Has TSA screening at US airports stopped a single terroristic plot since its establishment?

Factual Questions
21

If you are implying that these tests show that TSA does not detect any weapons, the number of guns and knives that TSA does detect shows this is incorrect. Hell, the people behind me on the last flight I took got their long screwdrivers confiscated.

I’m old enough to remember when every other plane, it seemed, was hijacked to Cuba. There are lots of copycats for successful crimes. That there have been none, - no copycat shoe bomber, etc., shows that there is at least some evidence that TSA is being successful.

22

As an example of a shoe bombing? That doesn’t quite fit.

As an example that the TSA has prevented a similar attack? Not sure how that follows.

I agree some kind of aviation security is necessary. But there isn’t a lot of good evidence the TSA itself provides adequate security vs the other measures we take. Actually, there’s evidence they do a poor job of it (see my previous post). And still not much evidence that having passengers remove their shoes does much of anything at all.

23

So wait- they found 4000 guns, but the test indicated they failed 80% of the time?:eek:!??

so there were really 30000 guns carried on airplanes in 2017?:confused:

24

Well no, that’s not what I’m implying. It’s clear the TSA detects weapons. But it’s not clear that simple detection of some number of weapons - even a record setting number of weapons - is sufficient. There’s the old saying that even a stopped clock is correct twice a day. What if the TSA is merely improving to 5 times a day?

What I’m stating, backed by the government’s own assessment as cited in those articles I linked, is that the TSA is currently inadequate to the task to which it has been assigned. The DHS itself has tested this and found that weapons and explosives can easily be smuggled through security checkpoints.

Does that mean all of them will get through? Clearly, no, even those tests showed somewhere between 5-20% got caught. But that leaves the remaining 80-95% that don’t get caught. And if that’s the case, a record number of confiscated weapons at TSA checkpoints is just that much scarier - it implies that there were even more examples that were never detected in the first place and that the record number of confiscated items today may only represent an improvement from ‘terrible’ to ‘merely bad’ leaving the majority of weapons/explosives undetected.

Maybe? Who really knows? Certainly more than 4000. It’s not hard to find websites and photos of people who figured out too late that they forgot to leave a knife or whatever at home but still got through security.

That 80% also represents explosive devices. Presumably people don’t typically pack explosives in their carry-ons so there’s a low sample size problem there. But yeah, really scary.

25

So both the TSA and the bouncers at the night club down the road can both claim to have maybe prevented a terrorist attack with all the weapons they’ve confiscated.

The answer to the OP is still no though.

26

That’s not a valid calculation.

The 80% is from people who were deliberately try to test the TSA, so presumably actually hid the fake weapons (it wouldn’t be a very good test otherwise)

The majority of those 4000 guns was just dumbasses who forgot they were carrying a gun, so didn’t.take much skill from the TSA to find them.

27

Prove it.

28

I’m not sure if we are saying the same thing or not, but if the majority of those 4000 simply forgot that they had a gun in their gym bag, then those people would not have represented a harm to the aircraft.

If I got on the plane, looked in my bag and saw my pistol (and subsequently shit myself and counted the seconds until I was able to leave the airport) then I would not be a person that is the purpose of the screening. Yes, we try to keep guns off of planes, but not for its own sake. We keep guns off of planes so that people do not use those guns to do violence on planes.

So it seems that even the 4000 guns the TSA did catch made between nil and fuck all difference in aircraft violence/terrorism.

29

I’ve done sampling theory for work, and I suspect the tests - which are no doubt designed to find holes, not to certify how good TSA is - are too few in number to say much about the actual detection rate.
If 80% of guns get through, you’d expect some gun use on a plane - even if not by a terrorist. We’ve certainly seen fights break out.
Also note that the terrorists, who probably have a good handle on this, seemed to go to weird stuff like shoe bombing. If there was really an 80% fail rate, they could get on planes without much worry. After all, if they got caught they could say whoops like all the other people getting caught.
So the present system is either catching weapons terrorists are trying to get on board, or discouraging them from even trying. The on the ground incidents show they haven’t given up.

30

When is the last time a plane got diverted to Cuba? That was pre-TSA, yes, but the same thing. It’s not like screening started on 9/11.

