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Comment by tomohawk | Hacker News Reader

Get rid of the TSA. Security theatre belongs off broadway, not at airports.

The only (small) benefit of the TSA is standardization. Prior it was all contractors with varying rules and enforcement.

Keep the standards, and throw the rest? Seems like a slam dunk, outside of the theatre lobby.

Do you think anybody should be able to bring whatever they want onto a plane?

https://reason.com/2021/11/19/after-20-years-of-failure-kill... ("After 20 Years of Failure, Kill the TSA") | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29286418 (November 2021 thread)

https://web.archive.org/web/20181009074941/http:/oversight.h... ("Airport Insecurity: TSA’s Failure to CostEffectively Procure, Deploy and Warehouse its Screening Technologies")

https://www.oig.dhs.gov/taxonomy/term/5 ("Office of Inspector General DHS TSA Reports")

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/reassessing_a... ("Bruce Schneier: Reassessing Airport Security") | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699339 (June 2015 thread)

> The TSA blog carries constant reports of weapons confiscated from people who forgot to remove them from carry-on bags. But the Homeland Security Red Teams in the 2015 test actively concealed forbidden items just as real criminals and terrorist would. The result was that "TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints."

> Two years later, a Red Team test at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport achieved the same 95 percent failure rate to detect explosives, weapons, and illegal drugs. Repeat national tests in 2017 also went badly, "in the ballpark" of an 80 percent failure rate.

> In fact, the DHS Inspector General has long been a thorn in the TSA's side, compiling a still-growing collection of critical reports. In 2015, the TSA grew so upset with the criticism that it went so far as to classify some findings as "sensitive security information" in order to suppress distribution.

We were fine before the TSA.

It was created in response to 9/11, which is not what I would consider being "fine". Regardless, that doesn't answer the question. Please answer the question.

While the loss of life of ~3k people, once, is regrettable, it is by no means an event worth the response that has occurred. Sometimes, you are just unlucky, and we aren't going to reconfigure entire systems at enormous cost when it is unlikely the event will happen again. It is very hard for people to internalize this. "Do something!" and what not. Armoring flight deck doors would've been sufficient to prevent a recurrence. Instead, the TSA spends ~$8B/year and employs ~60k federal workers. For 3k people who died once.

Conversely, there are ~40k-50k gun deaths annually in the US, and we do nothing, despite that being a much greater risk than an air transport terror attack.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-...

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/

Armoring flight deck doors has also killed at least ~400 people so far.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

Again, sometimes you are unlucky, wrong place at the wrong time. If we replaced pilots with full autonomy, and people died from edge cases/tail risk events, would we bring back pilots? There is no way to get to zero risk. Derisk when you can, accept the remaining risk.

I agree. I think it speaks to the trend to attempt to find technological or bureaucratic solutions to what are fundamentally social problems. More of these problems will crop up as society shifts from high trust to low trust.

60,000 decently paying jobs? And we might have some marginally better security? And every other country has more or less the same process in place? These sound like good things to me.

I'd rather the money spent on the TSA were spent on other programs that produce value for society, like funding the child tax credit, or school lunches, or more teachers to reduce class sizes, or repairs to roads, or public health care, or public education so more people can get degrees, or programs for the homeless, or treatment programs for addiction or mental health crises, or anti-domestic-violence programs...

Not all 'jobs' are of equal value to society

You've already gotten a very clear answer:

The TSA:

1. Expends a lot of money, and a lot of passenger time;

2. Without producing any benefits.

Thus, eliminating the TSA is pure upside.

Your question is irrelevant to the topic, because the TSA does not oversee what people bring on airplanes.

The ONLY response to 9/11 that has done anything is the change in cockpit door construction and procedure. Everything else is completely worthless. I know this sounds nuts but I really do not care if someone sneaks a tiny hooker pistol or a swiss army knife onto a plane, they're not going to be able to do anything other than piss everyone off and get beaten to a pulp by a bunch of people who had their travel plans interrupted, should they decide to do a terrorism.

Also, fun fact, the TSA doesn't actually care about any of this. They're mostly concerned with large bombs and have lobbied to not have to chase after every pair of nail clippers but the flight attendants union has successfully counter lobbied to prevent this. They don't want to be stuck in giant metal tube trying to convince 200 irate people to pay $5 for a can of Fanta and to sign up for the latest credit card if anyone is armed with so much as a spork.

I think the pre 9/11 safety protocols, with the sole addition of the new locking cockpit doors, is plenty safe.

This was all really we needed to do. It's so frustrating what travel has become

Sorry of. There are limits, it has to be yay big. Can't be too heavy. But those limits are (usually) administrated by the airline. Otherwise if it is legal then bring it. The reality is, if you want to bring something nefarious into a plane, you can do so. TSA mainly stops law abiding people and stupid people. And an enormous cost in time and money and safety.

I was recently amused at an airport security check in a major US airport when a TSA uniform explained to a person in the line next to me that US citizens can qualify to skip the security lines. I chuckled at what somebody might make of that without further explanation. I finally worked my way up to the screening gate where the person ahead of me presented their gold-star drivers license as an ID; the person behind me only had to present their boarding pass.

I have gone through the checkpoint with somebody who presented a photo id that was printed on an inkjet printer. Meanwhile, my holographic state-issued ID was subjected to four different tests.

The rules differ between major US airports. They differ between lines at the same airport. They differ between people in the same line at the same airport.

So it seems to me that some people already can bring whatever they want onto a plane. Which means that everything else is, in fact, theater.

The TSA misses 60-95% of guns in security tests. That's approximately $10-$11 per flight that you pay for at most a 40% reduction in guns on the plane (assuming they're even able to find intentionally concealed firearms at the same rate as the base chance). Most guns that make it through are never used or intended to be used for violence on the plane, totalling to well over (unclear if it's closer to 1x or 100x too small) $250m for every gun which was caught which might have on average prevented 1 gun-related crime in the air.

Their other stats aren't much better. For the equivalent of $250m worth of effort, there are thousands of better uses of your time and money.

And today, right this second, you can bring high-powered un-extinguishable bombs onto a plane [0]. That comic is written in jest, but it really is trivial to kill a lot of people with common household devices and chemicals, including those allowed on planes. The world carrys on because most people are at least halfway decent, not because the TSA saves us.

[0] https://xkcd.com/651/

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