower than TSA checkpoints - the lines are just much shorter because fewer people are going there than through a big airport.
Along these lines, I wonder if anyone has pointed out why the TSA is storing whay they view as "potentially explosive and life-threatening liquids" in the middle of a high-traffic area?
Also, if all those bottles of liquid are worth being confiscated because they contain harmful chemicals, they are also to be disposed of by personel in hazmat with proper EPA considerations, namely audit, analysis and documentation. It would be fun to see a lawsuit along those lines.
It's a bit of a paradox. The purpose of screening isn't really to confiscate dangerous materials, but to prevent people from ever bringing it. If you have a ban on liquids, then an attacker isn't going to bother bringing a liquid bomb. All liquids you encounter will be benign. Yet that doesn't mean that the ban is useless: if someone wants to bring a liquid bomb, then if you remove the liquid ban they will bring it.
I think the liquid ban is pretty silly, but that's because the whole idea of a liquid bomb seems to be unworkable, and there are better ways to handle this stuff. The fact that confiscated liquids are handled so casually is not actually an argument against the ban.
They don't have the resources to actually check every bottle for explosives. That's why it's a blanket ban. Note that if you have a good reason to bring a liquid (because it's medically necessary, for example) then they will let you take it through, but they will test it. And if it tests positive for explosives, then you can bet that they neither toss the bottle in the trash nor allow you to proceed to your gate.
The liquid ban itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but if you grant their IMO faulty assumptions (that liquid bombs are a big threat), the way they carry it out is actually pretty reasonable.
i had a fruitless discussion, when we found a water bottle in my bag, he said he knew, exasperated, and it's the rules and whatnot, but I so wish he said "Look Son, I don't know it's water, so I'm asking you to dispose of it". It's like even the staff know how stupid the theatre is.
> but I so wish he said "Look Son, I don't know it's water, so I'm asking you to dispose of it"
I'm sure he did that when he first started, but being berated on a daily basis ("Are you calling me a liar?!") probably made him decide that his current method is the path of least resistance.
"— I’d advocate that certain travelers, at TSA spotters’ discretion, be exempt from screening altogether. Personnel could be trained to choose certain passengers deemed lowest-threat, pull them out of line and allow them to pass."
I really can't imagine this going well at all. Isn't this basically telling your employees that they should discriminate based on some nebulous thing?
If the criteria they use become known, you're also creating a loophole for terrorists to target.
I can't remember the name of it, but some years back there a was a film (or possibly a TV drama) about a Chechen-American jihadi -- pale-skinned, blue-eyed and red-haired.
I think most people agree here that the TSA should be ended altogether and we should return to metal detectors if anything.
How do the american people make this a reality? What steps can be taken to motivate our political leaders to support such a change?
As of right now, it seems like political suicide for anyone to politically support such a thing, as they would surely be painted as a terrorist sympathizer or some such.
They don't want to make it a reality. You want to make it a reality, I want to make it a reality, but the majority of your friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens don't.
As of right now, it seems like political suicide for anyone to politically support such a thing
See? Answered your own question. If the majority of Americans felt as you do, it wouldn't be political suicide.
This is about as possible as ending the war on drugs was in the 80's. Just because something is reasonable and makes sense doesn't mean it is possible to implement politically. In fact, I'd say an inverse relationship exists between common sense and what's implementable politically in the US. You simply face too much fear and stupidity.
I think "fear and stupidity" is overly simplistic. People overestimate how worthwhile it is to address low-probability, high-consequence threats. Everyone. I know plenty of rational people that rail about terrorism being a low-probability event who would freak out if they saw a pregnant woman have a glass of wine. Or saw a kid playing unattended at a playground. Or someone feeding a kid formula. Or GMOs. Or whatever--almost all of the highly educated people I know have one or more things that they believe to be risky that is not supportable based on hard evidence. It's universal.
Right now the wife and I are in the market for a new toddler-hauler. I want to buy two-years used, and ideally American, but I cannot get over the fact that only a handful of recent models, none American, get a "good" rating in the new IIHS small-offset crash tests. I know that a Ford made in 2015 is perfectly safe, but I'm going to spend a bunch more money on a new 2016 Honda because I'm irrational.
If you didn't have irrational fear, the TSA would not have its current powers. If you didn't have so much stupidity, the TSA might manage more than a 5% success rate. Yes, there are other elements like hate which also come into play here, but there certainly is no element of rational thought that goes into these types of laws. Yes, people have their biases and individual quirks, but it's certainly possibly to come up with and implement a system that doesn't simply pander to people's fears and plays on their stupidity. There's just no interest in such a system from either the people who are in control or the scared masses who are afraid of terrorism or other scaremongering tactics practiced by the former set of people.
