Sadly, up until today TSA is not allowing airports to opt out of the system, even though the law was specifically set up to allow them to do so. The new FAA bill -- which also calls for the FAA to set rules for thousands of law enforcement drones to monitor civilians sometime in the next decade or so -- changes this. (random Google link: http://www.securitydirectornews.com/?p=article&id=sd2012...) A bunch have already applied -- and been turned down.
Hopefully this will change.
ADD: Hate to be Mr. Cyncial Guy, but I think it's important to look at the problems with the system that led to the creation of the TSA. After 9-11, the Republicans wanted to do something big to put boots on the ground all over the nation, to be the party of security (theater). The Democrats wanted tens of thousands of new federal union workers to help shore up their re-election base. Both sides also wanted to be able to run generally on "doing something about terrorism". So a compromise was reached, everybody got something they wanted, and here we are.
Hopefully many airports will manage to opt out. I am not holding my breath for it, though. My money says we'll see those tens of thousands of drones a long time before we see substantial competition for airport security. As the other commenter pointed out, even if you opt out TSA still gets to tell you exactly what to do. Litigation exposure alone will keep most airports from signing up.
> "Hate to be Mr. Cyncial Guy, but I think it's important to look at the problems with the system that led to the creation of the TSA."
The problems with the system that led to the creation of the TSA is that voters vote for theatre. They do it with drug laws, they do it with drunk driving laws, they do it to "protect the children" and they do it with anti-terror nonsense.
The parties' motives for going along with it are almost irrelevant. Opposing these laws is career suicide for American politicians.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said except for the part about drunk driving laws. Could you please elaborate on this part?
It's also worth noting that there are two types of career suicide here: 1. Acting against the population's wishes, and 2. Acing against what is deemed acceptable by the ruling establishment. I think the "war on drugs" is an example where the general population might be very receptive to an unorthodox (i.e. decriminalization) candidate, but such candidates are filtered out of the process.
You can be arrested for drunk driving if your caught sleeping in the back seat of your car.
You can be arrested for drunk driving a segway or a horse.
The drunk driving threshold in most states is so low they can't do physical tests to determine that level of impairment. They can only test your 'impairment' by testing directly for alcohol as many people preform better on reflex tests etc with that much alcohol in their system.
There is some impairment at that level but it's well below other accepted thresholds like being sleepy or talking on a cellphone. Still even sober people cause accidents so there are plenty of accidents caused by people with that level of impairment, which helps keep threshold set that low.
PS: Much of the world is much worse though with .02 being the limit in China, Estonia, Poland, Sweden.
I think you can sleep it off in the back seat only as long as you aren't in control of the keys (for a very loose definition of "control"). If the engine is off, and if you unlock the doors with keyless entry, and then throw the keys away (perhaps somewhere in the bushes where you can perhaps find them later), then I think it's possible to sleep it off. Try it out and let me know if it works. ;)
BTW, I live in Sweden. You don't drink even a glass of wine for dinner and plan to drive that night. On the other hand, there's great mass transit so less need to drive if you want to drink. It's also fine to drink beer in public, unlike several places I've lived in the US.
I can't imagine where you might have lived in the US where a beer in public would have even raised an eyebrow, let alone be frowned upon.
Aside from highly religious towns with strict licensing like, say, Salt Lake City, and aside from lunch during the work day, alcohol consumption is pretty well accepted.
Ohhhh, in public-public. Like, on the street. Yeah, that's only legal in a handful of places in the US.
I misunderstood and thought they were talking about drinking at a restaurant or something. I figured the likely cultural miscommunication was over the European position on having a beer with lunch.
While it's possible to get beer in Sweden at the company cafeteria, it's "lättöl", max 2.25% by volume. By comparison, Budweiser is 5%. There's actually no age limit for lättöl, but many stores require 18+.
It's not the same as Germany. There was a strong sobriety movement here for decades to reduce the amount of drinking. Back in the 50s there was a maximum limit of the amount of liquor you could by. You were allotted a maximum of 3L of vodka per month (1 liter if you were an unmarried woman), and the government store didn't sell wine. You had a book, which was stamped with your alcohol purchases so they could keep track.
It's been effective. The drinking level is now about average for the rest of Europe, but there's still the international impression of hard-drinking Swedes.
Regarding the impairment, keep in mind that alcoholics will show little impairment even at very high intoxication levels (2 per million and above). At the same time, alcoholics probably shouldn't be allowed to drive, generally speaking, so testable impairment is a bad measure.
I kind of think the 0.0 laws in the Scandinavian countries make a lot of sense, if you plan to drive, just don't drink anything, full stop.
And there's definitely something to be said about established party powers holding sway over policy. But as we've seen recently with the Tea Party: the established power in a political party can find itself very quickly out of power, should it ignore the policy preferences of a motivated voting bloc.
