I opt-out of the x-ray scanner every single time, and so should you. It really doesn't take much longer to go through the process. Show up 3 minutes earlier if you have to. You're rushing to the gate, for what? To sit there longer? Boarding with the crowds is stressful anyways. The most relaxed way to board is at the very end -- there's no more line, I just walk right into the plane, most people are seated, and just grab my seat. Why would you want to maximize the time spent sitting, especially on a cramped plane? I understand the situation is different if you really want your carry-on bag to stow above you.
If everyone opted out, the program would be scrapped. You can tell me about how the scanners give harmless amounts of radiation, but I don't really care. You have to stand for your principles. In this situation, a government contractor forced more security theater upon a country, with the only benefit of the entire charade going to their bottom line. Nobody is safer, an entire mode of transport has a new bottleneck, a government agency has expanded and is emboldened and now wants even broader jurisdiction, and as the article states, people are driving more and dying.
If we don't stand up and push back now, things will only get worse. More invasive, more annoying, more useless, more dangerous. And not an inch gained against the stated purpose of deterring terrorist attacks.
It really doesn't take much longer to go through the process. Show up 3 minutes earlier if you have to.
YMMV with respect to the additional time. I also opt out and have had to wait as long as 15 minutes for the pat down (and to make matters worse in that instance, there was an elderly passenger behind me who had a medical exemption from the scanner and they waved him through while I had to stand and wait).
My advice is that if you do plan to opt out, allow for more than 3 minutes.
I also opt-out every time, but I would estimate the average additional time to be in the order of 10 minutes.
It's highly variable. Sometimes you get the pat-down right away and then it only takes about 3 minutes, but most of the time you have to wait for the agent to come get you, and that can take up to 10 minutes in my experience.
But in any case, it's worth it (for the reasons you mentioned). I wish there were more of us that always opted-out.
I used to opt out, but I also get fed up with being groped by old men. I'm not sure what the solution is because unless a significant portion of people opt out this doesn't accomplish anything and my groin has been fondled a few too many times at this point for me to want to continue opting out.
The entire procedure is completely bogus of course- everyt time I fly in the US now it's a question of: "How do I want to be violated today?"
I opted out or chose a lane without a scanner for a long time until they implemented the new groin-feeling pat down. I opted out and got that enhanced pat down one day and I felt more uncomfortable with someone physically touching me than I did with the idea of someone seeing a picture of me. So now, I try to find a lane without a scanner, but I have gone through a scanner a few times just to avoid being felt-up. And yes, I'm entirely certain that one of the reasons for that pat down process was to push people toward not opting out.
> I understand the situation is different if you really want your carry-on bag to stow above you.
Or in the cabin. If you're the last to board, there's a very real possibility that they may have to gate-check your bag, which adds additional wait time at the end of your journey at best, and your bag arriving in Minnesota while you're touching down in Dallas at worst.
and your bag arriving in Minnesota while you're touching down in Dallas at worst
Is this even possible when gate checking? They literally walk your bag down the stairs at the end of the gate and place it into the plane cargo hold. EDIT: At the end of the flight, your bag is walked up the stairs back into the jetway.
I personally love the gate check loophole. If you intentionally wait to board last, you get a free bag check.
I don't know whether exactly that is possible, but I have had the following happen: my bag got gate-checked on an intra-US connecting flight, and my carrier then wouldn't return it until I reached my final destination in London.
Which meant that I didn't have it with me when my flight to London was cancelled and I had to stay overnight in Chicago (too bad since it had my washkit and a change of clothes in it) and that when the replacement flight was also cancelled and I ended up going to London with a different carrier, my bag didn't get home until a couple of days after I did.
I will not be flying with United Airlines again in a hurry.
I don't have the link handy, but there was a great article arguing that the airlines could actually save more money not charging for checked bags because less people will try to cram their oversized luggage into the overheads, speeding up boarding times. Thus allowing for a lower rate of delayed takeoffs, which, over a long enough timeline, allows for more flights in a day they can charge for (and the added bonus of better customer retention).
If all the overhead compartments are full and they have to check your carry-on, they won't charge you any fee, at least on the major US airlines I've flown on.
That NPR article you linked seems to say the opposite: "The government says it's OK, but scientists aren't so sure."
I personally opt out every time for the reasons in the OP: my principles. Getting the pat-down is unpleasant and I have indeed had my "junk" jabbed at by zealous TSA agents. (The sides of their hands go up your inner thigh until they encounter "resistance"--which is a nice euphemism for something much more sensitive.) You end up feeling like a common criminal. Neither of these was required just a few years ago--so saying one is better than the other isn't a good argument, because both are bad for more than a few reasons.
Whether or not you believe in scanning on a principled ground, you should also be wary of what the government--and more importantly, a private company the government has contracted--tells you is OK. The same country told veterans that Agent Orange was OK. Of course the private company that makes billions is going to tell you their product is OK. Even if you give the government the benefit of the doubt and assume they think they're telling the truth, they might have misunderstood, or not completely researched, things.
I would never trust the government to irradiate me with a technology only a few years old, in any amount. I do trust thoroughly-researched technology that time has proven--medical x-rays, air travel.
Read your own article. Nobody beyond the scanner manufacturers have confirmed those radiation doses.
There is no transparency in this process whatsoever, there is a very real health risk since There Is No Consequence-Free Exposure To Ionizing Radiation, and these machines are not operated by trained medical professionals.
Horrible accidents have happened in vastly more regulated instances.
We've already been through this discussion countless times. The radiation you are exposed to is concentrated in the outer layer of your skin. All of the comparisons that you mention are when radiation is applied to the whole body mass. Also, do you really want the outer layer of your reproductive parts to be dosed with ionizing radiation? Why not opt out? Are you scared of sticking up for your reproductive organs.. and your rights?
I wonder if there's a better way to register one's complaint rather than merely opting out. (And I happen to agree with another poster who said that the 'enhanced pat down' can be more degrading than the scanner if you get someone who gets a little overzealous when they 'encounter resistance.')
What about a t-shirt, perhaps? Printed on the shirt would be a calm and clear explanation of the problems with the scanners/groping. Everyone standing in line around you would see it, the TSA officers would see it, and it could get some conversations started.
If they're already hand-raping you because you don't want to go through the scanners (the only x-ray you can get in the US that's not run by a professional, btw), what makes you think they wouldn't let you go through the scanners and then grope you anyway if you wear such a shirt?
In the UK, you can't opt out. Also, you're subjected quite often to a full grope (if you set off the metal detector) before they select people to go through the X-ray scanners!
A quibble, because this whole fucking disgusting thing fills me with limitless rage:
TSA agents do not perform 'pat-downs'. Pat-downs are very quick checks to see if any obvious weapons are being concealed on someone's body. Police will do these before putting a suspect into a police vehicle, for instance.
TSA employees do what are called 'custody searches', designed to find contraband material on detainees. These are only performed under specific scenarios, such as being incarcerated.
Custody searches in this context are forbidden by the fourth amendment, by the way, regardless of what the TSA's legal team may claim.
No they're not. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld an exemption for searches in the context of airport security under the doctrine of administrative searches, where the state's legitimate interest overrides the cost (to individuals) of the search, and where no one person is singled out by the searches.
Your argument doesn't even follow logically, as all the 4th Amendment requires is that searches be "reasonable", and "reasonable" is obviously subjective. It's a right practically tailor made for adjudication by the Supreme Court.
Given that bags have been subject to search for decades prior to "pat-down" or "custody" searches, and that it's hard to think of a more invasive search than one that allows officers to rifle through your personal luggage, I don't think Constitutionality is the issue here. We should simply pass a federal law restricting the TSA's ability to electronically strip search or invasively grope passengers.
I'm just as disgusted by airport electronic strip searches as you are, but we shouldn't using sure-loser arguments against them.
I would stipulate (using statistics) that the threat of harm in airports and on airplanes is very very low. Therefore, the searches ARE unreasonable.
What "threat" are we defending ourselves against?
I also stipulate that removal of the security protocols would NOT lead to more hijackings or random murders on aircraft. It's specifically because of the fact that certain places are "weapon free" zones that they are targeted by criminal malfeasance. Knowing that most if not all of your opponents are unarmed is a HUGE tactical advantage.
The problem is that everyone believes they have a right to be defended by someone else. You of course don't have to defend yourself, but your defense is truly your own business.
This is not to say that acts of offense or even attempts at offense shouldn't be punished. We do have a right to justice, and simply put, that is all.
Spot-on. I think people tend to just read the word "unreasonable" out of the text, because it's a wiggle-word. But it's not the Supreme Court that put that word in there, it was the framers. And the framers did so knowing that "reasonable" is a signal word inviting judicial line-drawing.
I'm very specifically talking about custody searches, not pat-downs or "enhanced pat-downs" (an imaginary term created by the TSA's marketing team).
Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, there has been no Supreme court ruling on the constitutionality of any of these techniques in the context of airport security. I'm glad to be proven wrong.
The most relevant ruling I know of was from a half century ago and it wasn't the Supreme Court talking. United States v. Edwards, 498 F.2d 496, 500 (2d Cir.1974)
Quoting from the DC Circuit opinion in "EPIC v. Department of Homeland Security":
"""As other circuits have held, and as the Supreme Court has strongly suggested, screening passengers at an airport is an "administrative search" because the primary goal is not to determine whether any passenger has committed a crime but rather to protect the public from a terrorist attack. See United States v. Aukai, 497 F.3d 955, 958–63 (9th Cir. 2007) (en banc) (passenger search at airport checkpoint); United States v. Hartwell, 436 F.3d 174, 178–81 (3d Cir. 2006) (Alito, J.) (same); United States v. Edwards, 498 F.2d 496, 499–501 (2d Cir. 1974) (Friendly, J.) (carry-on baggage search at airport); see also Illinois v. Lidster, 540 U.S. 419 (2004) (police set up checkpoint to obtain information about earlier crash); Mich. Dep’t of State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444 (1990) (sobriety checkpoint). An administrative search does not require individualized suspicion. City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32, 41, 47–48 (2000) (individualized suspicion required when police checkpoint is “primarily [for] general crime control,” that is, “to detect evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing” unlike “searches at places like airports ... where the need for such measures to ensure public safety can be particularly acute”). Instead, whether an administrative search is “unreasonable” within the condemnation of the Fourth Amendment “is determined by assessing, on the one hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an individual’s privacy and, on the other, the degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests.” United States v. Knights, 534 U.S. 112, 118-19 (2001) (internal quotation marks omitted)."""