The only thing that ends anything the government does, is slow, steady, continuous pressure.
Eventually someone who wants to be elected will grab on to the idea and make it a tenet of their platform.
This is how anything ends in government that can't be proven (by proven I mean with loss of lives or some other very serious consequence, not simply proven ineffective) to be more harm than good.
Security Theatre was Job #1 behind the invention of the TSA.
A close second job was building a behemoth Government Agency to funnel money, direct contracts (to supporters), and lastly supply jobs for those people who were probably otherwise more difficult to employ.
Now I don't know about you, but I would call that a win-win situation.
The fastest way to fix TSA security lines would be to have a few suicide bombers blow themselves up while standing in line. The lineups would disappear overnight if that happened.
... not that I'm suggesting this as a solution; rather, it illustrates the lack of security created by the current system.
Even simpler: Completely separate the cockpit from the passenger cabin.
Without the possibility to use the hijacked plane to take hostages to a friendly destination, or to use the plane as a missle, it's no more attractive as a target than any other public space.
Simpler, but not easier - you're talking about redesigning basically every airplane across the world, including putting in another bathroom and a small kitchen area. That adds weight, cost and complexity, and may actually make things more dangerous for pilots if one happens to have a medical emergency.
Does anyone remember the TSA backscatter machines? (Blue ones) they rolled out and then promptly removed a few years later? Those cost the tsa north of 300m, wasted government pork spending as those are now all mothballed as it turns out they ARE bad for you, despite what the TSA said at the time. So when the TSA speaks, all I hear is pork, lies and federal union fear mongering to increase OT + pay at the expense of the taxpayer...all because....terrorism </gasp>
Given an establishment, the method of change is as important as the change itself. It’s not enough to have a good idea, you need a way to make it happen. Arguments about the inefficiency, cost or ineffectiveness of the current TSA will not matter in the least unless the people in charge can actually be swayed by such arguments.
Right now, the TSA is kept alive by a large group of people who benefit from beefy government contracts. These powerful people are quite capable of trotting out one bogeyman after another to challenge any TSA rollback proposal. They will twist the opinion of everyone that matters until one of two things happens: either nothing, or a new program that requires handing even more money to their select businesses. They are clearly not interested in actually making things better.
People love to focus on one thing, the presidency, while ignoring the fact that there are many positions of power in the world. It matters what kind of people we have in all of those positions. You can’t dismantle something like the TSA until enough people are in enough positions of power to make it happen.
Are some of the long lines caused by people carrying on more luggage than in the past (due to airline fees for checked bags + perception that checked bags are mishandled, lost, or slow down your travel time)?
I wonder if flipping the economics (fee for carry-on, checked bags are free) might help without any changes to the actual security procedures.
That claim is made but, speaking anecdotally as someone who has been traveling for a long time, I don't think so.
Families going on vacation usually have checked luggage anyway (because they have a lot more stuff than they could possibly carry on) while business travelers, who would typically expense any fees, hate to check luggage because of the extra time.
>perception that checked bags are mishandled, lost, or slow down your travel time
All accurate perceptions, especially the latter two. I'd add that having luggage checked also makes it much harder to do re-routings or flight changes when there are problems.
[EDIT: I'd also add that many (most?) business travelers already have fee waivers on checked luggage for various reasons, but they still rarely check luggage.]
What I do wish able-bodied travelers would dispense with is roll-aboards which IMO are responsible for a lot of overhead space issues.
Put air marshals on every flight to deal with any situation aboard the plane. That leaves only one vector of attack, which is explosives. We have lots of ways to detect IEDs that are quick and reasonably cheap.
This leaves open the possibility of people carrying drugs or something aboard planes. But that's not really a threat to passengers.
The problem has a lot to do with acceptable risk. Not of the passengers.. I mean of the politicians. As a politician, if anyone argued for lowered screening at airports, we all know what would happen when eventually a hijacking or airplane bombing occurred. That politicians career would essentially be over. It would not have mattered if the hijackers or bombers could have gotten through anyway.
In Las Vegas this weekend, coming back we did not have to remove our shoes or laptops, just toss metal items in our bags and walk through the metal detector.
I was through security in less than a minute.
I suppose a bunch of hungover people aren't a convincing security threat.
I realise this sounds crazy, but Bin Laden was apparently worried about climate change, and his acts have probably acted as a brake on the growth of air travel. Coincidence? Probably.
Global population has grown by about that as well. Don't you think it's possible that air travel would have increased even more, without the impediments that have been placed on it due in part to ObL's actions?
Eliminate the TSA and replace them with nothing. Cockpit doors are now reinforced, so the worst thing someone could do is blow up a plane, and if all you want to do is blow up a hundred people or so, you don't need to be on a plane to do it.