31

I agree with your statement, but I’m not sure what your point is. Freedom should not be a one way ratchet. Event X happens so we restrict your freedom a little. Then Event Y happens so we do it a little more. And we keep looking for Event X.

There will never be another successful aircraft hijacking in the United States. The old school “give them what they want and everything will be okay” was forever put to rest on 9/11 and will never happen again. So why conduct security as if that is the goal?

32

I don’t think you can make any claims about bombs being less popular now without showing that they were more popular in the past. If the last bomb on an American plane was in 2009, that’s one bomb in the last ten years. How many bombs were found in the ten years prior to that? More to the point, how many bombs were found in the ten years prior to 2011, when security was tightened?

33

Uh, the number of guns and knives confiscated has zero to do with whether TSA is effective.

I’ve accidentally carried knives on planes since 9/11. And I’ve intentionally hidden them to carry them back home. And you know what, I had no intention of using them to commit a terrorist act. And the ease with which I have hidden knives to carry them back home when I mistakenly carried them elsewhere suggests that any terrorist worth his salt will be able to carry a knife onto a plane.

All those confiscated weapons were ones that someone forget were in their bag. I’m going to guess that zero of them were brought to the airport with the intent of causing harm. Because if they were, I don’t think they would have been found.

Prior to 9/11 the “rule” was to go along with hijackers, let them force you to Cuba, and deal with them after landing. On 9/11, between the first plane to crash into the WTC and the one that passengers brought down no-place-in-particular-Pennsylvania the rule changed. And it stopped being useful to hijack a plane to fly it into something. Also, since 9/11 we have taken serious precautions to secure the cockpit. (Something El Al did long before 9/11, because El Al had a problem with people wanting to hijack their aircraft.)

The whole knife ban is just security theater, and adds absolutely nothing to the aircraft security. Except, I suppose it reduces the odds that a drunk passenger will pull a knife on the flight attendant who refuses to give him another drink. But that’s about it.

34

You had no intention. Can you prove that none of the others had criminal intention?

The purpose of TSA is to prevent people from bringing weapons and other prohibited items on board the plane. We see, indisputably, that they do this many thousands of times each year. Therefore TSA accomplishes it’s purpose with at least some success.

As many others have already pointed out, it is impossible to know the intent of the person. So as with iamthewalrus above, we are stuck trying to infer that a confiscated weapon was not intended to be used in terrorism, therefore TSA is somehow ineffective. (???)

We have no good way of knowing whether a person is an inept terrorist, a forgetful traveler, whether they aborted their terrorist plot after their weapon was discovered, or if the actual terrorists were so intimidated by security procedures that they just didn’t even bother trying.

Anyone involved with the security industry learns very quickly that deterrence is an impossible metric to assess. I find it utterly baffling that someone would assume that NONE of the weapons confiscated ever had a criminal intent. (As if that somehow makes it okay to bring a gun on a plane?)

Also, as I noted above, last year 198 weapons were found which were deliberately concealed (eg in a hidden pocket or false container). Can you prove to me that zero of those intercepted weapons were intended to be used in terrorist plots?

The logic of saying “The fact that it was discovered proves it was not a terrorist plot, because if it was a terrorist plot it would not have been discovered,” is the most boneheaded and fallacious chain of logic I’ve ever heard. So then if intercepting thousands of weapons has nothing to do with preventing terrorism, what is your standard for success? You’ve eliminated the entire possibility of success with your sweeping definition that all positive outcomes be automatically excluded from consideration.

If an MP had stopped Nidal Hassan and discovered his handguns, would you say he is not a terrorist? Or that he did not have terrorist intent? Of course! We’d just say, “Oh, he lives in Texas where lots of people have guns and he just forgot they were in his car.” And he’d have gotten a small penalty and we’d never know his name.

Please, prove to me that none of these people had intent to commit a crime. Because unless you can figure out how to open up someone’s skull and look inside, you can’t.

35

Sorry for the typo; I meant to write “2001”, not “2011”.

36

I think it’s the same in either direction. Jihadists aimed at crashing planes because they believed it would have more negative impact on Western societies than killing the same number of people in more mundane settings, Western societies basically agreed.

