our officers are trained to look for anomalies to help keep air travel safe
Number of times air travel kept safe by TSA: zero.
Please show me the list of incidents they have saved anyone from. It would be a huge public relations bonus so that list must be somewhere right? I mean you cannot take hundreds of millions of dollars and criminally hassle that many people without results - or can you?
I think most of us agree that the TSA is very ineffective at what it tries to achieve. That being said, saying they've had zero success is a little unfair, because this would be very hard to measure. After all, in the case of 'success', nothing happens - had they not been successful, something might have happened. We can't even compare the number of things that happened before and after a change was made by the TSA, because that presumes that there are always an equal number of people trying to make things happen.
Oh come on, if they stopped an actual weapon they would certainly do a full press release about it. In all the years with all the money spent, there is NOTHING?
What you are saying is they are awesome at stopping invisible pink elephants, they just cannot show them to us because they are invisible.
Every place in the USA has city, county, state and federal police with incredible laws that let they do almost anything they want, yet there is still crime. Somehow the TSA magically has no crime to show for their presence.
if they stopped an actual weapon they would certainly do a full press release about it
It's so common they don't even bother doing a press release anymore. Sometimes they write about interesting finds on their blog:
"Over 1,200 firearms were discovered at TSA checkpoints across the nation in 2011. Many guns are found loaded with rounds in the chamber. Most passengers simply state they forgot they had a gun in their bag."
"Small chunks of C4 explosives were found in passenger’s checked luggage in Yuma (YUM). Believe it or not, he was brining it home to show his family."
> if they stopped an actual weapon they would certainly do a full press release about it.
They stop about 20 to 30 handguns each week. I don't know how many guns they don't stop.
Some of those are loaded. TSA doesn't care about handguns in checked in baggage, they even advise people how to travel with guns. They do care about handguns in carry on bags.
At one point, it was a pretty good idea to travel with a checked in gun to keep photographic equipment safe. You buy a starter pistol which is considered a gun by their rules. Put it in your luggage with your expensive equipment. Since losing a bag with a gun is a no-no and those bags were locked - no "lost" equipment.
WHo says they keep the guns? I guess (but I don't know) that the weapons go to law enforcement for further action; maybe a "citation"[1] or maybe arrest and prosecution.
looking at the "Week in Review" posts you see the number of guns, handily broken down into loaded and unloaded. The charts list how many guns had a round chambered.
I have no idea how many people the TSA screen each week; nor how many guns make it through screening; nor whether any of the people trying to take guns on board a plane have any intent to harm people.
I'm not a fan of the TSA, but this isn't exactly fair. To put into perspective that a lot of people here might understand:
Hey, Sysadmin person, prove why we should keep paying you! You sit here all day doing things, and yet nothing has happened to our servers since you got here. Why do we need you?
Acutally, a sysadmin can do exactly what you say he cannot.
1. Wait for a server hdd to crash, and tell people that they suffered no interruptions because he had the foresight to do disk mirroring on the servers.
2. Wait for somebody to do 'rm -rf' on an important dir on their laptop, and help them recover from the hourly backup procedure he'd implemented on the day he joined the company (this has happened in a company i've worked).
While I agree with you, the sysadmin would be able to provide evidence of specific actions that prevented something bad happening. TSA has made zero arrest related to terrorism so far.
Plus quoting the end of the article :
He said that the laptop rule is about appearances, giving people a sense that something is being done to protect them. “Security theater,” he called it.
Two things have done more than TSA to keep airplanes safe:
1. Hardening cockpit doors and policies that keep travelers away from the cockpit.
2. Travelers fight. Both the Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber were discovered and foiled by travelers who have learned that resistance is the difference between life and death.
Frankly, TSA could be replaced by private security firms today and air security would not significantly change.
Number of times air travel kept safe by TSA: zero.
Please show me the list of incidents they have saved anyone from. It would be a huge public relations bonus so that list must be somewhere right? I mean you cannot take hundreds of millions of dollars and criminally hassle that many people without results - or can you?