The TSA is just a huge scam to siphon money and they need to show they are providing value. Taking shoes off is that value, so yeah it’s never going away. We could get out of Afghanistan but will never get rid of the TSA.
Meanwhile I remember flying through Frankfurt in 1994 and opening my (inspected before baggage drop) suitcase briefly to move something and getting pulled politely aside and my items re-inspected. Security policies that made sense and were executed competently by respectful and well-trained staff.
Since 9/11 I just try to avoid flying to or from the US entirely.
I had a friend bring 1L containers of liquid through security in Europe and no one said a word. The limit was 100mL. Nobody was looking at the scanner.
Don’t fool yourself.
Nobody wants to be the person who scraps a security policy and then has a terrorist attack happen as a result of their policy removal. Not politicians, not TSA higher-ups, nobody. That's a career-ending mistake, no matter how unlikely it may be.
Not to mention that it's probably not a particularly popular decision amongst the public. Maybe it's security theatre, but people like it.
This would never happen in today's climate though since both parties are pro-big government.
A 18" dirk from the 1800s ...
Made it through security without anyone saying anything and only remembered when it clanked as he put it into the overhead luggage compartment.
REMOVE_SHOES is one in probably a thousand settings in TSA's airport security makefile. Like all makefiles of any complexity, the trick is separating out the bona fide settings from the mountains of ineffectual ones that disappear somewhere deep in the nasty bowl of bureaucratic spaghetti.
As programmers, we should all inherently understand the value in not touching that goddamned mess unless someone really understands what they are doing. Even then, that almost always involves building a new system that runs in parallel to the spaghetti so that the "no touching" rule is obeyed at all times.
That's not to say TSA isn't a mess. It's just when I imagine what Libertarian International airport security looks like, the one thing I'm certain of is that they have set the RANDOMIZED_SCREENING flag incorrectly.