The Edwards reference you mentioned is in there, but so are others. In "United States v. Aukai" (2007) the 9th Circuit said "We have held that airport screening searches, like the one at issue here, are constitutionally reasonable administrative searches because they are "conducted as part of a general regulatory scheme in furtherance of an administrative purpose, namely, to prevent the carrying of weapons or explosives aboard aircraft, and thereby to prevent hijackings."
In United States v. Hartwell (3d Cir. 2006), para. 8 "We hold that the search was permissible under the administrative search doctrine. Cf. United States v. Marquez, 410 F.3d 612, 616 (9th Cir.2005) ("Airport screenings of passengers and their baggage constitute administrative searches and are subject to the limitations of the Fourth Amendment.").
I appreciate your thoroughness. I fear I am not focusing my argument well.
Administrative search at airports is legal, yes.
Consent is not required or relevant, yes.
Bag checks and scans are mandated by law, yes.
Magnetometer searches are protected by law, yes.
Weapons searches are protected by law, yes.
Carrying a meth pipe in your pocket is probably a bad idea, yes.
I am very specifically arguing that modern physical custody searches (aka "pat-downs") as performed by the TSA do not qualify under any Fourth Amendment exemptions. They have not been ruled as constitutionally reasonable upon by the SCOTUS, and that until they are, they are forbidden by the fourth amendment.
Administrative searches must be 'minimally intrusive' and 'escalat[e] in invasiveness only after a lower level of screening disclose[s] a reason to conduct a more probing search'. Custody searches, in my personal opinion, do not qualify as minimally intrusive. Prior to the TSA's inception they were only used in very restricted settings. Now they're considered commonplace.
The view that "They have not been ruled as constitutionally reasonable upon by the SCOTUS, and that until they are, they are forbidden by the fourth amendment." is incorrect.
Were it true then every single new law or administrative action (of the federal government) would need to be reviewed by the Supreme Court before it could be applied. Instead, we have the court system to address these problems after the fact. We assume that laws and policies are constitutional when put into place and use the court system to correct instances where they are not.
For the sake of discussion, let's switch to something similar. The shoe scans are a nuisance and are not effective. People dislike it even worse than the scanners and pat-downs. It takes time, which slows down the number of people who can be processed. Some people have balance or other problems, so it means there needs to be a chair during the line before screening. Others have religious or cultural aversion to putting socks or bare feet on a dirty ground, so many airports provide booties or paper slippers. This makes everything more complex.
The requirement that people must take their shoes off has not "been ruled as constitutionally reasonable upon by the SCOTUS." Therefore, under your viewpoint is it forbidden by the 4th amendment?
The view of the circuit courts, and implied view of the Supreme Court, seems to be that the pat-downs which you mention are reasonable under the 4th amendment, given the "degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests" and that it occurs in a place where "the need for such measures to ensure public safety can be particularly acute."
Yes, that is essentially my view. I do not believe the TSA's current procedures are constitutional. The court system has not corrected this instance of over-reach after ten years, and the TSA's policies continue to become more restrictive, intrusive, and degrading.
I do admit that declaring the TSA's current behavior as 'forbidden' is overzealous and legally inaccurate. I'm just an angry textbox and not a lawyer. :)
I agree with you. However, using false reasoning probably doesn't help. While it may help vent your frustrations, it may also make others thinks that your views are ungrounded in reality.
Why would it be lawful for the TSA to search through your underwear, but not lawful for them to feel you up? Where would the Constitution be drawing that line?
The fact of the matter is that it's SCOTUS that sets the standards here, not the Constitution.
Correct. My point is that SCOTUS has not said word one about these standards.
"Constitutionally reasonable administrative searches" in the context of an airport are legal, per SCOTUS. Consent has nothing to do with it, that concept does not apply here.
But, critically, SCOTUS has never ruled on whether the current TSA techniques are constitutionally reasonable. The only thing for sure is that the 3rd says that they must be 'minimally intrusive' and 'escalat[e] in invasiveness only after a lower level of screening disclose[s] a reason to conduct a more probing search'.
Nobody will cheer more loudly than I will if SCOTUS holds that electronic strip searches cross the line from "reasonable" to "unreasonable", but I don't know of a credible constitutional law source that predicts that they will do that, so baldly asserting that these searches are prima facie unconstitutional is a losing argument.
The case you've cited here is one where the 9th circuit held TSA's searches to be reasonable.
No, this case I've cited specifically says that magnetometer wanding and a pat-down over a duration of 18 minutes in search of a suspected weapon is a constitutionally reasonable administrative search.
My beef is with mandatory -custody- searches, which are implemented as either electronic/radioactivity scans of the entire flesh and/or full physical inspections of the body. These were not in use prior to the TSA's inception and nobody has ruled on whether they are constitutionally reasonable or not.
Heartily agree. The Circuit Courts seem to be in agreement, and the Supreme Court has declined to review appeals on this topic which were sent to them. This suggests that there is no Constitutional issue here which needs a decision.
Or in other words - NYC passed a law prohibiting the sale of sugary drinks over 16 ounces in size. To the best of my knowledge, the Supreme Court has never made a decision on if that action is Constitutional. And I strongly doubt that it ever will. Does that mean the legality of the new law is under doubt? Absolutely not.
> The fact of the matter is that it's SCOTUS that sets the standards here, not the Constitution.
Well duh. Because the Constitution is inanimate, due to actually just being paper and ink. Meanwhile, SCOTUS consists of living people with free will and the ability to walk around.
However, nothing about these facts implies that what the Sovereign Council of Nine says is consistent with the ideals that led to the creation of said document.
That's such a bad argument. I do no such thing. However, the reality of my profession requires me to fly. So I "consent" only under considerable duress. The choice is literally "put food on the table" or submit to incredibly intrusive security.
There are good arguments against "automatic consent" but this isn't one of them.
You consent to lots of things by driving on public roads, yet many people's livelihoods depend on driving on public roads. It doesn't mean that the consent for driving wasn't given.
The choice is literally "put food on the table" or submit to incredibly intrusive security.
No it's not. You can quit and get a new job. If you can't immediately find a new job, you will be on unemployment and food stamps. You will literally still have food on the table.
Edit: by quit I meant don't get on the plane, resulting in being fired
You can not walk up to the security checkpoint at the airport. To see why this matters, imagine that the TSA could, as soon you bought a ticket, search you in your home. The police can actually do that, if they have a warrant.
If this really were the doctrine under which these searches were instituted, wouldn't there have to be a situation where the search procedures are fixed at the point where you bought your ticket, and they can't spring surprises on you by changing procedures between purchase and travel? Maybe I'm being unreasonable, but if the idea is that you implicitly consent when you sign up, then it seems like they should not then be able to change what you consented to later.
Exactly that? Consent isn't what enables the search, but it's still good that the TSA can't raid your house. What enables the search is (i) no investigative intent and (ii) no discretion on the part of the searchers as to who to search.
There is a difference between "consent" and "putting up with because you want something else more."
I generally have a greater need to fly than to avoid being felt up. This does not mean I consent to being felt up. The fact that the Supreme Court mistakes this for consent bothers me greatly.
That's like saying I consent to have the sandwich you made but I don't consent to give you money for it, therefore you the sandwich shop owner are robbing me. You analyze the cost-benefit and consent to the whole package. You can't pick and choose.
No, nothing like that. I do not have a constitutionally protected right to eat a sandwich. I do have one to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.
Furthermore, with the sandwich, there are alternatives available to me. I can choose to go somewhere else that serves cheaper sandwiches, or make my own. There are some places that I just cannot get to without flying; and some for which getting there would take so long as to be completely impractical, thereby cutting me off from a large swath of possible activity if I do not "consent" to being touched in the nether bits.
Their argument is like saying that by walking into a fraternity, a woman consents to being groped. Hey, maybe they even put up a sign saying "we grope women who enter here." That argument does not make it consent.
Furthermore, you are not able to remove your consent once you reach the head of the line. At may airports, they subject only some passengers to having nude photos taken of them by x-ray (or groping if you don't consent to the backscatter). But at the point when you get to the head of the line and find out if you're lucky, you are not able to leave in order to avoid the search; they have arrested people for trying to do so.
There are certain ways to coerce people to create an illusion of consent; but that shouldn't be confused with actual consent.
And see, I find that to be a slimy, horrible way to get around these inconvenient "rights" that we have, by defining an entire class of activity, that is pretty much essential to be able to participate in the modern world, as a way of giving up your rights.
"Oh, sure, you may have a constitutionally protected right to free speech. But upon accepting employment or payment for anything, you waive that right." Hey, the government has the right to regulate interstate commerce, and has ruled that even commerce within a state counts because it impacts prices on an interstate level. So let's just do away with the whole bill of rights by saying "you give implied consent to no longer have these rights by engaging in commerce." Done and done.
Not in this case there isn't. You showing up at the airport and going through security is implied consent to the search, just like opening the door to them without explicitly denying consent is enough for police to legally enter your house.
I remember that consent/voluntarism being important to the lawfulness of airport searches, but I thought the big two elements of administrative search were (1) searches not being intended to collect evidence for criminal investigations and (2) officers not having discretion as to who to search.
That's like saying you consent by leaving your house. I guess you also think the airlines consent to having the TSA search their customers? I'd love it if airlines could opt-out. Let the market decide who thinks it is a risk. They could charge more money for the privilege of flying unmolested.
What is the argument for searches when you decide to leave after entering the pat down area? It doesn't seem to be an administrative search if you decide to leave after entering the security area, because you are no longer going to board an aircraft.
> Custody searches in this context are forbidden by the fourth amendment, by the way, regardless of what the TSA's legal team may claim.
As is x-raying baggage and body-scans.
Fourth amendment rights don't apply to the same extent when you are on private property, when there are balancing security concerns, when you enter a courthouse, when you enter a school, etc. You know the deal when you enter these places and you have a choice whether to enter them.
