And quite a few cold-call sales staff are polite, decent people who always remember Mother’s Day, pay their taxes, and are in every way, model citizens. I still loathe what they do for a living.
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While also taking, and storing (long term), images of it.
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Question: Kinda a side note, but i’ve often wondered about the X amount of liquid rule. As we all know matter has many states, can you circumvent this rule by simple state change…
for example, do they limit the volume of ice you can carry?
(i know this rule has nothing to do with real security and is just security theater after the stupid failed attempt)
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The TSA people at my small, local, “international” airport are always friendly and helpful, although I’m a white male, so I generally try not to make assumptions based on how people treat me.
Still, when it was said that the TSA would be created, just as when it was said that we would send the military into Afghanistan to get Bin Laden, my heart sank. Not because it was the wrong thing to do: creating a federal agency with unified standards for enforcing airport security was the right thing to do after 9/11. They were both the right thing to do: it was just that they were going to be done by an imbecile and a crook, and both have panned out exactly the way you’d expect an agency and a war to pan out when executed by an imbecile and a crook.
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The title “Homeland Security” still rankles and I suspect it always will.
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How is it harmful to our liberty? Please enlighten me on this. You know what I love the 2nd amendment and want to carry my guns everywhere but wait my liberty is being restricted, because I can’t bring my gun on an airplane. This is something people don’t understand our liberty is restricted in a variety of ways every day and no one bats an eye at them. Is what they do worthless, yeah but as wil9000 said
If the government hadn’t established all this there would be people, and I know some of the TSA haters would be among them, who would complain endlessly that nothing was being done. Basically the governments damned if they do and damned if they don’t. I’m going to catch a lot of flak for this but if you don’t like it don’t travel by airplane.
You can loathe all you want, but you can also be civil about it, they are people too just like you and I. I just hate seeing people give them so much crap for showing up and doing their jobs. I’ll have to be a social justice warrior for this one and be offended for them.
It’s easy to make nice about it as long as you can pass for “normal” in their eyes. I guarantee that if you tried to fly with the SSSS on your boarding pass, you would get a whole new perspective on what civil behavior means. And if you can fly SSSS with the ashes of your father in carryon, and be denied boarding because they can’t properly X-ray the damn thing, and no, you don’t want to let them open it up and sift through it… if you can do all that and still speak of them in civil terms, then you’re just a better all around human being than I am.
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Do you hate it more or less than having to surrender a bottle of a drink only to have to buy an identical one with an appropriate surcharge after passing the security?
So put them all in a warehouse somewhere where they can practice patting each other down and confiscating each others’ shampoo until they are qualified for real jobs. On balance this would be a major net gain for the traveling public.
5% effectiveness is actually not so bad for a government agency.
Compare for example the State Department and CIA, which are so far into the red that they are going to have to approach 100% success from now until the heat death of the universe in order to get back into positive digits.
Exactly. Once there are a sufficiently large number of fedgov employees “on the job” their employment becomes untouchable by anyone.
We’ve had seven years of TSA failure under Bush, and six and a half under Obama.
So is Bush the crook and Obama the imbecile, or is it the other way around?
I’ve seen plenty of ashes go through in my travels and guess what they do not sift through the ashes with or without the SSSS. All they do is put it back through the x-ray in a wire cage and swab the outside perimeter of the container and test it. When it alarms the person gets patted down. And I have traveled with my elderly mother she gets SSSS all the damn time, we don’t know why. Is it hassle and frustrating? Yes but since we know it happens we show up a few hours earlier and have a laugh about it afterwards. Am I a better person than you probably not, but I tend to see things from the “opposing” side and sympathize with them .
Again I travel a lot, so I know better than to try and bring things like that through. When I first started traveling and made all the newbie mistakes, it still didn’t irk me because those things cost fifty cents to a dollar fifty and I knew I was going to get a complimentary drink on the plane anyway. As for the shampoo and soap I live off of what the hotel gives out. Buying the exact product on the other side with a surcharge is again a consequence of the government being reactionary. If they don’t do anything the governments not doing enough to protect the traveling public, if the government does something about it what they’re doing is ridiculous and needs to stop.
That does not make it suck that much less. The 2-euro penalty (okay, 1.2-1.5 or so at the Dublin airport) for a drink is still there. I should be able to bring a bottle of tap water if I please. Taking this possibility away does not make me safer - it is just a security kabuki without any real impact other than just one more additional unnecessary inconvenience.
Complimentary drink? What’s that? Do you fly the Billionare Airlines? Some of us are stuck with Ryanair.
Which you should not have to. Nor you should have to buy a replacement on arrival.
It is also a consequence of the plebes being scared sheep, unable to quantify risks properly.
See above. Plus a large heaping of politician-grade incompetence.
Maybe it’s time to roll back the kabuki, move the resources to flight crew training and perhaps a couple Hollywood flicks with passengers overpowering wannabe troublemakers to keep that idea well-seeded (and nothing will happen anyway), and firmly tell those who are afraid of their own shadow that they can go by car and expose themselves to a much higher risk on the road.
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The Ministerium für Heimatsicherheit, as I like to call it.
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There were some needed improvements to airport and more importantly in-flight security, but I’m not sure we need the TSA and their fancy scanners. They don’t reliably detect weapons, and they’ll also admit they have little chance against some explosives. I wonder if simpler scanners might do more to detect threats; I’m guessing airports were better at detecting guns and knives in the days before TSA agents were tasked with detecting any and all liquids. We have to realize that all the security technology we can get might not stop a terrorist attack. What can work to find terrorists is detective work, rather than security theatre and mass signals collection, but at some point nothing can stop someone clever enough from bombing or hijacking an airliner.
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