You find that article persuasive? I find the essays from Reason to be, well, not well-reasoned.
Consider this quote: "Once the 0.08 standard took effect nationwide in 2000, a curious thing happened: Alcohol-related traffic fatalities increased, following a 20-year decline. Critics of the 0.08 standard predicted this would happen." It has a link for you to verify, but that's to a Cato ("libertarian think tank") essay from 2005. The Cato publication in turn refers to an increase in overall deaths, but doesn't say how large the increase is, nor if there are any other reasons which might cause the increase.
Since the Reason article was written in 2010, you'd think they would see if the predicted upward trend was more than a statistical anomaly. Go to http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811402.pdf and look at Figure 1 in Chapter 1. You'll see the trend went up, until 2005, and then dropped. The number of deaths in 2009 is about 4,000 less than the pre-2000 low of 34,942.
This means the trend hasn't continued, and the critics' prediction is wrong, so the foundation of this aspect of the argument does not exist.
This was pretty simple research (I think I spent 10 minutes to find that publication), so it's poor scholarship to use an outdated, secondary source, especially if it can appear that you've cherry picked that source.
Or take this example of what's considered a legitimate behavior: "Imagine a driver pulled over or stopped at a checkpoint after having "one for the road," knowing his house is a short drive away and the last drink won't kick in until he's sitting on his couch." That makes little sense to me. (Okay, the concept of "one for the road" doesn't make sense to me either.)
You've got, what, 5 minutes until the alcohol starts to affect you and 30 minutes until the BAC is at its max? Since "one for the road" happened when that person was inside, who needs to say goodbye, get out to the car, etc. then I'll call it 15 minutes until the alcohol starts to impair driving. There's very little margin of error: what do you do if you get a flat or you get out to the car to discover you've left the lights on and it needs a jump start? What about road construction, or if the lights are against you?
(Of course if you're less than a mile away I would say to just walk home.)
So I just don't see that as being a reasonable counter-argument.
To be clear, I'm not wild about Reason and my position wasn't made or particularly aligned with the argument in that article.
But I didn't feel like typing a three-thousand word essay and that article covers many of the problems and was fairly easy to find.
I'm also not out to persuade anyone. If you're not convinced, cheers. But at least be aware of the technical limitations of the breathalyzer, the liberties being infringed by drunk driving checkpoints and mandatory breathalyzer and blood tests and the punishments that begin at accusation or assertion of your rights, rather than after due process.
I agree with many of those points. The problem I have is that article contains enough suspicious information that it's easy for a reader to assume the other points are cherry-picked in order to justify a specific political viewpoint.
In other words, it isn't convincing and I don't think it's a good link for this context. Others might be:
Never. The author of the article doesn't understand how "opting-out of the TSA" works. Opting out of the TSA just means that your agents are hired through a private agency. The TSA still regulates them, sets their policy, and determines what screening devices are in use.
Airports using private agents will not be distinguishable from airports using TSA agents until the law changes, just as how SFO is indistinguishable from any other airport now.
The specific issue in the relevant wired article wasn't the policy and devices that are in use, but the abuse and mis-use of the policies and devices by TSA-hired agents. If the TSA is unable or doesn't choose to monitor and eliminate this behavior in its employees, but a private company does, then their could be a distinguishable, competitive advantage. In other words, allowing agents to request extra body scans of particular people they want to see (hopefully) isn't a policy mandated by the TSA that a private agency just can't avoid.
Which, although I hate the TSA, sort of makes sense from their perspective. What's the point of creating a consistent screening process if an airport can just opt out? The terrorists will just board at the airport with the weakest security. All of the security is then worthless.
Follow the money and if enough opt-out then all of those TSA jobs get "lost" and the TSA shrinks (so they go and do something else) and so the drive to keep this airport security theater pork around will decrease and might even kill it to put money on the next scare tactic response.
Last May, Texas tried to pass a bill to ban 'groping patdowns'.
The bill was passed by the Texan House of Representative, but then the federal government, approx 1-2 weeks later, threatened to shutdown all Texan airports because they would be a threat to the overall security. The bill failed to go any further on that threat.
My experiences at the San Francisco airport were no different than at any other airport I've ever been to. It's not like the TSA is alone in making poor hiring decisions.
This is my experience as well. These private companies are drawing from a pool of people who are willing to do a wretched job for not very much money, so it's not surprising that they'd be largely indistinguishable from federal employees. Too, it's not the TSA employees who are the fundamental problem; it's the organization as a whole.
I disagree. Having travelled extensively and been used to elevated threat levels throughout most of my life, I can attest to the fact that the average retail TSA employee is about as backwards, disorganized and inept as one could expect from the day-labor source pool.