The idea that you have the same fourth amendment rights boarding a plan as you do in your house or car is ridiculous.
I'm not saying I agree with TSA searches, only that your normal forth amendment standard does not apply.
Why do you need the right to not be searched at an airport or courthouse more than any place else? Speaking in hyperbole, I would rather have my fourth amendment rights broken voluntarily at an airport or by necessity at a courthouse than, for example, while I'm at home sleeping with my family or walking down the street minding my own business. While I disagree with the TSA searches and do not fly for that very reason, I also fundamentally disagree that you most need the fourth amendment protections while entering an airport.
We need standards and accountability if we're willing to accept that situations exist where safety trumps rights. I haven't seen a threat that warranted an ongoing suspension of rights.
It strikes me that many of our problems stem from people holding on to and trying to propagate the fairy tale explanations they were indoctrinated with, instead of moving on and simply acknowledging how the present day government operates and sustains itself.
I wish I had thought to keep links, but I've seen enough reports of people being picked out of the line for further review based on race, gender, and other attributes to want to see an investigation.
Profiling by gender makes no sense - it's not like there's much choice and I see no reason why anybody would want to profile by gender for any reason, if we're talking about security. How did it look - are men picked out just because they are men? Or women are picked out just because they are women? Both sounds strange. And I'm speaking not about it being right - just about why anybody, however evil, would want to use it for any purpose at all. Nobody profiles by color of one's shoes or by third letter of the last name. Profiling must make sense at least in the mind of the profiler. I can imagine what happens in the mind of somebody who wants to profile by, say, citizenship - citizen of Saudi Arabia is probably statistically speaking more risk than citizen of the USA. But gender?
Then don't fucking fly. Seriously, you guys make it sound the TSA breaks into your homes and strips you.
Yes, I disagree with a lot of their policies but this "Ron Paul" attitude of "the federal government actually has no power if you listen to my absurd interpretation of the constitution" isn't helping either. Its making my legitimate grievances sound lumped in with your extremist interpretations.
You can have sane security if you want it. The Europeans and others do it just fine. Its not illegal to search people or xray their luggage when they're coming on a plane. Deal with it. I'm getting sick of the weekly TSA hatefests. If site just a smaller reddit now? TSA has nothing to do with ycombinator or startups.
True, though the security concerns of weapons in a courthouse surely justify a baggage scan, metal detector, and pat down. Security is far more of an issue in a courthouse even than on a plane.
Having recently been on a jury, I wish airport security was as hassle free as a courthouse in Massachusetts, where my bag was x-rayed with my laptop in it, and I walked, shoes on, through a metal detector.
I also agree that, in practical terms, security at a courthouse faces many more real-world challenges than air travel.
That should tell us something about appropriate levels of security.
The ironic thing is that we lose the right to be free from searches, because we lost the right to defend ourselves. It is often the case where the Second Amendment is absent, so goes the Fourth.
Not all of these are comparable, since some of them are at least partially avoidable. For example, I'm sure the odds of dying from fireworks are much higher than the number listed if you use fireworks, and much less if you don't. And the chances of being legally executed are much higher if you murder someone than if you don't.
Exactly, and one can conclude that the dollars spent versus lives saved makes the waste seem even greater. Converting the TSA to bee control as mentioned above would lively save more lives (to take an extreme example).
Execution is out of place here since you have very high control over if you will be executed or not. If you aren't murdering anyone or participate in activities that can end up this way (such as violent crime), odds of your being executed is much lower - it's not zero, since you can still be falsely accused, but much lower than just execution statistics.
Also, odds of dying from bees, etc. probably depend a lot on if specific person is allergic to the particular toxin or not, which is not random for this person.
The sad fact is, I think TSA type security is hear to stay, and won't lighten up very much, regardless of the facts that question its efficacy.
Why? Picture this. Someone (likely a politician) crusades hard to have the TSA dismantled, and is successful. No matter how much better the system that replaces it is, there is always a chance that someone slips through and takes down a plane, and 300+ people are killed.
In the throng of people screaming that "something needs to be done to stop this from happening again", who wants to be "that guy" who lobbied to have the TSA dismantled/replaced? Former TSA proponents will jump up and down and scream "See! This is why we can't have nice things!"
Yea. It's one of those ideological dead ends that are hard to back out of. Just like the War on Drugs, Tough on Crime, Privatize and let the Free Market Decide, War on Terror, etc.
The USA would need to somehow simultaneously remove sociopaths from office and remove voting privileges from idiots before they can have rational legislation in favor of the people.
Then you just stand up and point out that TSA never caught a single terrorist in its entire history so there's no reason to believe it would have handled this incident.
> Then you just stand up and point out that TSA never caught a single terrorist ...
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise -- you're using flawed logic. What would you think of an oncologist whose patients never contract serious, life-threatening cancer? Is he ordering unnecessary tests and procedures on people who aren't really sick, or is he catching all the cancers so early that they're never life-threatening?
See the point? I'm certainly not arguing one way or another about the TSA, just that your argument contains a very serious logical flaw. Maybe terrorists, knowing about the TSA, won't take the risk of going near an airport.
> ... so there's no reason to believe it would have handled this incident.
>What would you think of an oncologist whose patients never contract serious, life-threatening cancer?
Since the science tells us that his methods reduce the rate of cancer (all metrics we can test to a degree), I'd think he's doing good work.
TSA, on the other hand, has been been called out by many actual security professionals for having shit practices that don't actually work. They're basically pulling a rain man scam and people like you are buying into it because you think there's no way to prove it hasn't magically stopped something we didn't even hear about. Actual professionals who don't have money invested in one conclusion or the other are saying it isn't helping anything.
> TSA, on the other hand, has been been called out by many actual security professionals for having shit practices that don't actually work.
Yes, that's true, but (a) those "professionals" have no better logical basis than you do, and (b) this doesn't change the fact that you were using flawed logic, my only reason for posting. The fact that there haven't been any terrorist arrests at airports doesn't mean what you seem to think.
> They're basically pulling a rain man scam ...
This is counterproductive. It might be true, it might be false, but it doesn't follow from the evidence. Again, I'm not taking a position on the TSA, only the logic.
> Actual professionals who don't have money invested in one conclusion or the other are saying it isn't helping anything.
Name one who is using an argument more scientific than "they haven't caught any terrorists!" And again, this is not about whether the claim is true, this is about the basis for deciding whether it's true.
Actually you're wrong. At least one security expert has written up pretty good critiques of why the screening can't actually be doing anything.
Also, there are other ways terrorists could hurt us that would be much easier to exploit than getting on a plane. Why has this never been tried? There is just no reason to believe TSA is doing anything useful. The burden of proof lies with them and their extraordinary claims that they're somehow keeping us safe with their bullshit ineffective procedures.
"The attention paid to terrorism in the U.S. is considerably out of proportion to the relative threat it presents."
I agree 100%! The formation of this organization was reactionary policy making at its worst. The TSA is nothing more then a works program for people who are barely qualified to do anything.
Someone else did an analysis of airline travel and highway travel and came up with a similar finding. Blow up one plane per month over the continental US and flying would still be two orders of magnitude safer than driving or riding in an automobile over your lifespan.
There's no proof that TSA is making things any safer either. No one will ever pull another fast one on the passengers of a plane again. We all know that the planes themselves are weapons, so I'm pretty sure most passengers will go down fighting if terrorists try to take control of the cockpit.
This is precisely why it's called security theater.
* We all know that the planes themselves are weapons *
Which is why I don't understand why pilots have to be screened. They are flying a huge flying bomb. What will screening them for nail-clippers solve? (Side note: I did, in fact, have my nail clippers taken by the TSA once)
Which is why I don't understand why pilots have to be screened
A person could be supportive of the cause without being willing to sacrifice his life. If pilots could get into restricted areas un-screened they could bring in bombs or weapons which they hand off to third parties. This would also be a more efficient use of a limited resource (the hypothetical Taliban sympathizer flying for a commercial airline).
What is the answer though? Can you imagine a politician running under a "massively downsize the TSA" banner? Would any existing Washington elected official take up the cause?
They can't even repeal the comically silly shoe removal procedure (unless you're under 12 or over 75, because no terr'ist would ever foot kerplode those demographic stereotypes).
Well, you could imagine a politician taking up the cause if the Republican party returned to its small government ideals, rather than "Small government, except when it meets our special interests (which most definitely include defense and scaremongering)"
Obama won't do it, because he's shown himself to keep whatever things from Bush are convenient if unsavory, like Guantanamo (saying you're going to close it and actually closing it are two different things).
This is my questions as well, I think the TSA at this point is far more trouble than the massive budget the government is wasting on them. I've read countless articles and watched countless videos complaining about the TSA, pointing out their flaws. But I've yet to see a reasonable plan to cut their budget. And even if someone was able to lower their budget, what happens if something does happen then. I'd love to see any plans, but just cutting the TSA budget entirely has obvious ill effects, it's definitely not as easy as saying, "The TSA is useless, get rid of them."
Tangentially - the thing that most surprised me about this article was reading that over 150,000 Americans have been murdered in less than a decade.
I find that number utterly staggering. Wikipedia says that the homicide rate in the US is 4.2 per 100,000, which is more than 2.5 times the rate in Canada and 3.5 times the rate in the UK.
America has the highest murder rate of the developed world, higher even than a chunk of developing countries.
My quick glace showed America at 4.2, the next developed country is Finland at 2.2, so living in America you're 1.9 times more likely to be murdered than any other developed country.
Of course, the vast majority of Developed countries have a murder rate less than 1.0 per 100,000 people.
The United States is very large, and the homicide rate varies wildly between states and cities.
Where I live, Oregon, the homicide rate is 2.1 per 100,000 people, a little bit better than Finland as a whole. Hawaii is at 1.2, New Hampshire and Vermont are at 1.3, and Minnesota is at 1.4.
Contrast those with Louisiana at 11.2 per 100,000 people (!), Mississippi at 8.0, New Mexico at 7.5, and South Carolina at 6.8.
It's clear that the homicide rates in the US are aligned mostly along socio-economic and racial lines, so it doesn't make sense to compare the whole country against the more homogeneous states such as Finland, Norway, Germany, and Japan.
