If you're ever wondering why something in the U.S. can't be made better, the answer is often that the existing rent-collectors must be allowed to continue collecting their rent at all costs. This is why we can't have the government file taxes on our behalf: because Intuit would no longer be collecting rent, and rent-collecting must be protected at all costs. This is why we can't have a single-payer healthcare system: because insurance companies must keep collecting their rent. This is why the TSA is here to stay: it collects rent from the taxpayers, the airports, and the passengers.
Any modification to the system must include ways for the rent-collectors to continue collecting rent from someone. TSA Precheck is a way for you to say: it's fine, TSA, I'll pay rent directly to you, so that I can avoid the worst parts of your services. It, of course, has nothing to do with actually pre-checking that certain passenger are low-risk -- it's just a solution to the problem of "but if we made the system more efficient, how would we still collect rent?" Collect it directly from the passengers themselves, for the privilege of avoiding the worst parts of dealing with you.
I'll add that one solution is to simply not fly through TSA airports.
I flew JSX last weekend and security was a swab for explosives and a metal detector. It took 30 seconds. Ticket says to arrive to the airport 15 minutes before departure. I'm not sure how scalable flying out of regional airports is, but the extra $200 was worth the price for a) not burning an hour arriving and b) having a large enough seat to work while airborne.
And the other option is of course to invest in HSR where possible.
I don’t typically spend an hour at the airport either.
This is why SFO is generally amazing and my favorite airport in the country. I often show up after boarding has started and have never been close to missing a flight.
The difference being that the TSA is the government, and the government collects that rent whether or not the TSA exist.
It's not that rent collectors must continue to be able to collect rent, it's that "it'll put people out of a job", no matter whether those jobs ever made any sort of sense, and actively make people's lives worse. Jobs are near-religiously sacred to the US mindset.
“ This is why we can't have the government file taxes on our behalf: because Intuit would no longer be collecting rent, and rent-collecting must be protected at all costs. ”
AKA The Shirky principle, which was discussed in great depth last week
In France the employer manages your income taxes, and then for the vast, vast majority of people (I would guess 90%) the tax filing is a 2 minutes work.
I think that since last year if you do not file them, they are automatically filed for you according to the info the govt has
Same for Finland... Takes me 5 minutes to go and add deduction for using home office and half of the internet bill. And any peripherals I got for work...
And if I didn't have any of those, well I wouldn't even need to touch whole thing.
Ya most sane countries have a PAYE (pay as you earn) type system with no involvement at all from the employee unless they make money in other ways that they need to declare (investments, etc).
Does TSA pre-check include any sort of background check? If so, that at least will flag someone with a criminal background. Although that doesn’t necessarily translate to the benefits of TSA pre-check of keep your shoes on and laptop in your bag. So even then it’s just paying to cut the line.
question: is there another country now doing airport security better?
I did a bunch of international travel a few years ago and found the process to be fairly standard. Didn’t feel as if other countries are quite so obsessed with removing shoes, but they seemed a bit more obsessed with additional carryon screening.
Helsinki airport was recently redone, and now the security doesn't require you to remove laptops from your bags. It's not perfect, but very welcome change for someone in charge of carrying electronics for the whole family.
Security at Frankfurt this past December felt like a lighter touch and better organized than TSA in Orlando or Houston, but still attentive and likely to catch something that shouldn’t be taken onto the plane.
It's not the same level, you don't have to take off your shoes for example.
In some airports (like in Haneda) you don't even have to pull anything out of your bag. Bag on the conveyor belt, yourself through the gate and you're done.
> the answer is often that the existing rent-collectors must be allowed to continue collecting their rent at all costs.
Well, to be fair, this is also the case in other parts of the world. They just differ in what part of the economy the rent-seekers have latched themselves on.
(Though I have to agree that allowing them into healthcare was a uniquely bone-headed decision.)
"This is why we can't have the government file taxes on our behalf: because Intuit would no longer be collecting rent, and rent-collecting must be protected at all costs."
