Airport Security Is Killing Us

I opt-out of the x-ray scanner every single time, and so should you. It really doesn't take much longer to go through the process. Show up 3 minutes earlier if you have to. You're rushing to the gate, for what? To sit there longer? Boarding with the crowds is stressful anyways. The most relaxed way to board is at the very end -- there's no more line, I just walk right into the plane, most people are seated, and just grab my seat. Why would you want to maximize the time spent sitting, especially on a cramped plane? I understand the situation is different if you really want your carry-on bag to stow above you.<p>If everyone opted out, the program would be scrapped. You can tell me about how the scanners give harmless amounts of radiation, but I don't really care. You have to stand for your principles. In this situation, a government contractor forced more security theater upon a country, with the only benefit of the entire charade going to their bottom line. Nobody is safer, an entire mode of transport has a new bottleneck, a government agency has expanded and is emboldened and now wants even broader jurisdiction, and as the article states, people are driving more and dying.<p>If we don't stand up and push back now, things will only get worse. More invasive, more annoying, more useless, more dangerous. And not an inch gained against the stated purpose of deterring terrorist attacks.

A quibble, because this whole fucking disgusting thing fills me with limitless rage:<p>TSA agents do not perform 'pat-downs'. Pat-downs are very quick checks to see if any obvious weapons are being concealed on someone's body. Police will do these before putting a suspect into a police vehicle, for instance.<p>TSA employees do what are called 'custody searches', designed to find contraband material on detainees. These are only performed under specific scenarios, such as being incarcerated.<p>Custody searches in this context are forbidden by the fourth amendment, by the way, regardless of what the TSA's legal team may claim.

Odds of dying from fireworks: 1 in 652,046<p>Odds of dying from lightning strike: 1 in 134,906<p>Odds of being legally executed: 1 in 111,179<p>Odds of dying from contact with bees/wasps: 1 in 79,842<p>Odds of being shot: 1 in 6,609<p>Odds of dying from a fall 1 in 163<p>Odds of dying in a terrorist attack: 1 in 3,500,000<p>Maybe we should switch the TSA to bee patrol.<p>(Source: <a href="http://www.nsc.org/NSC%20Picture%20Library/News/web_graphics/Injury_Facts_37.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.nsc.org/NSC%20Picture%20Library/News/web_graphics...</a>)

The sad fact is, I think TSA type security is hear to stay, and won't lighten up very much, regardless of the facts that question its efficacy.<p>Why? Picture this. Someone (likely a politician) crusades hard to have the TSA dismantled, and is successful. No matter how much better the system that replaces it is, there is always a chance that someone slips through and takes down a plane, and 300+ people are killed.<p>In the throng of people screaming that "something needs to be done to stop this from happening again", who wants to be "that guy" who lobbied to have the TSA dismantled/replaced? Former TSA proponents will jump up and down and scream <i>"See! This is why we can't have nice things!"</i><p>I don't think anyone will touch it...

"The attention paid to terrorism in the U.S. is considerably out of proportion to the relative threat it presents."<p>I agree 100%! The formation of this organization was reactionary policy making at its worst. The TSA is nothing more then a works program for people who are barely qualified to do anything.

Someone else did an analysis of airline travel and highway travel and came up with a similar finding. Blow up one plane per month over the continental US and flying would still be two orders of magnitude safer than driving or riding in an automobile over your lifespan.<p>There's no proof that TSA is making things any safer either. No one will ever pull another fast one on the passengers of a plane again. We all know that the planes themselves are weapons, so I'm pretty sure most passengers will go down fighting if terrorists try to take control of the cockpit.<p>This is precisely why it's called security theater.

What is the answer though? Can you imagine a politician running under a "massively downsize the TSA" banner? Would any existing Washington elected official take up the cause?<p>They can't even repeal the comically silly shoe removal procedure (unless you're under 12 or over 75, because no terr'ist would ever foot kerplode those demographic stereotypes).

Tangentially - the thing that most surprised me about this article was reading that over 150,000 Americans have been murdered in less than a decade.<p>I find that number utterly staggering. Wikipedia says that the homicide rate in the US is 4.2 per 100,000, which is more than 2.5 times the rate in Canada and 3.5 times the rate in the UK.