I find it interesting when Americans don't want America as a whole to be compared to other countries as a whole, because inevitably it makes for an unfavorable comparison.
Of course looking at a country-wide statistic is an average across the whole country - that's the entire point. I'm sure if you really wanted to, you could find a part of Oregon where the homicide rate is 0.1, but that doesn't tell us much about the bigger picture.
America has a single federal government, yes. If you just want a ranking, you can go ahead and use the national average.
However, America is ridiculously diverse culturally, and just using the national average is useless for understanding anything about America.
Perhaps the Americans in the thread aren't trying to avoid an unfavorable comparison - it's not like Americans aren't aware of the pros and cons of their own country. Perhaps they're actually trying to teach you something about their country and point out that relying on averages can be misleading.
> and just using the national average is useless for understanding anything about America.
I agree. We're talking about understanding America compared to other countries, not things about America internally.
>it's not like Americans aren't aware of the pros and cons of their own country
I completely disagree with that statement. How many times have you heard someone say "Best country in the world" with no understanding of the outside world? I'm continually shocked when meeting Americans that have absolutely no idea their infrastructure, education, health care, leave entitlements and general quality of life sucks compared to the developed world. They genuinely think they are the best in the world because that has been driven into them from day 1.
> relying on averages can be misleading.
Obviously looking at an average is exactly that. An average across the entire population, not a deep dive into where is the highest and where is the lowest, etc.
Those are strawman arguments. Meeting uninformed Americans is not evidence that the entirety of the American populace is ignorant of their failings as a developed nation.
For example, we are taught about slavery and the genocide of Native Americans in primary school. We dedicate an entire month to Black History because we are acutely aware of our status as one of the most institutionally racist countries on the planet. We have impasses at the highest levels of government over dealing with our failure to control healthcare costs, and that is something that many Americans are cognizant of. We are repeatedly informed of our failure to create a stable market economy. I can go on.
Please leave your preconceptions at the door when having a serious discussion.
I can tell you that your experience will be vastly different depending on where you live and work. That's why it's hard to make meaningful statements about America as a whole, such as "Americans think they are number 1" or "You're more likely to get murdered if you move to America". Nobody throws a dart on a map and moves to America the country, they move to California or Virgina or Wisconsin.
Your supporting evidence cited a Fox News poll, which is probably the most biased and self-selecting demographic I can think of. That's one of our well-publicized failings, actually--the inherent biases of corporate media and the echo chamber of politics.
>I can tell you that your experience will be vastly different depending on where you live and work.
I'm not sure how this makes the US different from the countries it's being compared to. They all have more and less dangerous regions. There are more and less dangerous regions within a block's walk from me, but the average over that area gives me a general basis of comparison with other areas.
I always feel that there's a racial subtext to this kind of defense of US statistics (which I often hear in terms of education, crime, and health outcomes.) It is, basically, that the parts of the US that the average Scandinavian or Japanese citizen would ever be in have comparable rates of terribleness to their own countries - just ignore the massive portion of the US behind the curtain.
e.g. I am more likely to be killed when moving to an average Chicago from an average Finland. Since Chicago is segregated, however, very few white people would ever see an average Chicago - so an average Chicago can't be a meaningful comparison.
> I always feel that there's a racial subtext to this kind of defense of US statistics (which I often hear in terms of education, crime, and health outcomes.)
There is, and that is a characteristic of the United States in general of which most who live there are keenly aware. This is why they speak quickly against comparisons of the United States as a whole against Scandinavian countries or Japan. Those countries do not have the ethnic heterogeneity or deep-seated institutional racism that the United States has experienced and still experiences.
For example, my state sterilized violent criminals and the mentally disabled until the 1980s, most of them being ethnic minorities. This would be unthinkable in Sweden, for example.
We also have easy access to guns and a destabilized internal culture in ethnically-heterogeneous areas, where community respect is a factor of how much crime you have committed or how many people you have killed.
You are exactly right, however, in that living in an upper-class neighborhood in Chicago would skew your perspective of crime in America.
>This is why they speak quickly against comparisons of the United States as a whole against Scandinavian countries or Japan.
I'm not excusing this perspective on US statistics, I'm saying that it's racist. It's the view that if compared properly, the US isn't so bad. Proper comparison involves excluding groups who are discriminated against from the comparison.
>This is why they speak quickly against comparisons of the United States as a whole against Scandinavian countries or Japan. Those countries do not have the ethnic heterogeneity or deep-seated institutional racism that the United States has experienced and still experiences.
America is not unique in that it faces challenges and obstacles to being successful. Japan had two nuclear weapons used on it's citizens, half of Western Europe has been invaded and occupied in the last 70 years, and Australia has had the worst drought ever recorded. Those examples barely scratch the surface.
Your line of reasoning that America is "unique" or somehow "different" because of the challenges it continues to face is a perfect example of American exceptionalism.
Facing challenges and obstacles is all part of the challenge of building a successful country where the average person on the street has a high quality of life. When compared against other first world countries, which have also faced very large challenges to their success, America does not rank well. Stop making excuses and finding reasons to excuse yourself from greater comparisons.
I am not making excuses for my country, and I am not here to prove that America is unique in that it has to face challenges. I am trying to say that America is not one place or one people, or even one government, and that comparing the entirety of a loose coalition of independent states to single independent nations is disingenuous and ignores specific factors that other developed nations simply don't have to deal with. Yes, all countries have challenges, but all challenges are not the same. I listed a few in my previous posts.
I don't appreciate your belligerent discourse, putting words in my mouth, or typecasting me as a brainwashed patriot. I am well aware of America's problems and I recognize that the United States as a whole is falling well behind in many important metrics. You are not buying my argument that these metrics are skewed greatly by historical and regional concerns that are outside the control of the federal government, and that is your prerogative. But please do not belittle me and accuse me of being ignorant of the world's problems.
I'm not sure why you think that other countries are in general by nature more homogenous than the US. Most of the countries that outrank us have engaged in massive internal orgies of slaughter over their differences.
>these metrics are skewed greatly by historical and regional concerns that are outside the control of the federal government
These metrics aren't "skewed" by, they are determined by. That your concerns (if I translate "ethnic heterogeneity" as "racism") are the reason for the bad numbers is clear. The reason that they should be excluded is unclear.
Racism and easy access to guns are written into our constitution.
> I am trying to say that America is not one place or one people, or even one government, and that comparing the entirety of a loose coalition of independent states to single independent nations is disingenuous and ignores specific factors that other developed nations simply don't have to deal with.
There is nothing unique about that. That is the case of all countries in the world.
I wonder what you would like to see happen? Rather than compare Japan to America, should I compare Japan to Oregon, and Japan to Louisiana like they are separate places? I wonder what the attitude would be then? Everyone in Oregon sits pretty because they are ranked with the world's best, and people in Louisiana are condemned to life of poverty and suffering?
I wonder what would happen if violence and poverty broke out in a corner of Oregon, vastly changing it's position - would you then further break-down Oregon into counties, so once again you can sit pretty in the knowledge your county ranks well and can ignore the others?
You sound like a baseball team manager who's team constantly finishes towards the bottom of the ladder- then you say "yeah, but we have unique challenges because our team is made up of different races, etc. If we had a better pitcher and short stop, we'd be so much better". The reality is you have the team you have. You can choose to work with it as a team to improve things, or you can segregate yourself and say "well, I'm a great first baseman, so screw everyone else".
How is that productive?
A country is made up of the sum of it's parts - every country has areas that are way above average, and areas that are way below average for an enormous number of reasons - that, of course, is the definition of average
Apologies for offending you, that was not my intention, though reading back through my comments I see I have not expressed myself well.
When talking about murder statistics, you can't be speaking from experience, can you?
The truth is that there are some very nice places in America, and some not very nice places. In the nice places, statistics is good or better than a developed country, in the not nice places, statistics is worth - because these places are nothing like developed country. While they are inside the borders of the USA, their life is very different from the life of the nice places. Smaller countries frequently do not have such diversity, and averages can be deceptive (when Bill Gates walks into a bar, average wealth of the bar patron raises significantly, even though nobody really got any richer).
"Sorta". It's more appropriate to compare it to the EU than to, say, Germany. The EU will still come out ahead in terms of murder rate, but it more accurately reflects the US in terms of both governmental structure and diversity of people (Louisiana is as different from Washington as Italy is from Finland)
America is one united federation of states. The federal government still exercises surprisingly little control over individual states, although that control is increasing over time. Most of the federal controls exist merely to regulate inter-state commerce to make sure there are no unfair practices where Michigan can enact laws to keep Indiana businesses from operating in their state. However, two neighboring states can have wildly different laws on local issues. Michigan for the longest time required motorcyclists to wear helmets when the neighboring states didn't, and only allows heavy trucks to have two trailers where other surrounding states allow them to carry three trailers at once.
Classifying America as one solid country all across is, to be honest, quite inappropriate. It's more of a slightly more put-together European Union, with a federal government existing just to make sure everyone plays fairly.
I'm not terribly familiar with states in different countries, but I wasn't trying to imply America is necessarily unique. What I was trying to get across is that, for all intents and purposes, each state in the union (read union as union of federated states) is semi-independent and can do almost anything they want outside of printing their own currency. Even that law comes with a stipulation that you can print your own currency but still have to accept US dollars as well.
The parent had asked if the US in particular was one country. In actually, it's not quite that simple. Similar reason why people refer to Canadian provinces by their provincial title in some circumstances. British Columbia is only incidentally related to Nunavut. At the same time, Washington state is only incidentally similar to Alabama.
As scale increases, you invariably include populations that affect your per capita statistic. The EU as a whole has a 3.5 per 100k murder rate, for example; much higher than Germany or the UK alone.
If you think about it this one, then wouldn't it be best to compare homicides per kilometer or mile? The point the parent was making is entirely valid though- the United States is a huge country compared to most.
I'm sure you could cherry pick parts of Finland that have even lower gun violence. Conversely, unlike your cherry-picked states, parent actually chose Finland for its exceptionally high gun violence. Even if you broke out the 50 states few would be within the normal range for wealthy countries.