The US government took the initiative to create this system. AFAICT, Intuit will not be collecting rent for anyone who uses it. Perhaps this will not be a significant number of people but this nonetheless contradicts the assertion in the parent comment that the US government must protect Intuit's rent collection "at all costs".
We can stop dancing around the issue while pretending we don't understand why the TSA exists.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the government has to be seen doing "something". This was the something.
Then, in the following years, the TSA evolved into a welfare program for veterans, because here in the US we can't dream of just giving people money, we have to invent bullshit jobs that make society worse.
No one values this work, and so it’s an identity and status issue. “Soldiers” vs janitors and people who keep the lights on. (“Support our troops”, “back the blue”, etc).
Someone mentioned upthread this is a job for veterans because we won’t pay UBI or similar. It’s status enough, in some cases (“make work for veterans”.
I don't think so, only a small portion is veterans. It's just a cheap jobs program for work that isn't really hard work and doesn't require much skill other than showing up.
TSA emerged in the aftermath of 9/11; TSA is USA specific. But why has every other country has adopted this useless security protocol. I don't understand that.
We probably told them too. I assume US won't accept airplanes into its airspace with passengers that haven't been cleared to a security specification that looks almost identical to what TSA does.
This might be a crazy idea, but maybe... it's not completely useless? Maybe if many countries deem it necessary, and many people who (I assume) have more expertise than most casual observers like us on HN also deem it necessary, maybe they might be right and we might be wrong about how necessary or not this is?
> In the aftermath of 9/11, the government has to be seen doing "something". This was the something.
No, that might have been true then, but the real reason is the same that Airlines suddenly unlearned how to group people who book togehter to sit together unless they reserve booking. The security theator is expensive to run, but it's less expensive than what you make selling more expensive methods of avoiding the security theather.
Airlines don't want you to have a nice and easy travel, unless you've paid the appropriate primum. They are perfectly happing intentionally pissing off 98% of their travelers to maintain the 2% who pay extra. And when you zoom out, that also means that what you pay for the premium tickets isn't to pay for extra luxery, its to pay for the intentional annoyance of everyone else.
The more likely reason for the creation of the TSA was to prevent victims from suing airlines into oblivion for failing to provide security. The government knew that if the airlines were found responsible the entire aviation industry could collapse, so the Feds stepped in and said "it's our job" and created the TSA to make that responsibility clear.
The situation is not dissimilar to how power tool companies would not deploy SawStop technology because that would make it clear to consumers that said companies knew their products were unsafe and would expose them to millions / billions in liability claims.
It'd be interesting to see a breakdown of percentage of veterans in different government positions. I'd imagine they are all fairly similar levels since it's most likely just a transition from military to government rather than specifically military to TSA. In any case, I certainly wouldn't call TSA "a welfare program for veterans" as the parent comment suggests.
I'll take off my shoes, get scanned, listen to contradictory instructions, suffer "random" pat downs, whatever. Just have enough agents checking IDs and keeping scanning lines open so that the queue doesn't get to be 45mins long!
You touch on one of the most annoying things about TSA: the inconsistency. Every airport seems to have slightly different rules, and the agents treat you like an idiot if you don't know theirs. Sorry, Mr. Cop School Reject, I've been to ten other airports this year and none of them did it your way. Even the same airport can vary sometimes. It's impossible to believe the rules are doing any good when each of them is skipped half the time and there's no effect at all.
Do you know when they stopped? It's been ~14 months since I last flew in the US and they were still making me take evvvvverryyyything out.
At the time I was typically travelling with a laptop, a tablet, and two USB-C portable monitors. It was quite a lot to unpack and re-pack.
NB: Out of concern for the sanity of myself and my fellow travelers sharing a TSA I made sure I could do it as fast as humanly possible. Everything was packed to allow the quickest possible retrieval in line...
Toiletries maybe, but devices still come out from what I've seen unless you're PreCheck (which is well worth the $ just for that and to not have to take off your shoes; went precheck last year and never going back).