Am I the only one to have pleasant experience flying?<p>I usually travel 2-4 times a year by myself as a single male. I plan for security (eg. I don't try to bring along liquids and wear shoes that are easily removed) and haven't had to wait in a security line longer than 15 minutes in the US in 6+ years.<p>I have been pulled aside twice to be patted down by the TSA, neither of which invasive nor did they get near my genitals. In contrast I have also been patted down by airport security in Belgium (much more invasive, didn't touch crotch) and been frisked twice by police in the USA (very invasive, definitely did touch crotch). [I have no knowledge of the female experience of being frisked - unfortunately I suspect a much higher level of both discomfort and inappropriate groping]<p>I don't like that our security is based stupid rules instead of smart security analysis, but the level of vitriol I see in the internet is totally disproportionate to my experience. The worst part of flying for me is getting stuck in the security line behind some person who still doesn't know full bottles of water aren't allowed through security and then try to argue with the TSA agents in an attempt to save $4 - and given that I still get through the line often under 10 minutes, that is more of pet peeve than a real issue worth complaining about.

Hear. Hear. I want to be able to walk into an airport with my shoes on and walk calmly to an arrival gate to greet arriving passengers there. And I want to be able to carry a Swiss Army knife in an airline carry-on bag. And I want the terrorists to be attacked relentlessly where they live, so that they have to hide in caves and ride on goats, while Americans and other people in developed countries get to lead civilized, advanced lives in the Twenty-First Century. Taliban delenda est.<p>AFTER EDIT: I wonder what aspect of this people disagree with. Do you still want to have to take your shoes off in airports?<p>Further edit, to reply to the first kind reply:<p><i>I still don't think attacking terrorists relentlessly is ever beneficial.</i><p>I guess that's an empirical question of history and current events. What does help people lead tolerant, civilized lives and be at peace with other people who may have differing opinions? I read a biography of Joseph Stalin back in the 1990s, after the Soviet archives became available to independent researchers, and the striking thing about how Joseph Stalin developed his influence in the Bolshevik movement was that he was a very active terrorist, frequently directly involved in random bomb attacks. We should consider the facts about Sri Lanka and Rwanda and other places to get a reality check on the power of terrorism.<p>I think communism mostly collapsed (as it mostly has by now) with the help of information flow into countries living under communist dictatorships that were established in some cases by domestic terrorism and in some cases by armed invasion from another country. The case of eastern and western Germany is especially illustrative: it's just where the tanks stopped after the armistice that ended the European phase of World War II that determined which parts of Germany became the postwar Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) and which became the German Democratic Republic (DDR). Several of the communist governments of eastern Europe were turned out of power largely peacefully when Western mass media made it all too apparent how different life was on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But it took an entire human lifetime for communism to decline in its influence on Europe.<p>So, yeah, if a peaceful process of information flow could bring Afghanistan into the Twenty-First Century, I'm all for that. I don't see how any rational person who knows well how other people live could want a whole country to be living under Taliban rule. But the Taliban's method is not to let most people in Afghanistan or Pakistan decide the issue freely. Their method is to give girls and women no voice, all non-Muslims little or no voice, and any Muslim who thinks that Islam is consistent with science and progress little or no voice. They use violence and thuggery to get their way in the areas they control. So, yes, if they are willing to send people onto airplanes to fly from Europe to the United States with bombs in their shoes (as they have been), I say let loose the drones, and let's keep the Taliban leaders hiding in caves and unable to travel more rapidly than at goat speed until peaceful news and education campaigns have enough time to win over so many of the common people of the world that the Taliban can no longer gain influence even through threats. Taliban delenda est. Peacefully or violently, the Taliban must be destroyed.

<i>In fact, extremist Islamic terrorism [since 2001] resulted in just 200 to 400 deaths worldwide outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq—the same number, Mueller noted in a 2011 report (PDF), as die in bathtubs in the U.S. alone each year.</i><p>Indeed. But the problem is how to get the votes in Congress to support a significant downsizing of the TSA. Were the President to do so unilaterally (which he may well have the ability to do), he'd be accused of disregarding Americans' safety and chances are that a good number of those accusations would come from inside Congress since there's still plenty of political capital to be made from opposing him.<p>As I've said before, there are three factors that support reducing the TSA's budget (and powers) in the coming yeas: the withdrawal from Aghanistan, budget cutting due to deficit management, and economic growth meaning that there will be jobs available for the laid-off TSA employees. These point to a downsizing of the TSA during 2015-16, after the 2014 midterm elections.<p><i>According to one estimate of direct and indirect costs borne by the U.S. as a result of 9/11, the New York Times suggested the attacks themselves caused $55 billion in “toll and physical damage,” while the economic impact was $123 billion. But costs related to increased homeland security and counterterrorism spending, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, totaled $3,105 billion.</i><p>This, on the other hand, is extremely disingenuous. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been major, major expenses (and major drivers of our national debt, since we didn't raise any new revenue to pay for them). Mentioning them last, as if they were some minor component of the TSA budget, reverses the order of significance.