Believe it or not, I don't disagree with you. The majority of states in the US are not what you would think of as "developed" by any objective measure-- be it crime, poverty, health, education, or equality. That is why I included states like Louisiana with murder rates comparable to some African nations.
But you cannot deny that some regions of the US are developed, are great places to live, and are comparable in terms of geographic area, population, and economic output with the European countries mentioned in this thread. Basically, to anyone who has spent time here, Louisiana is as different from Oregon as Lithuania is from Denmark. To lump all the states together and draw meaning from the statistical average is to fundamentally misunderstand what America is: a coalition of independent states, with different agendas and demographics.
It's relative to the population size in a few cases, though. Here in DC the homicide rate was 21.9 per 100,000 in 2010. We also have a extremely restrictive firearm policies - city law prohibits carrying guns either openly or concealed.
Despite policy, DC also had the highest rate of homicide by firearm: 35.4 per 100,000 in 2005.
The UK does not have quite the racial divide that is prevalent in the US. Remember that minorities were treated as second-class citizens here as recently as the 1960s, and are still subject to institutionalized discrimination. Socioeconomic mobility is much worse here than in the UK, reinforcing the "ghettoization" of minority groups in the US.
Factor in easy access to modern weaponry, an actively-discriminating and mostly white police force, and the war on drugs, and you have a mixing pot of racial tension, poverty, and crime.
Oregon is mostly white, so is Minnesota, Vermont, and New Hampshire. A city like New Orleans is 67% black, is mostly poor, and has one of the highest homicide rates in the country. I haven't come across a city like that in the UK.
My home town, Portland, is extremely segregated. The black population here is concentrated in an area smaller than a square mile in the Northeast quarter, and both crime rates and gang activity there outrank the rest of the city by a factor of five. This is a consequence of Oregon's racist policies (our state constitution actually banned African-American residency) that were in force until World War II, when a large black population migrated here to work at a shipbuilding yard in Northeast. After the war, a flood took out the shipbuilding yard and put most of those families out of work; their descendants are still in the same area, subject to socioeconomic pressures that keep them there.
So while Portland might sound like a great place to live, it is only because the crime is segregated into a small section of the city while white people enjoy kitchy neighborhoods and craft fairs.
True, but the murder rate within the U.S. is wildly uneven. There are nine state with a lower murder rate than Finland, while one, Lousiana, has 5x the finnish murder rate.
Suicide rate in Japan is 23.7 per 100,000, double that of most developed countries.
Also, Japan's murder stats are rigged -- if the police don't know who the killer is it isn't a murder, it's an "abandoned body". See Freakonomics for more on this.
I support gun control and everything, but how do you know that the low homicide rate is because of the gun control? Japan has been a model for social order (putting aside organized crime, in the sense that you lose your wallet and it gets returned to you, muggings don't happen often, etc.) for a long time.
I don't know that the homicide rate is because of gun control. I don't think it is possible to directly come to that conclusion given the other societal factors.
But it's an interesting data point.
This article tries to dissuade that control gun is responsible for the low homicide rate in it's summary.
"The idea that Japanese gun laws should serve as model for other nations is not uncommon. Some Americans propose laws even more severe than Japan's.[124] Often, the suggestion comes as an offhand remark in an newspaper editorial, but even when the suggestion is advanced by scholars, the reasoning is often superficial and unpersuasive.
L Craig Parker, an American expert on the Japanese police, proposes that the United States adopt Japanese gun control and also other Japanese strategies, such as a National Police Agency. Parker's brief discussion of guns, however, simply recites statistics showing that Japan has less guns and less gun crime. His only evidence that gun control would actually reduce crime in America is a study by Dr Leonard Berkowitz arguing that guns cause aggression. Actually, what the studies by Berkowitz and others showed was that people acted more aggressively towards other people if the other person was associated with weapons; for example, motorists reacted more aggressively to other vehicles slow to accelerate when a red light turned green if the slow car had a rude bumper sticker and a rifle in a gun rack.[125]
Summing up the perspective of many gun prohibitionists, one Japanese newspaper reporter writes, 'It strikes me as clear that there is a distinct correlation between gun control laws and the rate of violent crime. The fewer the guns, the less the violence'.[126] But the claim that fewer guns correlates with less violence is plainly wrong. America experienced falling crime and homicide rates in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1980s, all periods during which per capita gun (p.40)ownership, especially handgun ownership, rose.[127] And Japan, with its severe gun control, suffers no less murder than Switzerland, one of the most gun-intensive societies on earth.[128]
Japan's gun control does play an important role in the low Japanese crime rate, but not because of some simple relation between gun density and crime. Japan's gun control is one inseparable part of a vast mosaic of social control. Gun control underscores the pervasive cultural theme that the individual is subordinate to society and to the Government. The same theme is reflected in the absence of protection against Government searches and prosecutions. The police are the most powerful on earth, partly because of the lack of legal constraints and particularly because of their social authority."
Comparison between the USA and Canada is probably more meaningful. In recent times, Canadian gun laws have been stricter, but that was not always the case. There's something else behind the numbers. Universal healthcare? Cold weather? Who knows?
In 35 years of urban living in Canada, I've never seen a firearm that was not being carried by a law enforcement official. I do not know anyone who owns a fire arm.
Not in my experience. There are plenty of shooting ranges in Canada and they are always full. Properly equipped shooting range is the only place where you can legally shoot restricted guns -- pistols and such. Rifles and shotguns (unrestricted) on the other hand are common in rural areas and you can buy one in Canadian Tire in hunting section and shoot on your property or crown land. I know few people who drive around with a rifle in the back of their truck. No automatics anywhere though. :(
You have to pass a safety test (common sense, plus some regulations) and get few references to slightly increase the chance that you are not criminally insane to get PAL, but it is really less than a weekend worth of effort (and some waiting for papers).
I would throw my dart at financial inequality. The further the upper class gets from the other classes, and the harder it is to go from the bottom class upwards, the more likely people are to step outside the seemingly rigged [1] system.
[1] If you're at the bottom rung and statistics say that you're about as likely to win the lottery as to get out, the system will almost certainly seem rigged to you even if it isn't.
Just something to keep in mind when comparing statistics between countries... The United States is approximately the size/population of Europe, and its individual states are approximately the size/population of European countries. It's always hard for the US to beat every state-sized country, just as there will always be US states with numbers above and below the overall average. The overall European average of 3.5 per 100,000 is somewhat less impressive.
That European average is for the whole of the geographical entity known as Europe, so I'm not sure how fair the comparison is. The population of Europe as a whole is 2.3 times that of the US. Also the US is a single political entity, with (for the most part) ons set of laws. Many of the Eastern European countries do not fall within a similarly consistent legal framework.
If remove Eastern Europe, then the homicide rates for the rest of Europe are:
Northern Europe 1.5
Southern Europe 1.4
Western Europe 1.0
Conversely, including other parts of the Americas (ie Canada and Central America) massively increases the average homicide rate - Central America's rate is a truly shocking 28.5
So next time someone trots out the US being the largest economy on earth, I can use your same argument? We should be comparing all of Europe to the US since that's more realistic, right?
Am I the only one to have pleasant experience flying?
I usually travel 2-4 times a year by myself as a single male. I plan for security (eg. I don't try to bring along liquids and wear shoes that are easily removed) and haven't had to wait in a security line longer than 15 minutes in the US in 6+ years.
I have been pulled aside twice to be patted down by the TSA, neither of which invasive nor did they get near my genitals. In contrast I have also been patted down by airport security in Belgium (much more invasive, didn't touch crotch) and been frisked twice by police in the USA (very invasive, definitely did touch crotch). [I have no knowledge of the female experience of being frisked - unfortunately I suspect a much higher level of both discomfort and inappropriate groping]
I don't like that our security is based stupid rules instead of smart security analysis, but the level of vitriol I see in the internet is totally disproportionate to my experience. The worst part of flying for me is getting stuck in the security line behind some person who still doesn't know full bottles of water aren't allowed through security and then try to argue with the TSA agents in an attempt to save $4 - and given that I still get through the line often under 10 minutes, that is more of pet peeve than a real issue worth complaining about.
The issue is not the time it takes to clear security. The issue is whether it makes you feel like shit to clear it.
If it doesn't make you feel like shit given how airport security works right now, I respectfully submit your shit-meter is calibrated wrong.
But also, two points:
1) Your flying experience would be quite different with kids.
2) The flying experience varies very widely by airport. Often by terminal within airport. Flying Virgin America out of BOS is a very different proposition from flying Virgin America out of SFO, and also quite different from flying United out of BOS.
I tried to make my situation clear so as to avoid making it seem like I was commenting on other people's situations. Not everyone can easily avoid taking liquids along for example, and I certainly don't want to imply that people in other situations than mine 'invite' security hassles.
But part of what I'm trying to understand is why any of the current rules "should" make me feel like shit to go through - taking a few things out of my bag and removing my shoes are easy and quick. [Of course I sympathize with people who have horror stories, but I don't think everyone posting on HN, Slashdot and Reddit have personally been treated egregiously].
What is it I am missing? Is there a moral principle people of having to go through security people are upset about? Or frustration that the TSA is a large part security theatre? Or is it that so many people traveling do so in configurations that get much more hassle than I do - traveling with children, unavoidable liquids, medical devices, etc. ?
For me, it is a feeling of being subjected to stupid and demeaning procedures which exist only for show. When I pass, for example, Israeli security - which may take more time, but does it in a completely different way - I do not feel this, because I feel I understand what they are doing and why. TSA has no real reason to grope my ass and my balls - they do it because somebody somewhere decided they should, and his reasons probably were nothing but covering his ass in case something happens.
I appreciate you making your situation clear. I just pointed out that you are indeed correct that other situations end up very different, since I have experience with both.
> taking a few things out of my bag and removing my shoes are easy and quick
There's also taking off your belt or suspenders (and then trying to keep your pants from falling off, or risking arrest if they do), taking off your watch, putting your wallet on a belt where random people can make off with it, and having to choose between a pat-down search or standing in a machine with your arms over your head for a while, all for no particularly good reason.
Even the shoes thing is pretty ridiculous, especially given the state of cleanliness of the floors in airports, speaking as someone who distinctly recalls a time when you just wore your shoes through the metal detector, just like you still do in most countries. (Oh, and I should note that at Reagan National there are booties available at the security checkpoint so all the Congress-folk won't have to deal with the dirty floors like people at other airports.)
