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Comment by moogly | Hacker News Reader

Whilst I think airport security is indeed just security theater, roll my eyes every time I have to take my shoes off at an airport, and I disagree with some of the claims in this article that these things work and have kept us safe, I'm not sure that's a great idea.

I can only speak for myself, but I'm not a fan of cost-benefit analyses when it comes to human lives. Going down that route gives us such wonderful things like corporations preferring to pay out damages instead of making product recalls (c.f. the Ford Pinto case). It gets quite cynical. But I guess in the minority here. All my "tech bros" think like that too. It's all about cold, hard statistics.

There is something to be said about "Vision Zero[1]" type projects, but as it stands I don't think the TSA is currently engaging in a deliberate such project.

[1]: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Vision_zero

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You MUST do cost benefit analysis. A lot of people say "well if TSA saves one life..." But at what cost? A billion dollars? A trillion? A quadrillion? You may argue that it may never cost that much, but it can if you don't do those analysis. And what about non monetary costs? How many lives are you willing to forfeit to save just one? A lot of people claimed to take to the roads after TSA was formed. Yet car travel, per mile is deadlier than air. So theoretically it cost more lives to save just that one.

I think doing some kind of cost benefit would be preferable to just spending money on what types of death people are most afraid of, which is basically what we are doing now.

I'm not saying that we need to do super intense cost benefit on every way of preventing death. But if we are spending far more to prevent a particular type of death than another just because of public sentiment I think that is a problem we should fix.

And doing that kind of analysis can actually save far more lives by using resources more efficiently. Orders of magnitude more people die from obesity than terrorism, yet we don't spend orders of magnitude more money on promoting healthy lifestyles. Or to pick a slightly absurd example, if we replaced security screening with cancer screening it could be far more effective in preventing people from dying in ways that aren't their "fault" (false positives aside).

>I'm not a fan of cost-benefit analyses when it comes to human lives

What about when you measure the costs as lives vs. lives? E.g. spending X dollars on airport security saves Y lives, but spent on highway safety saves Z lives.

As someone else wrote in this thread, there's absolutely no way to know how many were saved from potential harm, so that's a useless contradistinction.

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