>An internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration revealed security failures at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports, where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials, ABC News has learned.
Unpopular opinion: That means for someone actually trying to bring explosives on board, they are looking at between 1/20 and 1/4 odds that they are caught and potentially deemed an enemy of the state, taken to a CIA black site, etc.
I'm not saying that the TSA is a cost effective deterrent, but I do think that that even with those odds there is a deterring effect. And its a jobs program! The US Gov spends money in worse ways.
Edit: and TSA is funded by airline fees, so not only is it a jobs program, it is paid for by a tax on the wealthy.
> Edit: and TSA is funded by airline fees, so not only is it a jobs program, it is paid for by a tax on the wealthy.
Even though people who fly are on average richer than people who don't, the vast majority are still normal people who get a W-2, and not Jeff Bezos or a trust fund kid. It's still an incredibly regressive tax because it's a flat per-trip fee rather than a percentage.
Taxes on groceries are incredibly regressive. The lottery is quite regressive.
Taxes on airplane flights can never be more than slightly regressive because the bottom 50% very rarely fly anywhere. A tax on what is fundamentally a luxury service would have to try really hard to be even a little bit regressive.
The fact that my CEO in first class and me in economy class pay the same flat fee is still regressive, just not as regressive as, eg. taxing food twice the normal rate
You said "incredibly regressive", which is what I disagree with.
It's at best slightly regressive—the fee is $5.60, so it's not like it's substantially raising the price of a ticket for someone who can already afford one in the first place. And the fee does scale with income to a small degree in that the higher your income the more frequent your flights tend to be.
Could it be a percentage of the ticket price? Possibly, though I'm not sure that would elicit fewer complaints. But it's already in the bottom quartile of regressiveness in how we do taxes in this country, so calling it "incredibly regressive" is either a clear exaggeration or a sign that you have no idea how bad the tax situation is here.
That's all well and good, but I'd prefer that our mildly effective deterrent and jobs program weren't pioneering privacy violations and generally making air travel a pain. They could probably achieve their terrible success rate with some sort of automated detectors that travellers could just walk through like a metal detector.
For someone that was about to blow themselves up, that’s not much of a deterrent. A terrorist group can just sent 10 people through and be happy with the successful 9 or so that get through.
You're woefully mistaken if you don't think the CIA doesn't operate on US soil.
Bad faith to even argue it when the we all know the word CIA is generally used colloquialy as a catch all for "feds" or "intelligence". We all know what they meant by CIA. Also, the FBI is just as scary as the CIA and its not like they won't make you disappear literally, or via a dark 10x10 cell in the Colorado desert.
I didn't see the CIA doesn't operate at all in the US, just that they don't disappear people from US soil, and we all know that GP was specifically referring to the CIA's rendition practices, which are a CIA thing, not a general fed thing.
What would happen is that the TSA tells local law enforcement who tells the FBI and all sorts of very normal "law enforcement" happen to you. In comparison to the CIA, the FBI is pretty impotent and generally has to deal with the bill of rights. There is no 10x10 cell in the Colorado desert. Nobody "disappears" from the TSA. Nobody is "disappearing" at all in the US.
The worst thing that happens to you is what the DoJ has been doing to the Jan 6 arrests - you get kept in solitary for a year before your trial or until you complain that your rights are being violated.
Once one gets caught, everything gets grounded and security beefs the fuck up for at least six months. Happy terrorist times if it’s guy #10 but if it’s guy #1, that’s operational funding totally in the trash and now the FBI will be looking for you and they have your guy as a lead.
Reductio ad absurdum: We could just imprison everyone, that way there's a deterring effect to committing most crimes. After all, can't commit wire fraud if you don't have access to any wires.
You're not wrong to point out that it does _something_, but the thing we need to balance the negative effects, and I don't think we've done that.
The CIA does not take people who get detained at the airport to "black sites." The CIA does not even police airports. Local police work with agencies to pick up most of the people who are going to be arrested and charged. Suspects are not "enemies of the state," either.
If you lived in a country where that kind of thing actually happened, you would not be writing on the internet about it.
So on the one hand, it is a very popular, and perhaps justified, belief that the TSA violates our rights every single day.
But at the same time, since this is America... it's absurd to suggest someone could be illegally detained if they are suspected of bringing a bomb on a flight?
Counterpoint: you could probably have a greater impact by detonating the explosives in the TSA line, which is often the most crowded bottleneck in any given airport. If you make one target less appealing but introduce a new appealing target, how much have you solved?