Back to your questions, in order:
The frustration _is_ in large part about the security theater aspect. Little things like having to throw out the water bottle that Israeli security already cleared through, the completely arbitrary and nonsensical rules about liquids, the perfunctory pat-downs whose only purpose is to be annoying so as to force people into the scanners, the ineffective scanners, and the general disproportionality of the response to the problem being solved. Basically, I would be a lot more OK with more stringent security if I felt there were a point to it, not just official ass-covering.
The other part of the frustration is that even the rules that are in place are enforced pretty arbitrarily. At some airports, in some security lanes, walking through a metal detector with a sleeping baby in a sling is OK; at others they will force you to take the baby out (waking him up) and hold in arms through the metal detector. You don't know which until you show up at the metal detector: it seems to be the TSA agent's call. Same thing for whether the 3-month-old's booties have to come off and go through the X-ray, just in case you stuck 3-4 grams of explosive in the soles or something.
And a last, most important, problem I have with all this is that I _do_ travel with kids a good bit. And my concern is that my children are learning that having to take off your clothes and be searched because someone randomly decides so is OK. The basic fact that government power is, and should be, limited and that there is such a thing as human dignity is that much harder to teach to kids who're dealing with airports on a regular basis. And _that_, of all the TSA activities, is what I despise them most: that they're in the business of making people be used to being treated like criminals.
You're lucky and compliant. I don't think your experience is the norm, and my experience certainly doesn't match.
It's always a delightful start to a journey to hold your struggling infant in your bare socks while some college dropout pretending to be a lab tech tests your formula for explosive residue and your wife figures out how to cram the stroller through the X-ray machine. Definitely try to avoid flying now.
I feel sad that you find being crotch-groped by anyone acceptable, let alone someone who has asserted legal authority to do so.
Would you like your 13 year old son and daughter to be exposed to the same process? How about someone who has been a victim of abuse?
Yes it's amazing to fly through the air, but the US airports, security and airlines do the level best to convert that miracle into torture.
I never said crotch-grabbing was acceptable. I said that compared to being frisked by the police the TSA pat-downs I have experienced were unobtrusive. Given this, the outrage towards the TSA seems disproportionate, especially given that the TSA only affects people who fly whereas police tactics affect everyone in the country.
Is there a disparity or is it that Slashdot and HN post articles about TSA abuses but not non-technical police abuses? Most people don't even seem to think frisking is an abuse of power, (though it seems like you may disagree with that), so why the outrage at the TSA but not the police?
Hear. Hear. I want to be able to walk into an airport with my shoes on and walk calmly to an arrival gate to greet arriving passengers there. And I want to be able to carry a Swiss Army knife in an airline carry-on bag. And I want the terrorists to be attacked relentlessly where they live, so that they have to hide in caves and ride on goats, while Americans and other people in developed countries get to lead civilized, advanced lives in the Twenty-First Century. Taliban delenda est.
AFTER EDIT: I wonder what aspect of this people disagree with. Do you still want to have to take your shoes off in airports?
Further edit, to reply to the first kind reply:
I still don't think attacking terrorists relentlessly is ever beneficial.
I guess that's an empirical question of history and current events. What does help people lead tolerant, civilized lives and be at peace with other people who may have differing opinions? I read a biography of Joseph Stalin back in the 1990s, after the Soviet archives became available to independent researchers, and the striking thing about how Joseph Stalin developed his influence in the Bolshevik movement was that he was a very active terrorist, frequently directly involved in random bomb attacks. We should consider the facts about Sri Lanka and Rwanda and other places to get a reality check on the power of terrorism.
I think communism mostly collapsed (as it mostly has by now) with the help of information flow into countries living under communist dictatorships that were established in some cases by domestic terrorism and in some cases by armed invasion from another country. The case of eastern and western Germany is especially illustrative: it's just where the tanks stopped after the armistice that ended the European phase of World War II that determined which parts of Germany became the postwar Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) and which became the German Democratic Republic (DDR). Several of the communist governments of eastern Europe were turned out of power largely peacefully when Western mass media made it all too apparent how different life was on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But it took an entire human lifetime for communism to decline in its influence on Europe.
So, yeah, if a peaceful process of information flow could bring Afghanistan into the Twenty-First Century, I'm all for that. I don't see how any rational person who knows well how other people live could want a whole country to be living under Taliban rule. But the Taliban's method is not to let most people in Afghanistan or Pakistan decide the issue freely. Their method is to give girls and women no voice, all non-Muslims little or no voice, and any Muslim who thinks that Islam is consistent with science and progress little or no voice. They use violence and thuggery to get their way in the areas they control. So, yes, if they are willing to send people onto airplanes to fly from Europe to the United States with bombs in their shoes (as they have been), I say let loose the drones, and let's keep the Taliban leaders hiding in caves and unable to travel more rapidly than at goat speed until peaceful news and education campaigns have enough time to win over so many of the common people of the world that the Taliban can no longer gain influence even through threats. Taliban delenda est. Peacefully or violently, the Taliban must be destroyed.
You do realise that what the drone attacks are doing is to further radicalise people in Pakistan, don't you? A bit like what's happening in Gaza, what these attacks do is remove a few visible figureheads, kill people who aren't necessarily connected, and turn a good number of previously neutral or inactive people into sympathisers or more active combatants.
The idea of a relentless attack strategy is, with respect, utterly absurd and has about as much chance of real success as the War on Drugs. The rest of what you say makes much more sense. Communication is the key. Relentlessly communicate instead of relentlessly attack.
Being an invasive empire doesn't make people like you? What an interesting proposition. It might baffle a few dozen suits who run the military industrial complex, before they go back to laughing while wiping their bums with $100 bills of taxpayer money.
Same way the pharmaceutical industry, for profit prison industry, and lumber industry (last one is debated plenty) will continue to shove money into politics to keep drugs illegal and prisons nicely packed full of pot smokers. It is all about the money, not the morality. That went out the window decades ago.
The lumber industry? You're seriously comparing Big Pharma and for-profit prison companies with the timber industry?
I'm not sure if you are talking about America in the 2010s, but the timber industry is tanking. Maybe if you were talking about the 1970s I might peripherally agree.
The timber industry is so bad right now that it is cheaper to buy 2x4s to burn in your fireplace than firewood harvested from logging scraps.
The Lumber Cartel is an ancient Internet meme. (People against spam must be shills of the paper trade, paid for by the lumber industry.) It gets mentioned when you're talking about cartels just because.
I like how I put in parens that it is debated, and it gets debated :P
But yes, they were the original reason for the widespread propaganda spree against pot, but today it is due to big pharma. And people on the internet always argue about it!
You seem to base your opinion of what is happening in Gaza on occasional random watching of biased TV news, which is not a good way to form an informed opinion. If facts are of any interest to you, here you go:
1. Strikes in Gaza are not removing figurehead, they strike known military commanders, whose direct involvement in the acts of terror and war is beyond any reasonable doubt. They also strike infrastructure used for such activities and for other purposes by military organisations. Of course, Israel army is not ideal and sometimes it is impossible to strike military targets without hurting civilians, and sometimes the intelligence is mistaken or the execution is flawed and civilians suffer. However representing it as "removing figureheads" and "killing people who aren't connected" only is to pervert the whole reality of what is happening.
2. As for further radicalizing - I'm not sure how you see further radicalizations of Hamas. Instead of destroying Israel and killing or expelling all Jews living there they'd want what? Instead of shooting rockets into the midst of Israeli cities and sending human bombs into the midst of Israel streets, restaurants malls they would do what? How you imaging further radicalized Hamas and Islamic Jihad that is worse than they are now?
3. The whole premise that people become terrorists because somebody hurt them is a red herring. Of course, some individual people do, but there are numerous example of terrorist organisations - both Islamic and non-Islamic - composed of people who were never hurt by anybody, they just decided that's the right thing to do. The facts show that stopping fighting terrorists does not make them disband for lack of recruits - this makes them bolder. Leaving Afghanistan to Taliban did not make Taliban unpopular. Leaving Gaza to Hamas did not make Hamas unpopular. Quite the contrary - they grew stronger and gathered more resources.
4. There is much difference with War on Drugs, and it can be easily seen. Terrorists are criminals that hurt people in order to advance their political agenda, and count on population being afraid and thus caving in to their demands. Drug users do not hurt anybody but themselves, have no demands from anybody and are pursued by the state for the only reason of spending their time and money in a fashion not approved by the state. If you leave drug users alone, nothing would happen. If you leave terrorists alone, you get 9/11. Notice the difference?
Drug users and terrorist are wholly separate groups that need wholly separate approaches but to claim that drug users only harm themselves is just not true. That being said the War on Drugs seems to amplify the impact of drug use on society rather than minimize it but just leaving drug users alone is as failed a policy as leaving the terrorists alone.
Why do you assume that all terrorists live in places with caves and goats? The CIRA, RIRA, Irrintzi, and many other such organizations are still active.
Assuming the big risk of terrorism is Islamic extremism (and originating from the Middle East) is a naïve, American-centric view: plenty of us live our lives more threatened by local separatist groups than by Islamic extremism. The big risk in the UK today is still Irish separatist groups, likewise in the Basque country.
Ignoring all that: I still don't think attacking terrorists relentlessly is ever beneficial. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, as the saying goes: they are driven not to destroy, but to get their aims. The IRA were never going to be defeated by force: by killing the nationalist freedom fighters you inherently radicalized more, and the same is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq to an even bigger degree. To many, it's not a case of evil infidels attacking, but rather the evil foreign aggressor killing their friends and family — if a foreign country attacked yours, claiming to rid you of evil and imposing their morals on you, would you stand by as they killed people you knew, under the promise of a better land? This is how the coalition forces are seen by many, especially in Iraq.
Defeating terrorism by force is like defeating the Hydra by force: everyone you kill radicalizes two more.
As an Irish person, I disagree. The IRA had a very specific territorial objective: ending British rule in Northern Ireland. The Taliban are not articulating an alternative approach to Afghan nationalism, they're religious radicals that think it's OK to assassinate 12 year old girls, stone unmarried lovers to death, and behead their political opponents. When the freedoms you're fighting for consist exclusively of oppressing other people, then your cause is bankrupt.