The author points that SFO is not using the TSA. Having used SFO often, I have to say that I sadly would have never guessed that. So I think not using TSA is not going to be a competitive advantage, as long as the private companies are indistinguishable from TSA. Actually, if everything is just the same anyway, I'd rather them do it instead some random private company who is in it for the cash.
I wouldn't have guessed that either. I flew for 9 months at my last job, which included 6 outbound flights through SFO. SFO was one of the few places where I actually was patted-down instead of scanned (not by choice). So, what is the actual difference between the TSA and the security companies that are emulating the TSA?
Overall, the headline is (unintentionally, perhaps) misleading. I thought there might be some network of airports that don't have TSA-like security procedures. If that were the case, yes, I would use those instead if the prices were close. I guess that is a (libertarian?) fantasy though.
Obama could close this election right now by simply getting rid of the pornoscanners and the groping. Please, oh please, let the Republicans be the party that wants to take away your birth control, and subject you to the TSA, while the Democrats are the one removing government interference from your life.
Your response implies that other news outlets -- ABC, MSNBC, etc. -- are "moderate", while Fox is the one that is pandering to an off-center political agenda. Surely you don't really believe that the rest of the media is centrist.
(I'm not asserting that Fox doesn't have an editorial slant, I'm claiming that every news agency, bar none, does as well.)
It would be nice to think that the things that the Obama administration have got right on that count could trump that sort of silliness in most forums. Killing bin Laden is a good headline, for example.
(I'm neither a Democrat nor a Republican, being from outside the US; I'm just a guy who wishes the US would get its house in order on this one so governments elsewhere in the world have to stop pointing at the US and saying "Well, they do it!" as if it's some sort of justification for their own security theatre.)
Politics doesn't appear to work that way. People trying to push unfavorable policies do their best to get the support of whoever is popular at the time.
As long as our choices are defined for us, our choices will suck.
The GOP is still trying to beat him as soft on terrorism (eg Iran) despite Obama being the most hawkish Democrat in living memory and having a string of wins to his credit (bin Laden, Gaddhafi, umpteen lesser threats eliminated). If he wins re-election and the Democrats improve their representation in Congress, then incremental changes tot he TSA may come in a few years. FBI stats suggest that Al-Qaeda type terror attacks on the US have declined in both number and severity over the last 3 years, but it will be some years before a political consensus emerges about that. Crime figures have been falling since the 90s, and and yet there have been few politicians willing to embrace penal reform lest the trend prove fickle. Neither the political system nor the general public takes a rational approach to existential threats of this kind.
despite Obama being the most hawkish Democrat in living memory
I'm afraid to say that you're the victim of propaganda. Yes, Obama is hawkish (to the chagrin of many of his early supporters). But Democrats tend to get us into wars more frequently than Republicans do:
* VietNam - in fact our escalated presence there was directly caused by LBJ's misrepresentation of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident [1].
* Korean War - this occurred under the watch of Truman, another Democrat [2].
* WWII - FDR was keen to get into the war against Germany in order to aid our allies (can't quickly find a citation, sorry).
* WWI - Woodrow Wilson, another Democrat.
The fact is that most American wars in the past century were entered under a Democratic administration.
'In living memory' was stretching it a bit, I suppose - I ought to have said 'in my lifetime (1970->).
On the other hand, I can't really agree with your criteria for inclusion; in both WW 1 and 2 the US only entered the war after direct provocations (the sinking of the Lusitania and the attack on Pearl Harbor, respectively) and while entry into the Korean war was optional, there were strong strategical imperatives as Communism presented a much greater existential threat to the US in 1950; the USSR had exploded it's first atomic bomb in 1949, and China had fallen to Mao's Communists late that same year. I don't regard it as hawkish to respond militarily to significant emergent threats or actual attacks. You are quite right aout LBJ and Vietnam, though.
My underlying point stands, I think: Obama has shown himself to be far more comfortable deploying military force than many expected, and has had several apparent successes; but Republicans still attack him frequently on national security issues, and will continue to do so given that it's an election year. He needs a fresh electoral mandate before he can propose dialing back the TSA or DHS in general.
I drive and take the train when possible over flying even when it is a little bit more of a hassle and have been doing this more and more over the past few years. Beyond the security theater my door to door time increased so much because of the security increases that it actually made the other forms of transportation faster in some cases for me.
PDX used to be a non TSA Airport. And I think it won "best small airport in the US" for 5 years running. I didn't hate it.
At the end of last year, TSA took over.
The difference is dramatic. I fly through PDX at least 4 times a month. Average security wait time has more than tripled for me. They've installed scanners. But the big change is the way travelers are treated. As a woman waiting in line next time me on one trip put it, "these TSA guys act like they're Prison Guards - and we're convicts."
It's turned a not terrible experience into a truly awful one. It's turned PDX from one of the best US airports into just another shit show.