I agree that the TSA is a jobs program. I don't think that necessarily justifies its existence, but I have accepted that employing people is the TSA's only functional purpose and anything else is just propaganda.
Because not many people actually want to blow themselves up?
The TSA only really exists at this point because the flight attendant unions are scared someone might be able to hurt them while they enforce increasingly absurd rules mandated by their airlines meant to extract money from passengers
The effectiveness of a deterrent has very little to do with the degree of consequences once caught and very much to do with the likelihood of getting caught.
I think we are in agreement there. My point is those odds of getting caught are not too terrible if you compare them with the general clearance rate of violent crime in America.
> The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment
That seems prima facie absurd, or in need of heavy qualification. Even if the probability of being caught is 100%, a sufficiently low punishment might make it still worthwhile. If we always caught murderers but the punishment were only a month in jail, do you really think the murder rate would be lower?
You seem to be equating success with charging someone with crime and a harsh punishment. This is not the case. Success could simply be a bottle of volatile liquid thrown in the trash. Success could be an 'oops, someone forgot about ammo in their carry on luggage again'.
Second point. It is no longer necessary for a terrorist to board the plane at all. Suicide bomber on a busy day at the security check point could kill far more than a plane load of passengers.
> they are looking at between 1/20 and 1/4 odds that they are caught and potentially deemed an enemy of the state, taken to a CIA black site, etc
As opposed to what odds if they blow themselves and a plane up?
Or rather, they would just blow themselves up anyway in the middle of the crowded security area if they got found out. So you're looking at between 1/20 and 1/4 odds of blowing up the security area rather than the plane.
>Air carriers collect a fee of $5.60 per one-way trip originating in the U.S., or up to $11.20 per round trip, and then send the money to the TSA. In 2020, this fee accounted for about 32% of the TSA's budget.
Perhaps credit to TSA they did not trigger false positives of the mock explosives, we kinda want that? If the news media had tried to sneak actual explosives would be a fair test
100%. Other than the millions of innocent we killed, this is the worst part of 9/11. This and surveillance... 9/11 really opened up the flood gates to abuse.
“In a 2013 hearing on Capitol Hill, then-TSA administrator John Pistole, described the Red Team as “super terrorists,” who know precisely which weaknesses to exploit.”
“[Testers] know exactly what our protocols are. They can create and devise and conceal items that … not even the best terrorists would be able to do,” Pistole told lawmakers at a House hearing.
Good ol security through obscurity
“The pen-testers know exactly what our code is. They can create and devise attacks that not even the best hackers would be able to create”
Just fire this guy already. Shameful that he can’t spout out these pathetic excuses with a straight face
> “[Testers] know exactly what our protocols are. They can create and devise and conceal items that … not even the best terrorists would be able to do,” Pistole told lawmakers at a House hearing.
It seems reasonable to tailor your defense to the threats you're realistically likely to face.
Because other countries adopted similar security protocols and still MH370 and Germanwings Flight 9525 happened. And the 2004 Russian bombings.
You do have a point insofar as that 9/11 changed the game: previously a hijacking just meant you'd get an unscheduled vacation and would likely be released unharmed. Now the assumption is that it's a suicide mission so passengers will fight back.
This is nothing to do with the TSA's security theatre; it's simply because most people don't want to die.
To think overwhise is "my magic rock keeps away heffalumps" levels of reasoning.
Because there have been zero heffalump attacks since 9/11.
What on earth are you talking about with MH370 and Germanwings 9525? Do you believe I'm claiming that the TSA prevents mentally unstable pilots from crashing passenger aircraft? In case that's actually what you understood me to be saying: no, that's not what I said.
> This is nothing to do with the TSA's security theatre; it's simply because most people don't want to die.
There are plenty of aspiring terrorists who are perfectly fine dying during their attacks... obviously...
Even worse, he used to be a deputy director of the FBI lol
Thankfully he's no longer at the TSA and the president of a university now.
>John S. Pistole (born June 1, 1956) is the former administrator of the United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and a former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.[1] He is currently the president of Anderson University.
For 2 years as a student, I carried a 4" gravity knife through a lot of airport security terminals. It was completely by accident and when I realized it was in my backpack, I was surprised.
>Undercover tests conducted by the Department of Homeland Security have shown that the TSA's failure rate frequently ranges between 80% and 95%.
- https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Admini...
>An internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration revealed security failures at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports, where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials, ABC News has learned.
- https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-fin...