I think this is a pretty novel argument, basically the cure is worse than the disease. Basically intrusive security measures make flying less desirable which moves people to other forms of transportation (notably cars) where they are more likely to die.<p>It doesn't help that people don't internalize risk well so its hard for folks to see the merits of the argument but I applaud whomever came up with it.

I've always felt that airport security was always about testing the limits of the complacency of the people and not really about security. I imagine some person complaining during a security checkpoint, holding up the line, and some lady yelling from behind in support of the government keeping "us" safe. It's kind of pathetic and undignified.

&#62; <i>In fact, extremist Islamic terrorism resulted in just 200 to 400 deaths worldwide outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq — the same number, Mueller noted in a 2011 report (<a href="http://politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/CNApart.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/CNApart.pdf</a>), as die in bathtubs in the U.S. alone each year.</i><p>Can anyone find a citation for the "200 to 400 deaths" claim? The NCTC report (<a href="http://www.nctc.gov/docs/2011_NCTC_Annual_Report_Final.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.nctc.gov/docs/2011_NCTC_Annual_Report_Final.pdf</a>) seems to give much higher numbers, unless I'm missing something.

I don't see why there isn't more interest in high speed rail in the US: New York and Boston/Washington DC could be less than two hours travel time apart, which though it may well be an hour slower than a flight, has a lot less overhead (no arriving two hours before departure, etc). The technology is quickly reaching the point where San Francisco to Los Angeles may be equally doable in around two hours, again an obvious gain if you have to arrive at the airport that long before departure.

While waiting this morning to get through security, I overheard a TSA agent saying they were undergoing a downsizing at that airport (BDL, which is a pretty small international airport in Connecticut) from 200 to 50 on staff. So there's one "anecdata" point that the footprint of the TSA may already be shrinking.<p>He also mentioned it was downsizing through attrition rather than layoffs, which is probably an easier strategy for elected and appointed officials to get behind.

Before we checked luggage for bombs, bombers took down entire aircraft by checking in explosive laden bags. Before we checked passenger shoes, a bomber attempted to detonate theirs. If we relax our security, how do we ensure these things don't happen again?

I wonder about the deterring effect. How many attacks do not occur because security is there. It's hard to measure, with a high risk to reward factor.

The TSA has the same problem car alarms or home security systems have: there's no way to prove how many events they've prevented.

The probability of a tragedy occurring is almost completely irrelevant to the common person (including my mother and wife). What does get people's attention is the shock factor when that one-in-10-million event occurs. Which helps explain the bewildering popularity of Nancy Grace...

Guys with heavy beards... do you get more attention from the TSA? I heard that any male (regardless of race/religion) with a heavy beard is checked more closely. Has this been true for you or people you know with heavy beards?

Unless someone cares a whole awful lot nothing's going to get better its not.

"The attention paid to terrorism in the U.S. is considerably out of proportion to the relative threat it presents."<p>W O W. My jaw completely dropped when I read this sentence.<p>Considering we've averted 40 terrorist plots since 2001 this is pretty scary somebody would actually print such a statement. Keep in mind, those 40 are the ones we actually know about as well.<p>I'll continue to put up with the minor headaches as long as we continue to stop these plots before airplanes crash into skyscrapers or car bombs start exploding in times square.

There is an old Proverb, "Only Our Enemies Truly Know How Many Plots We Foiled."<p>I hate TSA as much as the next guy, but their presence and efforts could have deterred and foiled thousands of plots you and I would never hear about because they don't even know about them.<p>Denying the reality of the potential danger airplanes can cause to major population centers, like we saw on 9/11 is foolish. Airport Security May Suck. But, It May Be Saving More Lives Than It's Killing Indirectly.

If you can avoid it* never travel through the united states.<p>*Edit

This is so NOT relevant at HackerNews. Why do you guys think other 'hackers' would be interested in such news? Can't they find newspapers on their own?