Hacker News Reader

Comment by aestetix | Hacker News Reader

I hope the list is made public soon. The TSA needs to be abolished.

The politicians will never abolish a multi-billion dollar jobs program because having such a program to control gives them power. Being able to appoint someone somewhere, make rule changes in favor of this or that group, those are political currency and get exchanged as such in DC.

That's not what you want. If that happened whatever the TSA is doing will be done by the FBI or some other agency.

I don't know what you want; maybe a less intrusive trip to the airport? If that's the case fine - but what you want is for TSA to be more respectful of civil liberties. The way you're saying it sounds like you just want the country to be more dangerous. There's no audience for that.

If anyone wants to kill a lot of people, disrupt air travel, disrupt the economy and spread fear they can just set off a suicide vest in the middle of a TSA screening line. We're not any safer by having a planeload of people all standing in line to be screened.

TSA lines are way larger than a planeload during holidays. Doing things to the TSA line would be far more effective nowadays than doing anything involving planes.

> The way you're saying it sounds like you just want the country to be more dangerous

It's hard to know what dangers they're actually alleviating.

And on the flip side, they create other dangers, like having things in your luggage stolen, causing you to miss the occasional flight, normalizing intrusive government begavior, and in general just adding unnecessary friction and indignity to travel (ok maybe that last one is a stretch to call a danger).

Maybe you value these things less than the feeling of comfort that TSA may provide, but I think I'd count myself a part of gp's audience.

Edit: not to mention the opportunity cost of all of that tax money. Though there is something to be said for providing jobs... but you can probably think of plenty of jobs programs with a better ROI.

> I don't know what you want; maybe a less intrusive trip to the airport?

I want security turned back over to the airports/airlines like before the TSA.

> The way you're saying it sounds like you just want the country to be more dangerous. There's no audience for that.

You have no evidence that TSA has made anything safer while we all have lots of evidence that TSA has made the experience much worse.

The TSA made it more dangerous because now people drive more.

Nope, they're getting more power https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2022/10/18/tsa-issue...

What would be the alternative?

Why do we need an alternative? Air travel existed for decades without it. Here's a more in-depth article on it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellistalton/2019/01/28/is-the-t...

The previous solution.

We don't need an alternative. I've never understood why we need to go through security to board an airplane, but not to board a train.

probably the likely outcomes of terrorism. On a plane the whole thing is demolished in a crash because of the kinetic energy involved in colliding with the earth. For a train probably not the same degree of destruction is attainable unless you like bomb a bridge or something of the sort.

> More than thirty buildings in Lac-Mégantic's town centre, roughly half of the downtown area, were destroyed, and all but three of the thirty-nine remaining buildings had to be demolished due to petroleum contamination of the townsite. Initial newspaper reports described a 1 km (0.6-mile) blast radius.

Not terrorism, just negligence -- but a train can do a lot of damage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...

wow, yah if you're carrying hazardous material that changes the calculus for sure.

9/11.

If anyone ever uses a train to ram into the Pentagon, expect the security / security theater for trains to be scaled up as well.

Assuming someone managed to hijack a bunch of planes again, I doubt they could reproduce 9/11. The government would shoot them down.

Sure they could kill everyone on the plane, but a train has more passengers than a plane, and a determined terrorist could probably kill everyone on a train.

Notably, there are ways to do so without being on the train, which probably increases the number of people willing to do it.

> Assuming someone managed to hijack a bunch of planes again, I doubt they could reproduce 9/11. The government would shoot them down.

They don't really need to hijack planes, they just need a few hundred thousand dollars and a NetJets account. Also, if you read some of the BlueLeaks documents you can tell the government is very worried about vehicle ramming attacks. The unfortunate truth is that anyone with a little bit of money and willingness to die for a cause if coordinated can cause massive amounts of damage. We are lucky that most terrorists aren't that smart.

Security theater has no impact. 9/11 had two important outcomes: locking the cockpit door and making passengers aware that hijackers will crash the plane rather than detour it to South America, ensuring that they will never again assume that sitting back and letting the hijackers do what they want is acceptable.

THOSE things made air travel safer. Body scanners and confiscating pocketknives did not.

To describe the current behavior as "confiscating pocketknives" isn't even accurate - third party testing of how well the TSA actually detects and confiscates items like knives, guns, and (fake but real looking) explosive devices shows that they miss the vast, vast majority of items. Like more than 90% of them.

Nobody who wants to succeed would bother going through TSA.

'Known Crew Member' goes around TSA. Even TSA goes around TSA since they added the shiny metal badge on their shirts in 2008. Airport vendors bring in tons of product every day through side gates.

Strong flight doors which are locked and better procedures stop the hijackers.

Another person commented on it before me but TSA is going be expanded to cover trains too. https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2022/10/18/tsa-issue...

Same as the rest of the world, metal detector and possibly luggage scan of larger luggage. US airline security is a ridiculous jobs program for the most part. People have been using the phrase "security theater" since the TSA was invented, and with good reason. Taking your shoes off at security is outrageous, no other country requires this on a regular basis.

It's strange that every commercial airplane passenger has an interaction with a federal employee. This isn't true for busses, trains, ferries, cabs, or any other mass transit system. It feels like something more appropriate for an airport employee, with local PD on premises.

Not having it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com