The SFO screeners aren’t federal, they’re contracted by the city, which owns the airport. Different places will have varying levels of graft of course, but nothing on the order of KBR or Halliburton. Plus, airports compete with each other, at least in metro areas large enough to have more than one. “We have a better passenger screening experience” would be a big selling point.
And a security firm would have a tough sell convincing anyone it’s the only one capable of providing a bunch of rent-a-cops. It’s not like rebuilding Afghanistan or designing the national health care database.
Fair enough. Even vis-a-vis the federal government, I overstated my case. I do not want to imply it’s never worth the effort of trying to fight or push when confronted with inappropriate, abusive bureaucracy – at an airport or elsewhere.
I do believe anyone who tries to fight one of these systems needs to be prepared for a long, minimally satisfying effort. I haven’t engaged in such a fight. I have a family member who sued a regional hospital for malpractice, and a former college classmate who sued an Ivy League university for mishandling money she’d raised to fund an endowed chair. Both women won their cases; both found them to be draining, disheartening experiences. Both had lawyers representing their interests who counseled them that: this is what it feels like to win.
Such fights are “worth it” and benefit our society as a whole, but they are grueling.
I have the opportunity, and do travel to, several international conferences a year. I’ve boycotted the US for the last decade primarily because I found the TSA security theatrics obnoxious and insulting.
And that was as a “Professional White Male”.
I’m sure the economy will be none the worse for missing out on my modest tourist spend, nor the culture from missing out on the pleasure of my modest company…
But I’ve yet to meet anyone who didn’t immediately understand and sympathize with my simple statement “I choose not to go there because of the way they treat me at the airport”
Thanks to binding arbitration clauses, America’s reputation as the land where you can always sue somebody is rapidly becoming unjustified. In an increasing percentage of cases, weighted toward the ones that matter, you can’t.
The fact that these are just rentacops, rather than ‘Homeland Security’ might still be helpful if they decided to beat down and/or execute someone in the security screening line, the blue wall of silence doesn’t really apply to rentacops; but dodging a little civil liability? Recourse is virtually certain to be more expensive than the camera, if it exists at all.
I travel quite a bit as well, and have found that security theater exists pretty much everywhere, frankly.
Last year, I stood in a security line for nearly an hour in Australia and had to do exactly what I do in American TSA lines.
A few years ago in Berlin, the entire security line was stopped when I got my laptop out. “Foreign laptop!” they said, and pushed a button. Five minutes passed, and a man on a black bicycle rode up. He got out a tiny vacuum thing and vacuumed my laptop keyboard for drug residue, scanned it, and gave them the go-ahead while the line behind me watched.
The reality of TSA lines is that I’ve never waited for more than a half hour in a line, and at the end, I take off my shoes, walk through a scanner, and walk away. If you’re literally boycotting the entire country because of the hyperbole you see on the news and on BoingBoing about three-hour-waits and agents looking at your junk on “pornoscanners”, that’s your choice, but it’s very silly to pretend that airport security theater exists nowhere else.
I wonder how much non-US security theater is influenced by what we have in the US, though. I’m under the impression that there’s pressure for flights to the US to adhere to the same protocols as flights from and within the US. Once an airport starts implementing US-style security theatre to US-flights it may easily spread to the others.
An amount of security routine exists most places, yep indeed, though I blame the US airports directly for that as well. When they sunk to the greatest level of paranoia they could come up with, all international airlines had to start to sink to the same levels in order to keep the Worldwide Duty Free zone equally airtight.
I make my own choices based on my own experiences, not hearsay. Being fingerprinted in LA seemed primitive and invasive, and being fully processed to get entry to a holding pen for three hours in Miami, only to be fully processed on the way out of it again seemed ludicrous and illogical.
I’m a placid traveller, I actually love airports and have a lot of patience for standing in line or whatever as long as things make sense. But in Australia (for example) and most of Europe (Germany included) in my experience there is a good chance that the staff is there to get a job done together. There can be beureaucratic inefficiencies and bottlenecks in many places, but it was the US cattle-runs that felt most like deliberate, vindictive, spirit-breaking exercises in population conditioning.
I can’t recall travelling through any serious military states, but even the systems there have reasons. They scan you for guns because having guns is a threat. But they don’t make you take your shoes off, because that’s silly.
As in a recent BB article on the randomness of Chinese censorship - the arbitrary nature of inventing rules to enforce is one of the weapons in the toolbox of fear.
If you haven’t travelled in the US for the last ten years, your experiences are past memories, and you’re boycotting due to your imagination fueled by the media. Feel free to do so! One less person in line.
[quote=“anon61221983, post:56, topic:78097”]
Which, again, is not us, it’s the airlines/ports. At what point have they shown that they have the same interests as us.
[/quote]Airports may not have the same agenda as the passenger, but they have do have an equal agenda against security. Airports want short security lines; more security means less people, more irritable people, and less time spent bored waiting on a plane (and spending money).
What advantage does a passenger waiting through long security lines give an airport? Airports literally hate the TSA enough to tell the federal government to get rid of the lines or else they are getting private security.
They do? If that’s true, I don’t think they’ve shown that in anyway, until very recently. They’ve only do so as the lines have gotten so out of control that they have to look like they are doing SOMETHING! I don’t think either the airlines or airports have shown the least bit of care about their passengers, because they know that people who depend on air travel (and aren’t super-rich) don’t really have an option. If you’re someone who has to travel for business, you literally have no other options, other than driving or train, which is out the door if time is a factor. And it’s not like this is new. They’ve had years of complaints and haven’t done much.
Plus, who has gone private? Has it been any of the major hubs at this point? Who has threatened to do so so far, other than Phoenix?
So, I don’t know. I still would argue that the airlines/airports do not feel as if their and our interests are aligned in this case at all.
I think that your average airport manager is a lot more attentive to passenger complaints than the TSA bureaucracy. In fact, paying attention to one passenger complaint per year would be a marked improvement.
Maybe. I think complaints need to amass for it to make an impact, though. Little has changed despite complaints thus far (which might be a factor of the disconnect between the TSA and airports in general).
The wait times and the intrusiveness will eventually reach a tipping point which produces an “impact”. At least I hope so. Not nearly enough people have stopped flying I guess.
Let’s hope so. We haven’t flown in ages and it sounds like it’s only gotten worse since we stopped doing so. This summer might be it. I know at ATL, the security wait time is rarely longer than 30 minutes (at least according to the local NPR in the mornings), but they’ve finally gotten longer than an hour today, as they had to close one of the security check points for a few weeks (I forget why). We’ll see what happens in the next few weeks before they get it back open.
I’m a little surprised how many people here are wringing hands over the prospect of “privatizing” security. Security is private for 80 years before the 9/11 brought the TSA in.
And at no point did the TSA ever run things even close to as smoothly as private security. At most you could say, “their job isn’t worth doing, but they do it fairly after 30 minutes or so.” Now you can’t even say that.
My God, has this farce gone on long enough that people somehow regard the TSA as normal?
Sometimes I think that the TSA was designed deliberately by someone like Crowley:
What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.
— Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
