Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tristor | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Thankfully, Amex Platinum benefits include a credit for Global Entry which automatically gets you TSA Pre-Check, so I've been whizzing through border patrol and TSA for a long time now. Unfortunately, it's a protection racket that requires participants to turn over their fingerprints into a national database, so it has all sorts of ethical and philosophical murkiness around it. In the end though, if you're traveling for business its one of those things you can't afford not to have because of how stupid the process for regular joes is.

As a frequent traveler I can only agree with Bruce's conclusion here. TSA Pre-check is a failure, not because it doesn't provide enough security, but because the existing process for regular travelers is completely pointless. As any frequent traveler is already fully aware, the TSA is a big joke, and going back more or less to how we did airport security pre-9/11 with the better scanning technology is more than good enough for the realistic threat level and would greatly reduce traveler stress and increase airport throughput. The TSA is failed jobs program which has threatened the civil liberties of the average traveler for no gain whatsoever in national security. It's time to cut it back to something realistic.

TSA pre-check is actually a good honeypot for finding bad people. Regular TSA is a joke, so having these people skip it is fine. But coming up with a shortened list including most evil doers is golden.

I'm sure they scrutinize the heck out of anyone that's trying to avoid detection.

Someone that doesn't think it's worth paying the $85 fee for PreCheck is now an "evildoer"? There are a lot of people in this country that fly very rarely and for whom $85 is a lot of money.

Not agreeing with them, but you misread what they said. They said that PreCheck itself was a self-selecting list of "evildoers" (i.e. the only people who pay for it are up to no good).

As I said, I don't agree, but that's what they posted.

To clarify, I meant that vast majority of evil doers would pay $85 for less screening (alongside a lot of normal people).

While doing thorough background checks on all travelers is an impossible task, it might possible to do thorough checks on all Pre-Check members. This could be worth it for the TSA, even if 99% of PreCheck members are good.

I read it that way at first, but then went the other way because it makes no sense -- there's so little difference in screening between lines, why would a terrorist invite more scrutiny months before they are ready to act?

Besides, an organized terrorist cell is not going to bring their bomb through security anyway, they are going to bring it in on a catering truck or one of the other thousand service vehicles that enter the poorly secured airport perimeter every day. There's no way to "body scan" a truck.

"There's no way to "body scan" a truck."

I've seen something similar on a show in the past and found this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPfUSPVH6oQ

Up for debate is how reliable these scanners are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com