I know that I would absolutely fly to a less convenient airport if it were not TSA staffed.
right, I don't go anywhere I can't get to on ... Amtrak. I'm still trying to figure how, when I emigrate to Europe, I'm going to get there. (Cruise ship?)
Is there any evidence that private screening companies are any less skeevy than actual TSA? I'd be shocked if there was and appreciable difference between the two. They still have to follow all the same screening procedures that the TSA does.
It already is a competitive advantage. Connecting at an U.S. airport better be a whole lot cheaper and extremely convenient for me as a Canadian to consider it versus connecting at a Canadian airport or a direct flight.
I doubt that's even possible. US airports don't have much to say in terms of TSA presence.
US security services have shown very poor judgment on multiple occasions, in Canada now you're a child pornography supporter if you don't like internet surveillance and in UK you get extradited to US like a terrorist if you link to pirated content.
My advice: Steer away from Anglo-Saxon countries. Continental Europe and Brazil are the only reasonable places if you want to live in a civilized world.
Are TSA security services free[1]? Or does the airport pay for the government presence, too?
[1] That is, does a TSA airport pay out of pocket specifically for the TSA staff, or is it a service of Homeland Security (and funded by tax dollars, exclusively)?
There are fees on airline tickets in the US that pay for TSA services. Whether that is their sole source of funding or not I don't know. I imagine that at least some of the renovations that have been done at various airports to house larger screening facilities have been paid for out of general tax dollars.
I don't know but I very much doubt that airports pay for TSA staff. At worst, airports provide electricity for all the equipment, like scanners, and don't make any money off the space used up by TSA (screening rooms, etc).
When such a flight is one of the choices available to get to my destination, I'd be willing to pay additional just to continue to enjoy my human rights and dignity.
Yes, I'll put my entire family on a non-TSA flight. In fact, I would prefer it.
Are there actually any significant number of people that are acually pleased with the TSA, the naked scanners, the intrusive patdowns, and the bigger security theater?
I can see people being fooled by the theater and grudgingly accept it, but does anyone like it and think it should be expanded?
Lots of people like it. To the extent that it inconveniences them, they wish it were directed solely at Muslim-looking foreigners, but are willing to accept the security theater because they have a siege mentality. Similarly, there's a good number of people that call for ever more draconian enforcement of immigration laws, despite both economic costs and significant inconvenience to US citizens, Latinos in particular.
"This is all not to mention that hey’re [sic] protecting us from something that, statistically speaking, never actually happens."
I understand the sentiment here, but low relative frequency for a risk with catastrophic consequences, e.g. your house flooding or a terrorist attack, isn't valid justification for not taking precautions.
I blend back in with the author's rhetoric in calling out the TSA for engaging in expensive security theatre instead of working towards more meaningful uses of funds.
>but low relative frequency for a risk with catastrophic consequences, e.g. your house flooding
Let's be honest here, you don't have sandbags piled around your house and a boat tied up and ready to use for evacuation.
You've also done nothing to protect yourself from the thousands of other extraordinarily unlikely catastrophic events that might happen to you on a daily basis.
> isn't valid justification for not taking precautions.
As long as the precautions are effective, I have no problem with them. But 9-11 was a rule changer: even if terrorists got on the planes now, they would not be able to control the passengers or highjack the plane and would, most likely, get lynched after stabbing one or two passengers. 9-11 was a spectacular win for the bad guys, but that same trick cannot be used twice.
Before 9-11 passengers had an incentive to cooperate with highjackers - they were the highly valuable item that would be exchanged for something else. 9-11 changed that rule. Now, in most cases, the winning scenario is taking back the plane at any cost.
I don't think this level of precaution is warranted.
I have some volcano insurance to sell you. True, a volcano popping up out of nowhere almost never happens, but it did that one time so can you really afford not to spend money preparing for it?
"I understand the sentiment here, but low relative frequency for a risk with catastrophic consequences, e.g. your house flooding or a terrorist attack, isn't valid justification for not taking precautions."
That is a completely valid justification for not taking precautions. The amount of money we spend towards fighting terrorism on all fronts could go MUCH further in other places, protecting far more people from the large variety of threats we all face.
Hopefully this will change.
ADD: Hate to be Mr. Cyncial Guy, but I think it's important to look at the problems with the system that led to the creation of the TSA. After 9-11, the Republicans wanted to do something big to put boots on the ground all over the nation, to be the party of security (theater). The Democrats wanted tens of thousands of new federal union workers to help shore up their re-election base. Both sides also wanted to be able to run generally on "doing something about terrorism". So a compromise was reached, everybody got something they wanted, and here we are.
Hopefully many airports will manage to opt out. I am not holding my breath for it, though. My money says we'll see those tens of thousands of drones a long time before we see substantial competition for airport security. As the other commenter pointed out, even if you opt out TSA still gets to tell you exactly what to do. Litigation exposure alone will keep most airports from signing up.