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Comment by rrrazdan | Hacker News Reader

Maybe because many Americans understand that in this changed security environment, such kinds of check are necessary. America has been very successful in preventing a repeat of 9/11. Surely TSA deserves some credit for that? I may be the only one thinking like this, but as an Indian, we live in constant fear of attacks. And I find these checks a necessity. Inconvenient, yes. Humiliating, perhaps. But surely necessary?

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While I agree that "America has been very successful in preventing a repeat of 9/11," the truth is that this is utterly separate from what the TSA is involved in. The US has focused much more counterintelligence on al-Qaeda and bombed the crap out of them and assassinated their leader, and US civilians now know that they cannot tolerate being passive members in a hijacking and will take down a hijacker even if it means their lives. (It might be the case that their Federal Air Marshals service also deserves some tiny bit of credit, but I am hesitant to allow a Trusted Officer to board a plane with a gun -- it introduces new vulnerabilities on how you verify that someone is Trusted in the first place, either as a passenger or as an airport? and perhaps the terrorists can now steal weapons from the Air Marshals or bribe them).

The measures that we're upset about are due to some prominent security failures of the TSA, mostly to do with private individuals using plastic explosives. The most prominent were the shoe bomber (thus now we take off our shoes) and the underwear bomber (thus now you must either let them take a naked picture of you, or else submit to the Freedom Fondling of your genitals to look for such things). However, other intrusive regulations like "don't take a bottle of Pepsi on-board, it will be confiscated" come from a failed "liquid explosives" plan which we caught before they put it into action. The underwear and shoe bombs got right through the TSA's security screening, and were defeated by passengers noticing that people were trying to set weird things on fire.

People have been upset about the stupidity of airport security since before 2001; George Carlin's rant on airport security was in 1999, you can find it on YouTube easily. His ringing words, "Haven't found anything yet, haven't found one bomb in one bag" still rings true, surprisingly enough. We even found plastic explosive charges in cargo planes -- but only because counterintelligence sources intercepted the information of the plan and told us where to look. These guys digging around in your bags never did.

Let me tell you what's wrong here, in one brief statement. You know what happened when I last went through a naked body scanner? It went off loudly. You would think that this means that I would be a very sorry person indeed. No. They lazily took me aside, looked at where the computer software had drawn a circle (around my head), decided that it was probably detecting my ponytail as a false alarm, and whisked me on my way.

Wait, you say, you mean their alarms went off and they yawned? That's correct. Your chance of being a real unidentified terrorist is probably smaller than one in a hundred million. Their machine's false positive rate is probably larger than one in a thousand. That means that even if their machine goes off, there's only a one-in-a-hundred-thousand chance that you're a serious threat. The officer who deals with you will be conditioned by the last hundred non-threatening people he has very thoroughly investigated, and has started to say, "okay, yeah, boring. This person looks as trustworthy as the last hundred. I guess I'll let them pass."

I don't know how al-Qaeda feels about our new TSA policies, but it's probably laughable when compared to their fear of our military drones. The TSA probably doesn't make any terrorist afraid.

How do they deserve credit? Their security procedures are demonstrably flawed. And, of course, the most obvious relevant point: terrorists can do many things other than hijack planes, many of which are outside the TSA's jurisdiction.

We don't have the equivalent of the TSA here in Australia and I don't feel any less safe for it.

There is no "changed security environment." That's a myth created by fear mongers who support garbage like the TSA. Life is dangerous, do it long enough, you die. That was true before 9/11 and it's true now. There are bad people out there, that was true before 9/11 and it's true now. Living in a free, open society may be more dangerous in some regards than living in a tightly regulated society.... true before, true now.

Freedom is it's own end: true before, true now.

And never mind that the TSA does absolutely zilch to make us any safer anyway.

No. Not on 9/10, and not on 9/12. "Changed security environment?"

Nothing has changed. There have always been terrorists. 9/11 was just the first time this particular kind of attack was used.

That vulnerability was patched out the very next day (or otherwise quickly) - locked cockpit doors and air marshalls. Add to that the bonus of any guy standing up to hijack a plane will likely be throttled by angry passengers.

These checks are _not_ a necessity. We could go back to private screeners and metal detectors and be safe enough.

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