Speaking of irritating airport protocols: If you are a US citizen or permanent resident and you're coming into the US from abroad, download the CBP MPC app. You add family members to it with a passport scan, then up to 4 hours before passing through customs, submit your arrival location, take a photo of yourself, and then use the "Mobile Passport Control" lane.
If it wasn't for this so-called "theatre", I'd have accidentally got on a plane with more than 50ml of toothpaste last week, and I'm sure I don't need to explain the damage that would have caused.
last week i accidentally flew SAN -> DEN with not one, but TWO new full-sized tubes of toothpaste without incident. we were so lucky to have avoided catastrophe.
The most important safety measure implemented was strong doors leading to the flight station. The cost/benefit for every other 'security' measure has clearly not been worth it. The amount of time people spend standing in line, arriving early, etc etc has a real cost in human life and vastly outweighs the supposed security and safety benefits we have gotten from airport security.
I'm not convinced the TSA is needed to stop terrorism, but it probably helps a good deal with protecting passengers from ordinary psychotic Americans, of which there seem to be a significant increase over the last 20 or so years.
Last year TSA intercepted almost seven thousand firearms at security checkpoints, 93% of which were loaded. So take all those crazy people, then add firearms into their vicinity, or a firearm into the hands of a well-meaning but panicking co-passenger now trying to "secure" a crowd of 300 people 30,000 feet in the air.
Here's a brief article I found about this. They talked to a former security director at LAX who says...
“The majority of folks” who are found with firearms “are what we call low-risk passengers,” Jeffries said. “These are your more frequent travelers. They’re the ones usually in PreCheck. I don’t think there’s any malicious intent. The number one thing that we would hear out there, and I’m sure it still stands to this day, is, ‘I forgot it was in my bag.’”
This maybe more a reflection of how many people in the US own guns and less about people intending to stage some kind of shootout at the airport.
That's believeable, but if one bad guy gets onto a plane with a gun, it's getting hijacked. I can buy the "good guy with a gun" thing in other settings, but not on a plane.
So TSA creates these unnecessarily long lines and stressful conditions, and some of the people in those lines have guns? Only a matter of time before that ends very badly.
Ordinary psychotic Americans who get upset at me if I ask if I need to take my computer out and put it in a bin? Not sure it’s doing a good job at that.
Not too long ago I got yelled at for leaving my laptop in bag, because the TSA agent was telling everyone to leave them in, but that was only for the line one over from me.
This is bullshit. It's a ploy to further under-staff the screening area and even further discourage people from exercising their right to a manual screening procedure that does not involve a full-body scan.
I insist on a manual opt-out every time I fly, and I've noticed particularly in LAS that TSA seems intentionally to delay that screening process as an extrajudicial punishment and disincentive. It's outrageous and this intentional crippling of manual processes to which passengers are entitled needs to be checked, not expanded.
What TSA needs is proper oversight, better KPIs, and a cultural overhaul to stop treating passengers so terribly. TSA ought to provide an SLA commitment, consistently and openly report on their actual service level, reward managers who improve it, and fire/demote those managers who degrade it.
> I insist on a manual opt-out every time I fly, and I've noticed particularly in LAS that TSA seems intentionally to delay that screening process as an extrajudicial punishment and disincentive.
Make sure you put your bags through first before opting out.
>What TSA needs is proper oversight, better KPIs, and a cultural overhaul to stop treating passengers so terribly. TSA ought to provide an SLA commitment, consistently and openly report on their actual service level, reward managers who improve it, and fire/demote those managers who degrade it.
I agree, we need to teach TSA to Scrum and we need to do it yesterday!
If there were terrorists, they would just open fire on the crowded security checkpoints and kill hundreds of people without any complex scheme. This doesn't happen because there is no terrorist threat we need to be on guard against.
I used to think this until I realized that the theoretical point isn't to prevent great loss of life, it's to prevent the usage of airplanes as a weapon. Malls, subways, concerts, sports games were always target-rich...targets, but a plane can be used to attack infrastructure and militarily significant targets (e.g. the Pentagon) and to kill far more people with lighter weapons than you could otherwise.
