> The TSA blog carries constant reports of weapons confiscated from people who forgot to remove them from carry-on bags. But the Homeland Security Red Teams in the 2015 test actively concealed forbidden items just as real criminals and terrorist would. The result was that "TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints."
> Two years later, a Red Team test at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport achieved the same 95 percent failure rate to detect explosives, weapons, and illegal drugs. Repeat national tests in 2017 also went badly, "in the ballpark" of an 80 percent failure rate.
> In fact, the DHS Inspector General has long been a thorn in the TSA's side, compiling a still-growing collection of critical reports. In 2015, the TSA grew so upset with the criticism that it went so far as to classify some findings as "sensitive security information" in order to suppress distribution.
There are rarely simple answers to complex issues. If your question was instead, "Are there more cost efficient mechanisms to reach the same outcome?" the answer is unequivocally yes. How many aircraft fall out of the sky from attacks in every other country in the world? They achieve the same outcome without the TSA. It is plain as day we are lighting enormous amounts of human and fiat capital on fire for something that is simply ineffective for its cost.
Every other country has airport security of some sort (at least the several dozen I've been to). Is it the case that you aren't against airport security, except when it is specifically named "TSA"?
We had airport security before the TSA. It was very different and not at all as bad. Reading this discussion, it frankly sounds like you can't conceptualize the notion that not only can you have a very different model of airport security than this over-arching agency, but that many other countries--as well as our country only a couple short decades ago--manage to do so in practice. You thereby keep asking extremely strange questions like whether we believe people should be able to bring absolutely anything onto a plane, as, to you, either you have exactly the model we have now or we have literally nothing... but, obviously, that doesn't make sense, and you thereby just entirely ignore the stark differences between airport security pre- and post- TSA :/. The reality is that the TSA's way of approaching this problem 1) wasn't what was needed to prevent 9-11 and 2) doesn't even manage to prevent people from bringing dangerous things onto planes (another fact you keep refusing to engage with).
The process in other countries is roughly the same as it is here. The scanner you go through might be a bit different, the things that stay in or out of your bag may be a bit different, but let's not act like the TSA makes things somehow markedly worse than any other country and say that we should simply "hire a private company", as so many commenters think is the answer, as if that change anything.
I personally have had plenty of experiences in US airports with TSA where I don't need to take anything out of my bag or take any clothing off, and I simply walk though a metal detector. But folks here think firing the TSA is somehow the solution to getting that level of security (which is why I asked how much security people want in the first place, much to this site's objection). People are simply way to emotional about those three letters in specific that they can't seem to think clearly enough to separate what they actually do from their perception of their failures.
We are not lighting capital on fire. We are transferring that capital between owners. Failure to understand this will prevent you from improving the situation.
No, I do not think people should be able to bring “whatever they want” on an airplane. I also do not think TSA does a good job of keeping dangerous things off airplanes.
I doubt the OP you replied to thinks people should be able to bring dangerous weapons and such on airplanes, either.
Your question is a very low effort — and boring — straw man.
There's a really simple answer that's the top response to you: the pre-9/11 security rules with the addition of locking cockpit doors would be a great alternative.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181009074941/http:/oversight.h... ("Airport Insecurity: TSA’s Failure to CostEffectively Procure, Deploy and Warehouse its Screening Technologies")
https://www.oig.dhs.gov/taxonomy/term/5 ("Office of Inspector General DHS TSA Reports")
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/reassessing_a... ("Bruce Schneier: Reassessing Airport Security") | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699339 (June 2015 thread)
> The TSA blog carries constant reports of weapons confiscated from people who forgot to remove them from carry-on bags. But the Homeland Security Red Teams in the 2015 test actively concealed forbidden items just as real criminals and terrorist would. The result was that "TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints."
> Two years later, a Red Team test at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport achieved the same 95 percent failure rate to detect explosives, weapons, and illegal drugs. Repeat national tests in 2017 also went badly, "in the ballpark" of an 80 percent failure rate.
> In fact, the DHS Inspector General has long been a thorn in the TSA's side, compiling a still-growing collection of critical reports. In 2015, the TSA grew so upset with the criticism that it went so far as to classify some findings as "sensitive security information" in order to suppress distribution.