Let us not forget that slavery was legal, gassing Jews and others was legal… A lot can pass as legal, even if it’s wrong heinous fucked-up evil bullshit.
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Possibly high-school graduates, that’s who!
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Instead of tightening up their pat down routines, there is a completely different conclusion they could have come to from exactly the same data …
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Violating your very personal space to make an example of you for whatever transgression the security theatre troope determines you’ve committed is not normal and shouldn’t be accepted as such no matter who is subjected. I get SSSS on EVERY boarding pass. As the BS has only gotten thicker at the airport, I’ve opted out of flying.
National news tonight stated that the mom claims her son has sensory issues and told the TSA agents as much. The spin made it sound retaliatory. Given prior history of the organization, that wouldn’t be out of character.
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- Some sort of tech that knocks out the spurious security so that the rest of humanity can finally just get on with their business again without all the harassment and delays and nonsense?
- No matter how invasive they get or how comfortable you are with it, they’re not gonna find a bomb in someone that doesn’t have a bomb, which must be more than 99.9999999% of passengers. So getting more comfortable or more invasive would be useless. Unless you just enjoy that kind of thing.
- What would increasing the risk of harassment and delays by authorities solve? It’s already incredibly high. If you mean the risk of terrorists bringing bombs on your plane, that’s so incredibly low that you could probably accept a thousandfold increase in that risk and still have far less risk than that of suffering a fatal hemorrhage from tripping over your shoelaces and hitting your head at the security checkpoint just due to the no shoes rule.
- This has some merit if you mean reducing the forces that allow security types resort to violent and obnoxious behavior.
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My first thought was that posting a video of your teenager’s privacy being invaded is also a bit of an invasion of privacy. But, as an old guy maybe I’m out of touch with what sorts of parental behavior teens find embarrassing.
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Thanks for pointing this out.
But air marshals are also criticized as useless (see e.g NPR, NY Post) or the lol-worthy remark “In fact, more air marshals have been arrested than the number of people arrested by air marshals.”
The more or less only country/air line doing flight security right is Israel with El Al. The process is invasive and time-consuming, no one is excluded from the treatment, some decisions are debatable - but it shows results since decades, in an actually attack-prone region.
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That’s probably because you know it’s all for show and not actually useful.
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British airways used to be like this too, during the IRA days.
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Doesn’t scale though. Last year Ben-Gurion airport handled 18 million passengers total.
That’s basically what JFK alone sees in three months.
true. but I am not convinced that the US approach (scaling security theater, still expensive) is a solution for the unscaliness* of Israel’s method.
* is this a word?
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I’ll allow it, as I get what you’re saying. But the reason that it works is because every passenger has someone talk to them like a human. That literally cannot scale upward to the US.
Personally, I think we’d actually be better off without the TSA at all, but, fear of airplanes in the first place means everyone has to freak out and get paranoid.
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more or less what I tried to imply ; )
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I saw an excellent example of how it can apply at a large international airport, at DeGaulle. As we were standing at the gate, in line to walk out to the bus to take us to the plane, my kids were still little and we’d been up for hours at that point with a canceled flight already under our belt so they were antsy and my attention was on them. I handed the boarding passes etc. to the guy while keeping track of the kids. There was the slightest resistance. I can’t explain it, but it was just enough that I stopped looking at the kids and looked at him. As soon as our eyes met, he let go of the documents. It was clear that he had been trained how to be smart about what to look for. It was the second example that day at that airport, so maybe I was just primed to see it, but I really noticed how a few well-trained staff members can do the work without the indignities and time suck of TSA-style security checks.
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So, personal, individual attention for every passenger is the way to scale it up? Because a tired mom flying with more than one kid isn’t a threat, period, and is a waste of both parties’ time.
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No, the point is that everyone had several check points through the process, where they had to show documentation to an official, and those officials were trained to determine in an instant whether or not to be concerned about that passenger.
Think about how there’s a person at TSA who first checks your boarding pass and passport/ID before allowing you to continue down the line to the X-ray machines and scanners. Imagine if that person were trained well enough that nearly all passengers could then just walk through a scanner and then keep going instead of every 10 people or so being patted down?
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Scanners and eye contact are looking for different things. Scanners are directly looking for weapons. Eye contact is part of a process looking for someone who would use a weapon. But because of the quantity of false positives (and the fact that some states have to post warnings on doors telling people to not bring their guns into the airport in the first place), the scanning for weapons bit is always going to be a time sink.
The fact is that I can go get a gun this afternoon in a way that you can’t in France. France doesn’t have as many weapons to look for in the first place and they can have less sensitive metal detectors whereas here in the states the TSA has them tuned sensitive enough to look for a bullet. We’re generating a ton of false positives over car keys that Paris isn’t.
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You make some excellent points.
I do think that knowing how to read people, to figure out who is distracted or stressed versus agitated because they’ve got nefarious plans, is a huge step in the right direction. In a way it’s a version of “guns don’t kill people; people kill people”.
I travel a fair amount, and this particular interchange really hit me as being categorically different than anything we’re doing in the U.S. I’m not explaining it well.
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No, you are. And personal connections like the one you mention is the main security system El Al uses.
But again, it’s not scalable when CDG handles the vast majority of flights for France and has 65M JFK alone is almost equal to the number of passengers. In the New York City area alone (JFK, EWR, LGA) we’ve got 58M, 40M, and 30M passengers. That’s one city. Now you need to extend the same level of training and competence to every airport in the US. Boise. Albany. LA. San Antonio. Charlotte.
Because once one airport drops the ball then the entire exercise is pointless. And it’s a huge country we have with thousands of daily flights.
That’s why the TSA has to rely on technology instead of people. It’s objective and you’ll notice that it’s not the target of the complaints. It’s the TSA’s varying application of their own rules. That in New York they never worry about my toiletries but in Iowa City they do.
Again, the TSA is security theatre. The goal is to appear like they have things in control to avoid people worrying about flights getting hijacked. But if someone really wanted to, they could take over a flight with things available past security. We could do away with it tomorrow and not see any difference in flight operations safety.
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