Of course, this could never happen. It's been said to death, but the conventional wisdom before 9/11 was to allow plane hijackers to run their course and assume that all they wanted was cash, to just sit tight and wait for them to set down somewhere. Not even after, but mid 9/11 people realized that old paradigm was out and the passengers of the fourth plane the cockpit door, preventing the usage of the plane as a weapon.
Post 9/11, nobody could hijack a plane with box-cutters anymore - enough people would rather be stabbed than see their plane be used as a weapon that it's simply insufficient, especially since if they crash the plane you're probably dead anyway.
I think you'll find terrorists do exist, and you do need to be on your guard.
Whether the specific airplane controls we have now are effective or required is still a good conversation to have, but you draw the wrong conclusion if you think there is simply no threat.
If it's so obvious, then why didn't this happen on 9/11?
Edit: I'm aware that the TSA was created after 9/11. The point I'm making is that it's possible they were able to bring weapons aboard to hijack the planes because security was so lax.
Security checkpoints weren’t crowded before 9/11 because it didn’t take 15 minutes to get through security. I guess this is becoming lost ancient history. There was no ID check. There wasn’t even a boarding pass check — you routinely accompanied departing friends to their gate to see them off. There was none of this shoes off, no liquids, laptop out of the bag, just an x-ray and a metal detector.
The threat model before 9/11 was hijacking, not suicide bombers.
Yes, that's why we couldn't bring more than 4 ounces of liquid on planes. The theatre about liquids did nothing to address the problems revealed by that attack.
I always wondered about well planned groups. Like wouldn't they use other avenues, infiltrate not as passengers, but as workers or import stuff to shops and restaurants... Either by getting hired or paying some poorly paid worker.
I think not only zero, but zero cumulatively for the last 30 years. I can't think of a single example of a terrorist attack foiled at airport security.
all US border security is theatre. ports are part of it any malevolent (smart, resourced) actor who wants to move people or items in or out has obvious ways to do it
I would love one presidential candidate to include this in their platform. I have yet to hear this (unless I just missed this person!).
A massive overhaul & reduction in all of this security theater. NSA and others already do the heavy lifting of identifying people planning bad things. Can we just do a basic metal detector or something and call it a day?
Well one candidate has you covered. He wants to dismantle the DHS. Unfortunately his platform comes with a certain amount of other baggage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
Oh, it's serious. Sure, he doesn't have the logistical or institutional knowledge and abilities to actually execute on it on its own, but his allies do, and they've shown that they'll do whatever it takes to keep riding this tiger, even at the cost of the country.
It is completely serious. It is put out by the Heritage Foundation and has input from a bunch of conservative organizations including many with close ties to Trump campaign.
Busses and trains aren’t good targets for terrorism.
You blow up a bus, maybe no one really cares except the locals to the area where the bus blew up.
A plane cuts through many different social classes and nationalities, putting them all in one place and making a large amount of people imagine themselves as the potential victim.
Literally just walked up to the gate. Only thing was the gate attendant checked your ID against the ticket. That was all. No metal detectors. No screening. Just walk up to the gate an get on. One time my mate forgot his drivers license, and missed the flight. So harsh!
I flew the final 6 years of that period and enjoyed flying. Post-9/11 flying sucks and is a huge drag. If you're too young to have experienced pre-9/11 airports then you really don't know what you're missing. When I was little they let me see the cockpit in flight, and the flight attendants would bring me little snacks on late flights.
It was a totally different experience versus being crammed into a flying bus.
Did we? Between 1968-1972 there were 130 hijackings in the US alone. In 1973 the FAA required passenger screening (I don’t know why people are saying screening began in 2001, the TSA was formed and updated screening procedures, but people were definitely already being screened).
From 1973 on, hijacking’s dropped considerably. Since 2001 there have been no hijackings in the US.
Yeah, I don't know if screening was the best solution and don't think the post-9/11 rules make sense, but there was clearly a problem in the past that got solved by screening. Also, nowadays we gotta make sure well-intended passengers don't have a Samsung Note.
