The TSA is a complete joke

[Reeve]

I saw this on The TSA website:
"Pay a non-refundable $85 fee valid for five years with a credit card, money order, company check or certified/cashier’s check."

Does that mean you pay $85 a year? or is it really only less than $20/yr?

It's a one time payment, not per year. For me it was $100, though. Not sure if there were other fees, or maybe they've just reduced the fee.

The thing for me that's even better than the Pre-Check security line is the immigration. When I get back from a foreign country, 20 hours on an airplane, the last thing I want to do is stand in an immigration line for 45 minutes.

[ghotihook]

It's a one time payment, not per year. For me it was $100, though. Not sure if there were other fees, or maybe they've just reduced the fee.

The thing for me that's even better than the Pre-Check security line is the immigration. When I get back from a foreign country, 20 hours on an airplane, the last thing I want to do is stand in an immigration line for 45 minutes.

Oh you must have Global entry or something like that. I found this article after more searching. This seems like a no brainer for anyone that travels at least once a year...

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[Reeve]

Oh you must have Global entry or something like that. I found this article after more searching. This seems like a no brainer for anyone that travels at least once a year...

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Oh you must have Global entry or something like that. I found this article after more searching. This seems like a no brainer for anyone that travels at least once a year...

Yeah sorry, I have Global Entry, which includes TSA Pre-Check.

[anon5123]

Are you completely missing the point that I wouldn't need to arrive 3 fucking hours early if the TSA didn't exist?

Even at busy airports, I've never spent more than 35-45 minutes going through TSA. You're exaggerating.

[Pipebomb]

Currently trending on Youtube.

[noidentity]

Even though I think the TSA does a horrible job they do find a lot of stuff.

They even have an Instagram account where they post what they find.

Instagram.com/tsa

[Deleted]

Even though I think the TSA does a horrible job they do find a lot of stuff

Yeah except every single test that anyone has ever conducted has determined that when someone actually wants to get something on board and isn't waving it around, they don't find jack shit.

[noidentity]

Yeah except every single test that anyone has ever conducted has determined that when someone actually wants to get something on board and isn't waving it around, they don't find jack shit.

I absolutely agree, a lot of what they find are novelty items that tourists "forget" about. Go look at that instagram link, it's funny what people think they can get away with.

Chances are TSA wont actually catch people who know what they are doing, especially with semi recent news stories of TSA workers actually doing the smuggling.

[Kujako]

Even though I think the TSA does a horrible job they do find a lot of stuff.

Stuff like bottled water and nail clippers?

[ringpriest]

It's because everyone involved is in a no win scenario.

Whats the honest truth of terrorism? That there is no such attack that is an existential threat to any country. Sure they can be horiffic and destroy thousands of lives, but even a kind of worst case scenario - a terrorist with a nuclear weapon - would not mean the end of America... "just" one city. The other 300 million Americans would be mostly fine.

Society cannot and will not admit this truth about terrorism - that it's a very low level, persistent threat that has to succeed just once out of 10000 attempts to be successful, but even that one "success" doesn't fundamentally alter the security calculus. Society admitting that this is the case is for it to say that some degree of death from terorrism is an operating cost in the modern age for society. Although to be fair, we have similar "we don't like to think about it" arrangements with guns, with cars, with drugs and so forth.

On this, I agree with you 100% - I think it's an effect of how our brains are wired by evolution: if you're a hunter-gather, that 0.001% chance that there's a panther lurking by the waterhole means that your genetic legacy dies with you, so you can't take it. As (theoretically) intelligent beings who are part of a globe-spanning society, we need to use different math, not the ones our brains are hard-wired for, but as a society (particularly but by no means exclusively in the American right-wing) the opposite seems to happen instead: the lessons of literally thousands of years of civilization are abandoned in favor of unthinking instinct.

The TSA is effective enough to catch the idiots of the world who try and do stuff as well as the occasional disturbed individual. But the TSA, or anything like it, is an intrinsic losing proposition. The day will come that terrorists smart and innovative enough do something on the day the TSA slips up a little bit.

Consider the alternatives. A super-TSA that is white list only, will basically end air trafic as we know it in the US and change the face of travel and comerce back to something nearly a century old. Having no security would allow the loser terrorists and the nuts to get through.

The TSA is at best, a 70% solution, and for what it costs - which for our government budget is pennies - it's a rather cost effective 70% solution. It should be focused on casting a broad net to get the screw ups and the mentally ill. Anything beyond that is luck on their part, or a fiction. There has never been a fortification, a plan, that, a prison, that a smart man couldn't figure a way around. We can't resource the TSA enough, nor can they possibly cover every concievable avenue.