Pull out a map of the region. The main reason the taliban got to be so powerful is that Pakistan's ISI (intelligence agency) considered a Taliban-run Afghanistan strategically useful in the ongoing struggle between Pakistan and India over the territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
PS don't assume that because I'm Irish I supported the IRA's objective - quite the opposite, in fact.
no, instead the IRA were religious radicals that thought it was OK to place car bombs in Central London, Manchester, and countless other cities, murdering hundreds of innocent people going about their daily business.
The Taliban have a clear military objective too: remove the infidels and their supporters from the country that was formerly theirs.
quite how this is any different from the IRA, semantically or morally, I'm really not sure.
The IRA were not religious radicals. You had a Protestant population whose loyalties lay with the government of the UK and a catholic one whose loyalties lay with the Irish Republic, but this was nothing more than a side effect of Britain adopting a different state religion several centureis ago. Nobody ever solicited or repeated IRA opinions on religious dogma, because they didn't have any. For that matter the IRA wasn't in the habit of bombing Protestant churches in Northern Ireland, but generally attacked military bases and police stations. One Catholic priest was directly involved with the IRA bombing campaign, but this was exceptional, out of hundreds of churches in the region.
The Taliban have a clear military objective too: remove the infidels and their supporters from the country that was formerly theirs.
They were stoning and beheading people and generally running Afghanistan as a medieval hellhole when they were in charge of the place without any miitary opposition, back in the 1990s.
The IRA weren't religious radicals, they were nationalists.
My grand-uncle was an IRA man starting in the 1920's, and probably supported them in some way into the 1980's. It is difficult to convey the depth of feeling that folks like my uncle felt. His father was imprisoned for writing things unfavorable to the British. His uncle was deported for sedition. His entire community was impoverished by onerous taxation and discrimination.
The Taliban want to embrace a fundamentalist vision of Islamic law and institute a theocratic government. Removing foreign influences is a rallying cry, but not the core objective -- they dominated the country well after the Soviet withdrawal, and were themselves a product of foreign intervention. (Ie. Pakistan)
I think the IRA and the ANC are great examples to suggest that violence and "relentless attack" aren't necessarily the best options when trying to combat "terrorism".
The IRA are a brilliant example of this in how they became popular: they had very little support when they took (British) Dublin, by force, in Easter 1916. Yet, after the execution (for high treason) of the leaders, when some were still badly wounded from the British counter-attack, turned far more against the British than had ever been before: the British turned those freedom fighters who few supported into martyrs for their cause.
No it isn't. The US accepted the Taliban as de facto rules of Afghanistan, notwithstanding their backwards approach to running the country, and negotiated with them on things like rights-of-way for trade and so on up to the summer of 2001, when the Taliban broke off negotiations. That was before the attack on the US took place and the Taliban turned out to have been giving Al Qaeda a a home for its terrorist activities.
There are lots and lots of things wrong with Western policy towards Central Asia, but the causal argument boils down to 'you made me do it', which is almost never true.
Terrorism is a tactic of murdering civilians in order to scare other civilians to behave like the terrorists want. Striking terrorists is nothing like that - nobody cares how they behave once they fulfill one simple condition - they don't murder anybody, don't blow up stuff and don't kidnap and behead people they consider infidels. If they stopped doing that, nobody would care what they do.
It's the same as saying putting a murderer into prison is the same as kidnapping an innocent child. Both limit freedom, but if you think for a minute, you'll find the difference. Try it.
Are you honestly deluded enough to believe there have been no civilian casualties in the United States' war?
Are you honestly too callous and/or imbecilic to think that calling this "collateral damage" changes the situation for someone who's life has been destroyed by a foreign entity?
Again, I'm speechless at how deeply some have imbibed the propaganda of the war machine. Please, please recognize the terrible mistake in your logic.
[...] I pity your naïveté
Are you honestly deluded [...]
Are you honestly too callous and/or imbecilic [...]
Where's the substance? You said "I haven't the time to expound further" and then came back to spew more insults. Reasonable people read "I haven't the time" as "I haven't a valid argument but I disagree so I'll make you out to be a fool so obviously wrong that you're not worthy of a proper rebuttal". That doesn't work here.
First and foremost, there is simply no recourse for smsm42's argument, no recourse that that holds reason to a higher degree than nationalism.
Particularly,
nobody cares how they behave once they fulfill that one simple
condition - they don't murder anybody, don't blow up stuff and don't
kidnap and behead people they consider infidels.
This remark doesn't allow for American acts of war to have any degree of inaccuracy. If you take such an idea as fact, you and I shall never find agreement. While perhaps my insults betray their hasty inception, the idea is so inaccurate as to warrant it's correction being, in my mind, an act of human decency.
Now, let's move to the matter at hand.
The crux of tokenadult's argument is that, above all:
Americans and other people in developed countries get to lead
civilized, advanced lives in the Twenty-First Century.
This is the element with which I find fault, and where you may find the division between myself and those who follow the causality constructed by propaganda. For there is an extreme fallacy here, one that is perpetuated endlessly and has set the tone of our generation.
How, I ask, can we lead civilized lives while actively participating in war?
There is a disconnect between the technologically and socially liberated, wonderfully progressive population of Americans imagined in tokenadult's words and the utter chaos and violence unleashed in the reality of ground invasions and air strikes. The problem with tokenadult's argument is that this break in the chain of causality is a complete illusion.
Now, you may argue, how can a "civilian" be participating in a war they did not decide to enter, and was in fact prompted by a major attack?
To which I would reply, I'm not talking about the conflict in Afghanistan.
I'm talking about the drug war, and all its brutal ramifications from the international to the local. I'm talking about the return of slavery manifested in our prison economy. I'm talking about trade agreements both national and private designed to create entire populations of debtors. I'm talking about the very concept of health care that hinges on salary. There are many more.
These are all wars we fight daily, contribute to endlessly, and support in our very existence. Not only our tax dollars, but our attitudes and opinions are weapons in these wars.
tokenadult looks around and sees a peaceful utopia. I look around and see a society rampaged by violence, racism, sexism, and class warfare. This is not a future I wish for Afghanistan, or anyone at all.
And I certainly don't think we can get anyone anywhere by force.
Time's up. Now let's go write some code and get on with our lives.
I didn't downvote you, but it's very obviously this part: "And I want the terrorists to be attacked relentlessly where they live"
This implies enthusiastic support of constant US intervention in foreign lands. Maybe that's not what you meant, but I'm guessing it's what people are reacting to.
I downvoted him. This is ignorance that shouldn't be tolerated.
He's acting like the Taliban is a personal threat to him when traveling by air. They are not, and citing things like Richard Reid (who was British), do not support the argument.
There are repressive regimes all over the world, many that commit atrocities much worse than the Taliban, yet I still feel that I should be able to board a flight without someone putting their hands on my penis.
The whole Taliban argument seems misplaced as well considering nearly all of the terrorists that attacked on 9/11 (the cause of the increased airport security) were nearly all from Saudi Arabia.
So while we do nothing to Saudi Arabia, this person wants to feel safer flying by dropping bombs on Pakistanis.
If you're comfortable killing people indiscriminantly then others will be comfortable killing you indiscriminantly. As long as you offer them that bargain they will continue to take it.
Personally, I really don't care what happens in Afghanistan. It's not my problem, I've never been there, and I don't believe I have the right to decide their future. But I find your belief that drone attacks are actually destroying the Taliban fanciful.
Most of the people drone attacks kill are not the intended targets. How would you react if a foreign power killed someone you loved? Would you go away, never to be heard from again? Or would you take up arms against that foreign power? Given your bombast and chest beating I'm assuming you wouldn't stay silent. So what makes you think that the relatives of the people being killed in drone attacks are somehow going to just go away?
"So, yeah, if a peaceful process of information flow could bring Afghanistan into the Twenty-First Century, I'm all for that."
I'm constantly surprised that when it comes to regime change that there isn't an effort to set up some satellites and air-drop some mobile smartphones with data plans designed with the same principals as one-laptop-per-child.
Look at what Facebook and Twitter did for the Arab Spring.
The role of Facebook and Twitter in Arab Spring is hugely exaggerated. Yes, people used both to communicate. But nothing was caused by it - it was caused by people being tired by old and rusty dictatorships, which also suppressed their religious thrivings (which btw may be not really all that nice if fulfilled - dictatorship is bad, but formally democratic fundamentalist regime is not really freedom either).
The reason why airdropping mobile phones would not work is very simple - first, they would not work (no electricity, no coverage in most of the territory), second, the ruling powers would execute everybody that uses it. And they are quite good at executing people for ... well, anything they like. Limiting flow of information to majority of people is quite easy, if the regime is ruthless enough to enforce it.
OLPC is possible only with local authorities' cooperation. Without it, it could achieve nothing.
In fact, extremist Islamic terrorism [since 2001] resulted in just 200 to 400 deaths worldwide outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq—the same number, Mueller noted in a 2011 report (PDF), as die in bathtubs in the U.S. alone each year.
Indeed. But the problem is how to get the votes in Congress to support a significant downsizing of the TSA. Were the President to do so unilaterally (which he may well have the ability to do), he'd be accused of disregarding Americans' safety and chances are that a good number of those accusations would come from inside Congress since there's still plenty of political capital to be made from opposing him.
As I've said before, there are three factors that support reducing the TSA's budget (and powers) in the coming yeas: the withdrawal from Aghanistan, budget cutting due to deficit management, and economic growth meaning that there will be jobs available for the laid-off TSA employees. These point to a downsizing of the TSA during 2015-16, after the 2014 midterm elections.
According to one estimate of direct and indirect costs borne by the U.S. as a result of 9/11, the New York Times suggested the attacks themselves caused $55 billion in “toll and physical damage,” while the economic impact was $123 billion. But costs related to increased homeland security and counterterrorism spending, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, totaled $3,105 billion.
This, on the other hand, is extremely disingenuous. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been major, major expenses (and major drivers of our national debt, since we didn't raise any new revenue to pay for them). Mentioning them last, as if they were some minor component of the TSA budget, reverses the order of significance.
