I think we have circled in on the essence of this issue. Ultimately, most controversies have a fine distinction at their center, with an increasing spiral of obfuscatory hoo-ha hanging off of it. People use this to shift the argument to their strengths and interests. Bla bla bla.
More importantly, it’s Cory who has much greater impact than most of us, and if this degree of discussion gives him ideas to fight the best good fight, then huzzah.
Very nice chatting with you.
Imagine if the ultimate outcome of enhanced TSA searches was 10-second colon cancer screening. Excelsior!
I am wading in deep here. Why can’t I keep my trap shut?
Yes and no. And unfortunately I know a bit about this industry.
$85 means a contracting firm gets paid $40 to do a background check. Which means the analyst that does the check gets paid $20. Which means the database(s) access cost around $5. And there are a lot of DBS to check.
So a couple points:
I am honestly at a loss. I don’t know what the correct balance is, since I constantly see bad actors and evasion attempts every few seconds. I have biases.
However $85 sounds about right to me, based purely on the (theatrical) economics.
I assumed they were operating on a full cost recovery model.
The pat downs at the airport do not operate on a full cost recovery model.
The amount doesn’t really interest me, the logic of the policy does.
The pat downs are… I am not even going to use the common words because they are so toxic, so I will just use collusion and nepotism.
I was at an airport and witnessed what must have been a three month old get patted down. The TSA agent was kind and gentle, I am not throwing shade on her. But every pat down is billable, as is every pre, every GE. (Billable also includes charge backs, service agreements, etc)
This is what happens when people insist on the luxury of wearing clothes.
People generally beg me to wear clothes.
Last time I flew my gf said she wouldn’t sit by me when I threatened to wear an old pair of *really" tight and *really" short shorts for the pat down. Instead, I asked if I could pick who did my pat down, while staring at the most macho “cop” there!
I’d like to be able to do that, to make visiting family easier, but I live outside the US, which is not just a scheduling difficulty, especially as I’ve changed my name and gender. Also, I doubt my wife, a non-resident alien who has visited Syria in the last 5 years is eligible, as she can’t even do the ESTA thing anymore. I’m not sure us separating at security is a great idea, especially for me as the mistreatment and groping I’ve experienced in the past gives me intense anxiety, which makes me look more suspicious.
I mean, I’m sure you’re more moral than your feckless family, but it actually is the case that not everyone has your options. And this doesn’t make anyone a bad person - just maybe all of us should be able to get the same amount of respect that you were allowed to purchase?
My dad’s 10 minute appointment was a 90-minute drive (each way) from his home, and he can’t drive anymore, so that involved finding or paying someone to drive him. And then they turned him down without explaining why.
Just saying, it’s not as simple as you make out. Like so many things, if one is poor or disabled even the “simple” things aren’t so simple.
I hear you. Any large scale undertaking is going to skew towards statistical norms. Ongoing expansion of civil rights as we have over the last 100 years would have gotten almost everyone there eventually. Backsliding at the moment, obviously.
I would say no, this isn’t the best analogy, because the public U.S. Postal Service is built on serving every single address in the entire country ‘equally’ (obviously, there are some differences if it takes longer to get to a very rural address or Alaska, for example).
If the regular line through TSA were respectful and non-invasive, then paying a little extra for “Express” service would be equivalent to the USPS’s Express option.
But that’s not the baseline for TSA. That’s the problem.
Yeah, but not billable directly to the passenger going through the check, whereas Pre is.
I’m not going to go too deep into the “why” because I doubt there is a good answer (culturally we accept publicly funded security, pat downs are security, someone wanted to introduce a new program to make things easier, someone else said, “How much will that cost?” and next thing you know the improvement is only for people who pay).
But my point is that everything costs. I hope to god that billing for pat downs is just a manner of speaking and the security personnel are paid salaries, but regardless it costs money to do pat downs, to run porno scanners, to x-ray luggage. Everything about airport security has to be paid for.
Does the pre-screening actually cost more than the security it skips? I doubt it. You said you could see how the real cost was probably about $85. So if a business traveller who does a round trip once every other month for five years (60 visits to the airport) get it then it barely has to save a dollar per trip in pat downs to make it a net positive for the TSA.
I don’t think I agree with their general level of security, but if I accept it, I have to think that doing some amount of pre-screening is making the process cheaper, faster and better for everyone. Depending on how much money is saved per airport visit, charging $85 for the program might be costing them money for all I know (it seems within the realm of possibility).
I think there would be a justice problem with it even if it was free. Putting people in the higher security check line makes them suspects and gets them the worsening treatment Cory is talking about in the main post. But the fee thing really gets under my skin. I work in government and how government chooses where to use user fees and where not to basically has no logic behind it at all (at least no public policy logic, the logic is more about whether it was implemented in a time of relative austerity or a time of relative largesse)
Contractors have been used in airport security since 2002. They are paid an hourly wage, but the master service agreement contracts define the number of minimum enhanced screenings that must happen. If those metrics aren’t met, contracts don’t get paid.
You are correct, an agent isn’t paid five bucks per patdown or anything silly like that. But the contracting firms are absolutely paid by metrics like patdowns.
It is, what I would call, a perverse incentive.
So pre-screening is essentially the TSA saying “pay us some extra money so that you can go back to how things used to be before we existed, which is coincidentally how airports everywhere else in the world still function”?
Is it just me or is that pretty much the definition of a protection racket?
“Nice unviolated sense of personal space you’ve got there, mate. It’d be a shame if anything were to happen to it…”
Good news, as of last August…
TSA is upping its Precheck enrollment game in more creative ways.
Last summer TSA approved the opening of Precheck enrollment centers at H&R Block tax service offices in 27 states. More locations have been added since then.
More recently, MorphoTrust set up Precheck enrollment sites in Department of Motor Vehicle offices across Virginia. The company also offers temporary Precheck sign-up centers as a perk for attendees at some big conferences and now has a “Summer Tour” under way bringing pop-up enrollment centers to easy-to-access hotels in 15 cities across the country.
That is good to know…thanks!
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
