As asked in the thread title?
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How could we possibly know about the deterrent effect?
I’d love to know the answer.
Trouble is, no one has a vested interest in telling the truth.
If you report the plots you have stopped, it gives intel to the person doing the next attack of possible ways to get past screening.
If you don’t report plots you have stopped, it could imply either there aren’t any, or you’re missing them. Neither is good for your long term job prospects.
But they are a law enforcement organisation. The latter is not an option for them. They aren’t going to silently transport a terrorist to gitmo without telling anyone, just so their buddies won’t be tipped off about the TSA’s (incredibly dumb) screen procedures.
If they had arrested and prosecuted a terrorist in the process of committing a terrorist act, it would be a matter of public record (and shouted from the rooftops by the TSA themselves)
I don’t think there’s a GQ answer to this because results don’t equal intent.
They have confiscated tens (hundreds?) of thousands of knives & thousands of guns. That doesn’t mean the person truly didn’t remember having it in their bag, was a dumbass, tried to sneak something thru to avoid a check baggage fee or was intent on doing something bad if they got their weapon onto the plane.
Just FYI, in 2017 a record-setting 3,957, firearms were discovered in carry-on bags at checkpoints across the country, averaging 76.1 firearms per week. Approximately 84 percent were loaded. Another 198 items (mostly knives and tasers) were found after being deliberately concealed in a hidden pocket or deceptive packaging. And there were also a handful of other containers of gunpowder and pyrotechnics.
“But,” a skeptical person might say, “That’s not the same thing. We’re talking about terrorists like Arab jihadists with bombs, not idiots and rednecks who left a knife in their pocket.” At this point, I would remind such a reader that 9/11 was perpetrated with box cutters.
I would also submit that while I cannot recall TSA ever finding a bomb, I also cannot recall the last time an American plane exploded. The last time a bomb actually made it onto an American plane was 2009. This implies to me that - for whatever reason - bombings and hijackings on US aircraft are no longer a popular course of action.
Why haven’t there been any more successful 9/11 attacks?
One answer is that no one wants to do such attacks. Considering the massive U.S. intervention in the Middle East in multiple countries this is incredibly unlikely.
The other answer is that U.S. anti-terrorism efforts (of which TSA screening is one) have been effective.
We can guess how many cases of the flu the vaccine has stopped by comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated people. But, I will never know if getting the flu shot this year personally prevented me from getting the flu or whether I wouldn’t have gotten it anyway.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a control group of unscreened airline passengers to compare against screened airline passengers. We could take a survey of known terrorists and ask them if they gave up on any plots because of the screening, but the results wouldn’t be very reliable (it seems to me).
We do know that there have been more terrorist incidents in public places where there is no TSA screening than there have been in the secure part of airports, I think.
Altho I think much of what the TSA does is security theater, I tend to agree with this. There have not been any shoe bombers successfully getting onto airplanes since they started inspecting everyone’s shoes. Evidently, this tactic has fallen out of favor with would-be terrorists, due to this approach.
Related to the OP: it’s hard to prove a negative.
The TSA is regularly tested by DHS. And have failed to find fake weapons and explosives in those tests with alarming frequency in 2015 and 2017. So not very long ago.
Rather than testing a negative, they created positive (albeit with weapons/explosives that did not work) testing under real-world scenarios, and the TSA has repeatedly come up short.
Has TSA screening stopped any plots? Possibly, though difficult to prove. But the odds look really bad if you had to put a bet on it.
Would the TSA be effective at stopping determined (or even not so determined) plotters? Unless it has gotten drastically better in the last couple years, almost certainly not.
Disclaimer: The efficacy of the TSA, in particular, does not say anything about the efficacy of other anti-terrorism measures.
Fortunately, we have data from outside the US to compare against in this case. It hasn’t occurred anywhere else in the world outside the US either, and few if any of those other countries inspect shoes to the same degree or even inspect them at all.
The worldwide lack of other attempts and the one highly visible failure indicate that maybe rather than falling out of favor, it never became popular in the first place.
But, yes, it’s hard to prove a negative.
The problem with this argument is that it became effectively impossible to take over a plane with knives sometime during the morning of Sept 11, 2001, regardless of TSA actions.