> But does anyone dare board a plane when none of the passengers have been screened?
Yes. Without hesitation, yes.
Americans learned a lesson on 9/11/01. Prior to that, almost all hijackings resulted in the eventual release of the passengers. No one had ever hijacked a plane in the US and flown it into a building before. There was no real reason to fight back if doing so put you at risk.
After 9/11/01, the default assumption to the hijacking of an American airliner can only be that everyone on board is going to die, along with an unknown number of people on the ground. That change in perspective significantly alters the likely outcome.
If someone tried to hijack an airliner in 2024 with a knife - or even a gun - I would be highly surprised if, at the end of the day, more injuries were caused by the attacker than from the scramble of people jumping on top of them to subdue them.
The problems TSA was nominally created to solve simply no longer exist. Screen luggage for explosive, maybe walk people through an x-ray if the airline wants that, and move on with life.
Even further back, before the hijacking spree of the 70s, when I was a kid I remember our local airport had no division between ground side and air side. You just got out of your car, walked to the gate, and they checked your boarding pass. This would be in the late 1970s, it was a remote city, so probably the transition to a "secure boarding area" was later than in the big cities.
Absolutely I would. Most other countries have little or no screening and are just fine.
It's not a realistic risk to be concerned about... it's just not worth the hassle trying to mitigate something that is orders of magnitude less of a deal than other easier to mitigate risks.
Security was handled (owned) by airports since the dawn of time. Airports with high risk (JFK) had higher security, airports with lower security (SAT). Airports hired typical staff from the local community and you would go through a metal detector and someone would X-Ray your luggage to make sure there were no obvious bombs in there. Your family could meet you at the gate.
Originally when the TSA was invented, airports were allowed to do their own security, TSA was optional. Now, airports that already have TSA are not allowed to provide their own security, it is mandatory they hire federal union employees.
WHY is it necessary for municipal airports to hire federal union employees? Airports know their own local risk factor and can adequately manage those employees. Airports want their passengers to have a good experience, so that they come back. This is why they pay big bucks for rennovations, why they have the bad-ok-good-better-best colored buttons in the restrooms and everything else.
The airport has virtually no control over the staff running security. They can't overschedule employees for busy times and holidays, they're beholden to what the TSA does.
And yeah, they do regular tests of the TSA to see how much contraband they can slip past security. TSA regularly fails these tests/audits.
The rest of the world does not deal with the level of security as american airports, and nobody else is having problems. US airports are still running at/above 9/11 security levels... why? In most countries you aren't required to take off your shoes or walk through anything more invasive than a simple metal detector.
1. Abolish the TSA. Allow local airports to hire and manage their own staff (currently not allowed)
2. Adjust minimum standards up and down based on current thread level (don't force people wearing flip flops to take off their shoes)
TSA was a huge mistake and is absolutely security theater. Every other country in the world does a better job of managing risk at airports than the US.
If you have money, you buy Pre+Clear+Global Entry. The "screening process" is nil (three simplistic questions for Global Entry).
That leaves the bag inspections - and I can tell you that at least for the Pre checkins, they're not exactly enforcing e.g. the weird liquid rules. (And there are plenty of articles showing they're not super-great at finding guns, easier)
And yet, it seems air traffic is mostly threatened by carriers & Boeing implementing cost savings to enrich execs.
Also, we did just fine pre-2001, and it's highly doubtful the TSA would've prevented 9/11. So, what exactly does it buy us, outside of an employment program that mostly enriches folks supplying TSA equipment?
Any modification to the system must include ways for the rent-collectors to continue collecting rent from someone. TSA Precheck is a way for you to say: it's fine, TSA, I'll pay rent directly to you, so that I can avoid the worst parts of your services. It, of course, has nothing to do with actually pre-checking that certain passenger are low-risk -- it's just a solution to the problem of "but if we made the system more efficient, how would we still collect rent?" Collect it directly from the passengers themselves, for the privilege of avoiding the worst parts of dealing with you.