It's the perception of safety.
If DOGE was really about efficiency and cutting waste, TSA would be the first place they would be looking.
If DOGE was really about efficiency and cutting waste, TSA would be the first place they would be looking.
If DOGE was a real agency, maybe it would.
You say that as a dig, but a perception of safety is a real deterrent. If you can make your adversaries believe something is true, it doesn't matter whether it actually is or not. This is sometimes known as a bluff.
To be effective, safety measures don't have to block people who are smart and wouldn't commit the crime anyway. They only have to block the people dumb enough to do it.
If TSA is just theater, couldn't an attacker simply bring weapons sufficient enough to hold off the crowd and break the door? The hijackers on 93 only had box cutters.
It is the combined perception of airport security and the perception that passengers will fight that deter bad actors from even trying.
My point is that none of these things have to be impenetrable. There is a swiss-cheese model to safety. TSA doesn't have to be 100% effective to be effective. Every layer of security adds up. There is no single component responsible for all airline security, not even the cockpit doors.
I'm guessing they weren't though, in which case this is a false equivalency. People did hijack airplanes prior to (and during) 9/11
2. In the modern world, it's unclear whether hijacking is a severe risk to planes (compared to drones or missiles which are way more acquirable by terrorists and civilians than they were 25 years ago)
3. TSA has a documented and repeated ~80% failure rate at detecting threats. To the extent security theater is effective, you would expect that that effectiveness would disappear once everyone knew that they most likely wouldn't stop the attack.
Well, if we caught 20% of threats across the 19 hijackers on 9/11, there would have been a 99% chance one was caught. And a 67% chance that someone was caught in each group for each of the first 3 planes with 5 hijackers.
But even if they do miss 80% of the failures in penetration tests, what actually matters is whether or not real world threats are being caught. Threat actors in the real world act with different motivations than penetration testers, and with different skill sets.
I have a family member who works at a (European) airport in an administrative position, and apparently the security culture is quite deep and, I dunno, it sounds reasonable? As in, employees have clearances and passes to enter the more restricted areas (and they go through their own security points), the airport generally knows where the employees are and why they're there, the public areas have guards and many cameras and even the layouts of the stores and booths are subject to many security rules regarding materials and even stuff like camera sightlines.
But it isn't obvious the Trump administration would have to worry about that. They've already saturated the screaming. There isn't anything worse to call them than Nazis and there are a couple of years of the administration left. We can hope someone thinks to tidy the TSA up.
I do wish it was someone smarter doing this, but only a President already hated by all the elites could do this degree of upheaval and get away with it.
Anyway, he's not the real power, here.
...they would've nixed Trump's trip to the Super Bowl, which cost taxpayers 15-20 million all for him to leave early when his team lost.
They wouldn't be killing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which costs taxpayers nothing (it's funded by the big banks, aka The Federal Reserve).
The direction they seem to be going, they'll probably increase the TSA budget, add an extra hour to security lines, and make you take your pants off for some reason.
But as others have pointed out, a lot of the TSA processes (taking off shoes, laptops, liquids, etc.) are pointless.
What prevents another 9/11 are the cockpit doors, which have nothing to do with TSA.
Before 9/11, airplane hijackers were like bank robbers: idiots trying to get some cash. If you just followed their orders, everyone would mostly get out alive.
Even mid-9/11, when it became clear that the hijackers were using the planes to attack civilians (at the necessary cost of the lives of the passengers), people stopped cooperating and stopped the final plane from reaching its target.
Even if someone walked into the cockpit with a gun they'd get nothing for their trouble but an immediate nosedive as the pilot sacrificed the plane to protect whatever the intended target was.
Nowadays, any would-be hijacker is going to get immediately dogpiled and beat within an inch of their lives before they ever reach first class.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11326472/hijacking-airplanes-e...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_17...
Post 9/11 everyone else just caught up (except minus the actually killing the person), see e.g. the shoe bomber guy.
Yeah. So much that, on the morning of 9/11, when a student in my college class was announcing there was a hijacking, I remember wanting to shout “Who cares? Those happen all the time and it gets resolved![1] Why is this a priority?”
… until he got to the part about it crashing into the WTC.
[1] Which, of course, still would have been out of line to say, but I was unusually cranky and didn’t get why that would be something to stop everything over.
I do know flying from Los Cabos Mexico where TSA doesn’t matter, I didn’t have to remove my laptop a couple of years ago
amen! but we know that ain't happening
We need about as much security around the airport as we need around a subway or a concert.
After the dark knight shooting, we didn't find the need to put up xray scanners in every movie theater. It's dumb to do that with airports.
Were I to guess, the reason we focus so heavily on airports is because our lawmakers fly more than most of the population. The theater is likely their safety blanket.
as soon as we have 2.7 million people in subway and/or concert daily in the US you'd be right... until then...
Like what?
In the absolute worst case it grounds flights nation wide and 100 people die. In the grand scheme of things that's a minor hiccup and not a likely outcome. We saw a bigger impact from the polar vortex.
The security simply doesn't match the value.
I'll remind you that 70 people died from an airplane accident. Tragic, but we were hardly impacted by it. When you talk about 2.7 million flyers, the impact of a few hundred dying a year still makes it one of the safest forms of travel.
Airplanes aren't special and shouldn't have the annoying special security treatment they do today.
Too lazy to read the many GAO reports that all demonstrate TSA accuracy at finding dangerous items never topping 5%?
I'm not saying that we should let people board in full armor again, but surely there is a happy medium?
People do it all of the time for other reasons.