But we can't say that like that. So we have to engage in this fiction that the TSA is a 99.9999999% solution instead of a 70% one. Basically that's why my position is what it is. It's better than nothing because it does perform a valuable function acting as a broad filter. However to protect against motivated terrorists it's worthless, society just can't talk honestly about that little fact.

I think there are some real problems with just accepting the TSA "as is", though - it has multiple hidden costs: it detracts from other, more useful options (opportunity cost); it externalizes much of its impact in ways that aren't readily visible; and it aids and abets in misinforming the public about terrorism.


First, it detracts from some good arguments to spend more on more generally useful and resilient infrastructure - the TSA is basically worthless in an emergency; it can't do much of anything but screen mass transit traffic (and it's doing the usual bureaucratic growth thing there, too, attempting to expand to rail and even road traffic). The TSA tends to mask that more general-purpose emergency personnel can be far more cost effective.

We need to not allow terrorism to have an outside impact, but instead of minimizing the cost of terrorism, the TSA effectively aids and abets terror, particularly with handling false alarms. Every false alarm that shuts an airport down for hours has a large cost, a cost that is no less real for being "hidden" because its distributed and not accounted for on a simple balance sheet. Ever man-hour needlessly lost to the TSA is a win for terrorism in general, because its a cost they're succeeded in imposing on our society - we need a real, objective cost-benefit analysis on security, and the TSA acts to actively prevent that.

In fact, the TSA seems to actively support the fear-driven, irrational response to terrorist boogeymen; talk to a TSA agent (or most law-enforcement types in general) and you'll hear stories about all the "dangerous" threats they stop all the time - threats that have no objective, statistical existence, even among people with the appropriate clearances; they're fairy stories, not reality. Terrorists, with extremely rare exceptions, are incompetent idiots - if they weren't, they wouldn't be terrorists in the first place; the idea that there is some massive terrorist threat directed at the United States threatening our way of life, is utter nonsense. But TSA officials love to hype the threat, and their very presence reinforces the idea of terrorism as a high-probability threat.

Also, the TSA's wide-spread, unthinking order-following presence is a very bad precedent - it's poor civic hygiene; I'm not saying that the TSA is the Gestapo (it isn't, except maybe from Hogan's Heroes) but letting organizations like the TSA sprout in your society, well.. that's how you get ants the Gestapo.

[Ahovv]

Even at busy airports, I've never spent more than 35-45 minutes going through TSA. You're exaggerating.

No, I'm not. I listed my worst airport experience involving the TSA out of 15 or so flights. I'm not claiming it's 90 minutes every time.

[Kakera]

My roommate works for TSA. I can confirm that it is a complete joke.

[Kujako]

Good thing terrorists don't fly first class, cause every time I do they just hand wave me through security.

[noidentity]

Stuff like bottled water and nail clippers?

Well looking at the last 3 pictures they posted.

- Cylinder flask full of black powder
- A live smoke grenade
- what looks to be an old pistol with ammunition.

Also, a lot of ninja stars.

[Skroe]

On this, I agree with you 100% - I think it's an effect of how our brains are wired by evolution: if you're a hunter-gather, that 0.001% chance that there's a panther lurking by the waterhole means that your genetic legacy dies with you, so you can't take it. As (theoretically) intelligent beings who are part of a globe-spanning society, we need to use different math, not the ones our brains are hard-wired for, but as a society (particularly but by no means exclusively in the American right-wing) the opposite seems to happen instead: the lessons of literally thousands of years of civilization are abandoned in favor of unthinking instinct.



I think there are some real problems with just accepting the TSA "as is", though - it has multiple hidden costs: it detracts from other, more useful options (opportunity cost); it externalizes much of its impact in ways that aren't readily visible; and it aids and abets in misinforming the public about terrorism.


First, it detracts from some good arguments to spend more on more generally useful and resilient infrastructure - the TSA is basically worthless in an emergency; it can't do much of anything but screen mass transit traffic (and it's doing the usual bureaucratic growth thing there, too, attempting to expand to rail and even road traffic). The TSA tends to mask that more general-purpose emergency personnel can be far more cost effective.