The only reason it worked for a while that morning was that no one had ever done it before, and the standard response of passengers was to keep your heads down. But once you know that someone trying to take over a plane is going to use it as a guided missile with you inside, people fight back. Which they started doing that very same day.
A confiscated knife has never prevented a terrorist attack.
It is possible but in my opinion somewhat unlikely that other screening measures have prevented attacks.
In fact, it should be very easy to infer the effect of deterrence. If there are many determined would-be terrorists who are deterred from the hijacking of aircraft in a September 11, 2001-style plot we should see them selecting other, less protected targets with many vulnerable people, such as concert or sports venues, schools and other public gatherings, municipal water supplies, et cetera which are not protected by the TSA or any other analogous security force. That such alternate attacks have not occurred would seem to indicate a lack of enthusiasm, ability, or interest in pursuing attacks on US soil by fundamentalist Islamic organizations supporting terror attacks.
In fact, the frequency of terrorist attacks on US soil have declined since 2001 and remained relatively flat until 2014, when they suddenly increased again. And while violent fundamentalist Islamic attacks have occurred, the largest number of individual attacks has been due to far-right violent extremists, e.g. white nationalists, neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, et cetera.. Nearly all Islamic-based attacks since those that destroyed the World Trade Center One and Two towers and damaged the Pentagon with hijacked airliners have been self-radicalized US citizens or permanent residents, with nearly half being US-born American citizens.
Preventing a repeat of the September 11, 2001 attacks has less to do with restricting items permitted to be brought on board planes than it did with taking the basic measure that security experts had been warning about for several decades, e.g. securing the cockpit door to prevent essentially unrestricted entry to the flight deck by would be hijackers. As Great Antibob has noted, the efficacy of the Transportation Security Administration screening is poor, both in false negatives which fail to uncover passengers often unwittingly or in system tests carrying prohibited devices and substances through the checkpoint, and false positives and inappropriate physical contact that borders on and in some cases meets the definition of sexual assault under the aegis of official policy. The TSA exists to provide two functions; to assure the public that the federal government is doing “something” (even if just for show), and to create a jobs program that essentially anyone with a high school diploma and a relatively clean criminal background check can pass.
The actual value of TSA checkpoints in preventing a terorrist attack, even at an airport is risible given the lack of phasing of security measurees and the compounding of a vulnerable and unprotected travelling public in queues entering checkpoints. The almost complete lack of pre-checkpoint security within airports combined with “lines” that are essentially a crush of travelers standing en masse who could be attacked with any kind of mass casualty weapon or even injured by the threat of such a weapon and resulting stampede. In airports where travellers stand in an open common area in queues that snake back and forth (e.g. Orlando or Denver), a single improvised explosive weapon could injure and kill hundreds, potentially even thousands of people.
This doesn’t mean that screening is useless, or that there shouldn’t be some universal standard instead of the “as you like it” screening that was essentially determined by individual airport policy, but the extreme measures taken by the TSA including sometimes invasive genital probing and public disrobing, the absurd restrictions on fluids and small tools and pocket knives, et cetera (particularly given how readily more deadly weapons could be improvised from ideas still permitted to be carried aboard airliners today) are not the big deterrent to terrorist attacks which the Department of Homeland Security would like the public to believe. Nor has the expense on various systems for detecting weapons and explosives (often advocated by consultants who had a vested interest in the companies producing these devices) been validated by objective performance metrics, and have often been taken off-line or removed from use with little explanation.
The TSA, more than any government agency in history, is emblematic of “fraud, waste, and abuse” when it comes to mistruths about performance, accounting for the use of budget, and oversight and discipline of agents in their interactions with the public. Even the Department of Defense can claim to have some legitimate successes of public benefit and occasional weapon system that actually works as advertized once in a while. DHS has yet to demonstrate that the TSA has provided any real value in deterrence of terrorism or in any other way improved air traveler security.
Stranger
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I don’t think it would just a ‘skeptical person’ saying that. It would be any reasonable person asking for positive evidence that any such case was related to an intended hijacking or attack. None AFAIK (though I wouldn’t be surprised if the real answer was ‘a handful, though not provably related to any organized or ideologically inspired terrorist effort’). Although the same person, since reasonable :), would accept that absence of proof of such intent isn’t proof of its absence.
