Last week, the chairman of British Airways blasted to US Government’s TSA secutity regulations. In summary, what he said was:
-the TSA relys upon security inspection procedures that provide little security and great annoyance/expense to the travelling public
the TSA does not use any intelligence to select persons for body searches
-the TSA ignores the much more dangerous ways that bombs/weapons could be brought upon aircraft (e.g. cargo, food services, etc.)
-the TSA is hugely expensive, and complying with its regulations costs foreign carriers a great deal of money.
I think his criticisms are valid-particulary with regard to the way that the TSA decides who gets a body search. instead of looking for obvious clues (one way tickets, tickets paid for in cash, young males of ME origin), the TSA mindlessly searches people who have zero chances of being a terrorist.
Of course, one can argue that the Terrorists are unlikely to pull another 9/11 type event-they made their point, and are more likely to seek ways of killing large numbers of people by the use of remote controlled bombs.
Unfortunately, the TSA now is well established, and will fight any attempts to use intelligence to improve the way it operates.
The TSA is an idiotic, ineffective organization that tramples the rights of ordinary citizens while doing virtually nothing to improve airline security. An organization that revels in confiscating breastmilk and sunblock in dangerously large quaitities (ie more than 3oz), while routinely permitting people to board with dangerous implements and even forged documents. They are both useless and evil.
As has been pointed out, these are not particularly “European” criticisms, and I can’t avoid the suspicion that characterising them as such as an attempt to marginalise them with a view to disregarding them.
The TSA procedures described largely function as “security theatre”, and they serve the end of reassuring the travelling public that Something Is Being Done, and also the end of benefitting the politicians who are Seen To Do Something. If it is true that the airlines pay for the procedures, don’t they also benefit from having the travelling public reassured in this way?
The nail in the coffin as far as the TSA goes was in their response to the underwear bomber. I was flying back from Canada the day after when they had the mandatory pat down of all passengers.
So the guy tells me to bend over, and stand with my hands on the end of the table. He then pats down my arms, my sides, chest and back. Goes down one leg, then the other, and finally checks my shoe.
He very intentionally left out the one place the underwear bomber had a bomb! What was the point of all that pat down if you have an established procedure that excludes the one place a bomb was known to be?
I have friends and relatives in the airline industry. TSA is a federal bureaucracy of pseudo-security for the ignorant masses. There are a considerable number of methods and pathways to bypass TSA security and get practically anything on an aircraft that is not checked (e.g., people, weapons, explosives). Air travel security is only “successful” because the “terrorists” are still dumber than the TSA and the security hype TSA, politicians and their supporters spout ad nauseum.
1998
I was going to meet Mrs. Cad with our daughter in the stroller at LAX. Of course the stroller set off the metal detector. Long story short, the security looked over, saw it was a stroller and ignored it. At that point, I knew it was a matter of time before something really bad would happen on a US plane.
Is security better than it wason 9/10/01? Of course. Can it be better? Of course but bear in mind that FEMA and DHS are reactionary organizations which are always trying to put into place what should have been policy during the last emergency.
Security is better, and much of it is security you can’t see. The TSA at the airport may be for show, but intelligence has improved, technology for sniffing out explosives has improved, etc. I’m sure the best security we have is the security we don’t know about. It’s the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, in the back rooms of luggage handling areas, etc.
Also, I think that the ‘no profiling’ claim of the TSA is just the public stance. And once in a while they hassle a granny to show that they’re being fair and not profiling and all that. But the only time I saw a guy hauled out of the security line and searched heavily and detained was when a young mid-eastern looking guy traveling alone got detained in front of me.
Still, I think the TSA is mostly useless security theater. At least, the part the public sees.
However, as for only putting in security after the fact - that’s an inevitability, because there are just too many things to secure. If a train gets derailed by a bomb, there will be new security put in there. If a semi truck blows up in a tunnel and kills hundreds and shuts down traffic for days, there will be semi inspections. And so it will go. every attack will result in a little more loss of freedom, but there will still be plenty of targets for the bad guys.