We need to not allow terrorism to have an outside impact, but instead of minimizing the cost of terrorism, the TSA effectively aids and abets terror, particularly with handling false alarms. Every false alarm that shuts an airport down for hours has a large cost, a cost that is no less real for being "hidden" because its distributed and not accounted for on a simple balance sheet. Ever man-hour needlessly lost to the TSA is a win for terrorism in general, because its a cost they're succeeded in imposing on our society - we need a real, objective cost-benefit analysis on security, and the TSA acts to actively prevent that.

In fact, the TSA seems to actively support the fear-driven, irrational response to terrorist boogeymen; talk to a TSA agent (or most law-enforcement types in general) and you'll hear stories about all the "dangerous" threats they stop all the time - threats that have no objective, statistical existence, even among people with the appropriate clearances; they're fairy stories, not reality. Terrorists, with extremely rare exceptions, are incompetent idiots - if they weren't, they wouldn't be terrorists in the first place; the idea that there is some massive terrorist threat directed at the United States threatening our way of life, is utter nonsense. But TSA officials love to hype the threat, and their very presence reinforces the idea of terrorism as a high-probability threat.

Also, the TSA's wide-spread, unthinking order-following presence is a very bad precedent - it's poor civic hygiene; I'm not saying that the TSA is the Gestapo (it isn't, except maybe from Hogan's Heroes) but letting organizations like the TSA sprout in your society, well.. that's how you get ants the Gestapo.

I really like the hunter-gatherer analogy. Reminds me what a professor told the class in school years ago (they sadist who invented Captcha, Luis von Ahn actually... he's kind of a piece of crap): "math is hard... this is hard stuff... think about how the human brain evolved. It's designed to hunt zebras on the savanah. It's not supposed to be doing this at all!". It's actually pretty ironic that the greatest concern is airline terrorism, considering the statistical safety of airplanes but the terror people have in dying in an airplane accident. We actually found a new way to be terrified about something that is statistically vanishingly unlikely in a mode of transportation that it statistically the safest way to travel. It's just mounds upon mounds of irrationality.



I mean I agree with you in princple on all of this... but at the same time, when I wrote what I wrote (and I'm still thinking on this topic), I can't see how x-ray machines and some security checkpoint stuff infront of the gates wouldn't be a thing. I mean do we just get rid of them and let people stroll up to airplanes? It seems to me that the TSA or something like it would very much be just *there* because it's commons sense to have some basic security there.

I guess maybe I'm having a lack of imagination about what a TSA-less security apparatus looks like. I'm entirely sympathetic and in agreement with the criticism about all the other side effects of the TSA's existence. But I'm not sure what, if anything, could truly replace it to the point we could point at at it and say "that... that's truly money well spent". Do we really want to go back to private contractors?

I guess, clean sheet, what is an effective model? What do passengers see, if anything? Behind the scenes security services doing their security thing will be in effect regardless, so what is where the TSA is now, if anything? Or do we just forgo passenger screening in this way entirely?

[GrinningMan]

Never really had an issue with the TSA. But I suppose that's what I get for showing up a couple hours before my flight :3c

Gosh, it's like you don't give yourself enough time.

[Nynax]

I've flown 10-15 times in the past few years. The current procedures are not only ineffective at actually catching terrorists, but cannot keep up with the flow of airport traffic. My most recent trip was utterly ruined by the TSA due to a 90-minute line at Boston-Logan. I asked if I could jump ahead because I was going to miss my flight, but I was told too many people were asking that. Of course, the flight was missed, the next available was delayed and I was forced to stay overnight at a shitty motel for four hours of sleep.

I don't know a single person who even feels safer with the TSA around. This organization is an egregious overreaction to the virtually nonexistent threat of terrorism (compared to other death rates and acts of violence). I can only imagine how it feels to have metal implants and being forced into a full-body pat down.

According to my Army bro, Airport security itself is a joke. So far we are just focused on the airplanes themselves....but what's stopping a heavily armed group from showing up and just shooting up the terminal? For some airports there are easily hundreds of people waiting around any one area.

If you really want Airport Security, you set the checkpoint on the road in, and screen the cars + the bags.
Of course that would never happen and be way too inconvenient, but there it is

[GrinningMan]

http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/video...0LnjY2NB11gg72

In before someone says those travelers are stupid for not arriving 4 hours early.

Well maybe if Chicago wasn't a festering asshole of a city...

[Torais]

I never really understood the logic of piling a whole bunch of people in small area before anyone actually checks them for explosives or weapons

Seems ironic that the TSA themselves seem to create a pretty viable kill-zone for anyone wanting to go that route even before stepping on a plane.