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There’s also a lot of ambiguity here, but I’d actually go along with this point more than the first one. Because it focuses on what the TSA was built into its current form to do, stop actual jihadist attacks on planes (there could be other similar attacks, there have been, but realistically that was how it justified the funding and massive hassle: jihadists). And there have been a lot fewer attempts. There are other possible reasons for that. Such as offensive military action by US/allies. And, different approach by jihadists, for example ISIS has emphasized other things (territorial gains in ME though recently much less successfully, starting up affiliates in other heavily Islamic parts of the developing world, inspiring very low end amateur attackers in the West, etc), not expert bomb makers to defeat the latest security.
And as has often been predicted, attacks on the airline system have also shifted, to the limited extent they still happen, to attacking people lining up outside security at airports rather than the more spectacular feat of getting a bomb on a plane.
All in all though, it’s probably not fair to say the TSA build up has nothing to do with point 2. It probably does have something to do with it.
I always thought the whole security theater thing was more to protect assets (airplanes, airports) than to protect people, and the way you describe it here aligns well with my assumption. An event such as you describe would not require a would-be terrorist to even bother with an airplane. But, I also assumed a terrorist would be more keen on a showy event like hijacking and crashing an airplane as opposed to a more mundane massacre at the airport terminal.
In terms of public spectacle (the “optics” in the current vernacular of media pundits) crashing hijacked airliners into iconic buildings certainly accomplished everything that Osama bin Laden and other jihad-seeking fundmentalist Islamic terrorists desired; it produced an enraged American public which supported military incursions into the Middle East and Afghanistan, destabilizing governments and leaving a power vacuum that groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda could exploit as well as serving as a recruitment tool for a new generation of disaffected Muslim youth. Which is really the point; al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups don’t need to pull off another “9-11”-type attack; they’ve gotten everything they needed.
An attack on a crowd at a TSA checkpoint might not be quite as spectacular in the movie-blockbuster sense but it would be enormously disruptive to air travel, especially multiple simultaneous attacks. The fiscal impact and resulting disruption would be significant. But then, Islamic fundamentalists don’t actually care about doing economic damage to the United States or the West in general; they want to perpetuate a state of cultural warfare which drains the United States not only of money but prestige far in excess of any kind of material damage such groups could do on their own. While the TSA is ostensibly “security theater” to reassure the public, it is also a constant annoyance to travelers in general, and a reminder of the need of hightened vigilance against a publicized threat, even though you are far more likely to die on your drive to the airport or have a heart attack from eating a diet of greasy fast food than you are to be killed in some kind of terror attack.
Far from preventing “a single terroristic plot”, the existance of the TSA in its current form is actually captiulating to the intent of Islamic terrorism. A better system would be a phased surveillance and security system that is less blatantly obtrustive and balances the need for legitimate screening with minimizing inconvenience and doesn’t require intimate “frisking” without some kind of justification beyond the all-too-frequent false positives of airport scanners (which I am convinced are deliberate and intended to keep TSA agents alert). But this would also require more forethought, training, and redesign of airports with an eye toward actual secuirty rather than just weaving queues in every open space regardless of how it actually makes the public less secure and obstructs foot traffic. But nobody wants to devote the effort and cost into that because, again, the actual threat of Islamic terrorism on domestic soil is just ahead of lethal shark attacks.
Stranger
Isn’t it time to start ramping down this shit? Why is everything a one way ratchet against freedom? This should have been a temporary response after 9/11, not a permanent restriction on people getting on airplanes.
As has been said, the card has been played. If someone hijacks an airplane, there will be 400 passengers that attack them. Let’s stop this nonsense and go back to the way things were on September 10, 2011.
Nobody wants to be the one to make the decision to dial back the security theater, because* if* something did happen then those responsible for the dial down would be held responsible. Even though, as stated above, the current security practices have little positive effect, and certainly aren’t useful in a cost/benefit sense.
Instead of eliminating stupid security procedures they are being bypassed through the introduction of new programs such as TSA precheck, known traveler, global entry, etc. Now that I have a known traveler number, my security line experience is similar to what it was pre-9/11—a metal detector and bag x-ray.
Try Metrojet 9268
Anyone who travels internationally in first world countries at least knows that there are significant checks there also, so we’d expect no bombings from these airports.
Most countries with poor security are not going to be targets, since they are not considered the enemies of terrorists.