I think this is a pretty novel argument, basically the cure is worse than the disease. Basically intrusive security measures make flying less desirable which moves people to other forms of transportation (notably cars) where they are more likely to die.
It doesn't help that people don't internalize risk well so its hard for folks to see the merits of the argument but I applaud whomever came up with it.
I've always felt that airport security was always about testing the limits of the complacency of the people and not really about security. I imagine some person complaining during a security checkpoint, holding up the line, and some lady yelling from behind in support of the government keeping "us" safe. It's kind of pathetic and undignified.
> In fact, extremist Islamic terrorism resulted in just 200 to 400 deaths worldwide outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq — the same number, Mueller noted in a 2011 report (http://politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/CNApart.pdf), as die in bathtubs in the U.S. alone each year.
I don't see why there isn't more interest in high speed rail in the US: New York and Boston/Washington DC could be less than two hours travel time apart, which though it may well be an hour slower than a flight, has a lot less overhead (no arriving two hours before departure, etc). The technology is quickly reaching the point where San Francisco to Los Angeles may be equally doable in around two hours, again an obvious gain if you have to arrive at the airport that long before departure.
Long-distance rail travel is politically unpalatable in the US. For reasons I don't really understand, government subsidies are almost impossible, even though every other form of transportation gets them.
High-speed rail in the Boston-DC corridor would be pretty pricey, too. Amtrak tries it, but their idea of "high speed" is sad compared to what the rest of the world thinks it means. While the Acela is somewhat similar to the TGV, it peaks at only 150MPH, and the average speed is far lower because the track doesn't support high speeds in a lot of places, and because it makes about three times more stops than it should.
Proper high-speed trains in that corridor would require new tracks built for much of it, and with level crossings pretty much impossible for high-speed trains, it would need a ton of bridges or tunnels and a huge expense. A lot of politicians will only support such a thing if they can bring service to their hometown, or where their constituents live, or whatever, so you end up spending way too much time stopped at irrelevant stations instead of going fast. The Acela makes seven stops between DC and New York alone, not even counting DC or New York themselves. It makes six more stops after NYC before getting to Boston. Covering a similar distance in a rational high speed system would involve maybe one intermediate stop. As it stands, when I take the train from DC to NYC, I don't even bother trying to get a place on the Acela unless it's the cheapest option, because it only saves about half an hour out of a four-hour journey.
I think it's ultimately a self-fulfilling prophesy. People don't think it can work, which allows politicians to screw it up, which means that it either never happens or happens poorly. So it doesn't work, and people don't think it can work, so....
Powerful lobbies are against a working passenger rail system. The auto industry employs something like 1/12 of the US population directly and indirectly.
The airline industry is dear to the hearts of congressmen, who fly back to their districts on the taxpayer dime, and subsidize the industry in all sorts of unique ways. The US Postal Service, for example, is compelled to subsidize air service in Alaska -- random towns of 250 people get 3 flights a day in many cases.
The rail business was put out of business by bitter labor disputes, subsidized highways and air travel in the 1960's. The direct Federal takeover of the industry (ie Amtrak) makes it difficult to function in a rational way, as it is subject to the whims of Congress. Amtrak is compelled, for example, to serve food on trains -- a service that loses millions of dollars annually.
The overhead comes from the government, otherwise air flights would be like taking a greyhound bus, and in the past, they used to be like that. Now the TSA is leaking to Amtrak and so on, so you might see similar delays in the future with rail!
High speed rail has a lot of land acquisition problems for the most part, air flight doesn't.
Because it's still too expensive when compared to flying. Just look at the cost of the high speed rail plan in California. Until the price of jet fuel is much higher, economically, it makes more sense to fly.
I say let the high speed rails come naturally (because they will eventually): don't try to force it.
Well, the plan for CA was several times the cost per mile of most high speed track built in Europe: something was wrong with that, regardless of anything else.
While waiting this morning to get through security, I overheard a TSA agent saying they were undergoing a downsizing at that airport (BDL, which is a pretty small international airport in Connecticut) from 200 to 50 on staff. So there's one "anecdata" point that the footprint of the TSA may already be shrinking.
He also mentioned it was downsizing through attrition rather than layoffs, which is probably an easier strategy for elected and appointed officials to get behind.
BDL just keeps getting worse. It's already hundreds of dollars less expensive (during the holidays) and takes less time to fly into say Newark and take an Amtrak to Connecticut.
Before we checked luggage for bombs, bombers took down entire aircraft by checking in explosive laden bags. Before we checked passenger shoes, a bomber attempted to detonate theirs. If we relax our security, how do we ensure these things don't happen again?
>Before we checked luggage for bombs, bombers took down entire aircraft by checking in explosive laden bags
Not sure what you're talking about here. The reason 911 actually happened was because no one on the plane expected anymore more than a bit of inconvenience (flying to a different destination).
I'd say do nothing. There aren't enough people trying to do this sort of thing to make it worth the effort or expense. Especially since they have to die every time they do it.
Yea, that's what I tell people when they tell me this rock hasn't been protecting me from tiger attacks. Maybe the rock isn't doing anything, but is the risk of being mauled by a tiger worth testing this? Use your head people!
There's however the documented cases of the guns carried onboard that they did not prevent. And there's documented evidence of TSA confiscating butter knife from the pilot (obviously, he was going to hijack himself), purse with picture of a gun from a 17-year girl (that was undoubtedly Hermione Granger and TSA knew she could turn picture of a gun to a real gun with her magic), plastic lightsaber from a small kid (Anakin Skywalker, I presume, and everybody knows how he turned out, so better to be safe) and a plastic 4 inch GI Joe gun from another kid (again, who knows those underage magicians - maybe they could turn it to the real one). I have no idea why they have problems proving they prevent many acts of terror, with such record. People must be stupid.
Yep, imagine the horrors that would have fallen upon us if a terrist had gotten through with some nail clippers.
Many security experts think it is trivial to get weaponry past them. They aren't extensively trained, you know, they are cheap rental guards following a procedure.
So in fact I would say the TSA has stopped nothing, the only prevention has come from the FBI and CIA, locking the cockpit door, and putting air marshals on the plane.
That's the point, right, that you aren't in a position to guess, and it's slimy position to be put in. It's the same way ADT can sell millions of home alarms every year - there's just no way to prove how many events a reactive system stops.
The probability of a tragedy occurring is almost completely irrelevant to the common person (including my mother and wife). What does get people's attention is the shock factor when that one-in-10-million event occurs. Which helps explain the bewildering popularity of Nancy Grace...
Guys with heavy beards... do you get more attention from the TSA? I heard that any male (regardless of race/religion) with a heavy beard is checked more closely. Has this been true for you or people you know with heavy beards?
I'm a 6' male with a beard, used to have long hair too.
I always got selected for "randomized" searches when flying (in the UK). At UK airports everyone goes through a metal detector. It would always beep when I went through even if I took off my shoes and belt.
"The attention paid to terrorism in the U.S. is considerably out of proportion to the relative threat it presents."
W O W. My jaw completely dropped when I read this sentence.
Considering we've averted 40 terrorist plots since 2001 this is pretty scary somebody would actually print such a statement. Keep in mind, those 40 are the ones we actually know about as well.
I'll continue to put up with the minor headaches as long as we continue to stop these plots before airplanes crash into skyscrapers or car bombs start exploding in times square.
Did you read the entire article? The author rather explicitly showed that even if all 40 of those incidents would have resulted in the loss of a plane we'd still be better off going back to pre-9/11 security.
And the TSA doesn't have anything to do with car bombs in Times Square.
40 terrorist plots! What a load of nonsense. I see it works on some people though. The fact is, most of the cases I've followed had no follow up... because they were thrown out for being ridiculous (remember the Disney world "bombers"?). The ones I've been hearing about for the past few years were almost certainly FBI entrapment (i.e. the person would had done nothing had the FBI not convinced them to and funded everything). So I'd put this number at closer to zero. Even if it's one or two, they still would have killed less people than have died on the highways trying to avoid TSA.
There is an old Proverb, "Only Our Enemies Truly Know How Many Plots We Foiled."
I hate TSA as much as the next guy, but their presence and efforts could have deterred and foiled thousands of plots you and I would never hear about because they don't even know about them.
Denying the reality of the potential danger airplanes can cause to major population centers, like we saw on 9/11 is foolish.
Airport Security May Suck. But, It May Be Saving More Lives Than It's Killing Indirectly.
Total load of bullshit. TSA has never caught a single would-be terrorist. Not one. I'd submit that the FBI/CIA have also never stopped a terrorist plot that we don't know about. The reason I'm confident in saying this is because of the ones they have told us about. Why would you tell the public about cases where you pretty clearly entrapped someone if you had better examples?
Yup. I managed a hostel in Ecuador for 5 months, and the vast majority of European travelers swore they would never again transit through America due to the nightmares they had experienced with security and immigration, all for a 1 hour layover in the airport.
Exactly. I'm Canadian and because of the TSA, I don't travel through the US anymore, even if it means my ticket
are a couple hundred dollars more expensive.
Most of those people have the power to vote this nightmare away though. If they won't then they're just getting what they wanted (if you think I'm being extreme, there are people in this very thread claiming this is necessary after all the evidence that's shown conclusively that it's useless).
This is so NOT relevant at HackerNews. Why do you guys think other 'hackers' would be interested in such news? Can't they find newspapers on their own?
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It's a story of unintended consequences, of an attempted bug fix that introduces a new bug. A story about choosing a technology that seems to serve your needs but doesn't serve your customers. A story of what can go wrong when you've locked yourself into your business model and company culture and can't pivot.
If everyone opted out, the program would be scrapped. You can tell me about how the scanners give harmless amounts of radiation, but I don't really care. You have to stand for your principles. In this situation, a government contractor forced more security theater upon a country, with the only benefit of the entire charade going to their bottom line. Nobody is safer, an entire mode of transport has a new bottleneck, a government agency has expanded and is emboldened and now wants even broader jurisdiction, and as the article states, people are driving more and dying.
If we don't stand up and push back now, things will only get worse. More invasive, more annoying, more useless, more dangerous. And not an inch gained against the stated purpose of deterring terrorist attacks.