It’s not about assets v people. It’s about impact on society. It’s not to say the societal consensus is always right, but it’s not really some public (or secret) desire to protect airplanes over people. It’s that airplanes blowing up in the air with people has more psychological effect on society than the same number of people killed in one incident on the ground, and much more than the same number of people in total killed in a large number of incidents a few at a time, or where there isn’t a single motive. IOW the same reason 9/11 had orders of magnitude more effect on societal perceptions than the same total of people killed in car accidents. Society wasn’t collectively crazy, or venal, to reach the consensus that 9/11 required dramatic reaction that a steady stream of car accidents or individual homicides did not.

Although, such prioritizations based on psychological impact shouldn’t be immune from reexamination and criticism either.

37

Let’s look at the data we have.

198 concealed weapons found last year
Security tests imply that the TSA fails to find weapons at least 50% of the time.

This suggests, in the conservative case, that approximately 200 concealed weapons were NOT found last year.

It is impossible to PROVE they were not found, but if a system fails spectacularly in undercover tests, it is highly unlikely that they succeed fantastically during normal times.

So, if 200 weapons were not found, and there weren’t any terrorist attacks on planes with these weapons, I’d say the smart money is on the other 198 not being terrorist plots as well.

38

Before anyone gets all riled up about this, I fully agree that there’s no strong evidence to assert that TSA is an effective organization. I think it’s a very difficult question to answer, and as mentioned, the tests of TSA’s screening abilities have uncovered alarming gaps.

However, there are indications that the bad guys are attempting to adjust to screening procedures, not just in the U.S. but worldwide. Most notably, the late top bombmaker for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was heavily engaged in finding new ways to conceal bombs in ways that would evade screening methods. He was responsible for the underwear bomb that Abdulmutallab wore on Christmas Day 2009, and the printer cartridge bomb plot that was narrowly avoided a little while later. But each of his designs were of increasing sophistication, and seemed to be of increasing capability to avoid detection. But it also seems that these plots – as far as I know – were generally based on getting something through screening overseas for aircraft headed to the U.S., as opposed to getting the bomb through TSA here to attack an airplane.

Now, one can view this many different ways:

  • Maybe the bad guys decided to put extra effort in concealing bombs because of efforts around the world to modernize detection technology.
  • Maybe the bad guys saw so many flaws in screening technology that they precisely targeted loopholes
  • Maybe this is just what bad guys do

But for some reason, we’ve been safe from airplanes getting bombed (though that was just luck in the case of Reid and Abdulmutallab). Is that because we’ve had good enough intelligence to disrupt the plots? Is it because the bad guys are just incompetent?

Tough question to answer.

39

TSA is incredibly effective. They confiscated and destroyed my 200ml shampoo bottle, thus preventing… not sure what

40

First of all, we’ll never know for sure if a plot was prevented by TSA or not, even if no claim is made that one was, because for all we know, one of the many confiscated weapons prevented a person from attempting a terrorist attack, but we just never realized it. Proving a negative is very difficult with so many possible positives.

Second of all, there are comparisons that can be made around the world; not every airport in the world screens as aggressively as TSA does. So comparison statistics can at least attempt to answer the probability of the question being “yes”. Obviously, one has to compensate for the fact that terrorists might not be as interested in taking down Royal Nepal Airlines Flight 101 as in taking down Delta Flight 823. But given that insertion into the system somewhere else can still lead to subsequent flying in the US on US carriers …

Thirdly, the fact that there are other options for committing mass murder outside of the off-limits area does not mean that failure to attack them demonstrates a lack of effort to attack areas beyond the screening line. As a simple example, please note that the most efficient place to commit mass-murder at an American high school (or any school) is to attack students pouring out the door at the end of the day headed to their buses. No such attack has occurred, yet continued attacks inside the school (much less efficient) occur yearly, despite the use of metal detectors, armed guards, etc.

Fourthly, the flipside to that discussion is that there are numerous methods to commit mass murder type terror in the US, none of which have been attempted (yet), indicating that there may not be much desire to try such terrorism in the wake of the response to the September 11 attacks. For example, I chuckle every time I drive over the open to air Los Angeles Aqueduct near Olancha, CA on US 395. They have whited-out the sign proclaiming that you are crossing that aqueduct, as if by not having a sign, terrorists won’t know what it is. It seems to me that, if you want to sow some real terror in the US, simply hitting LA’s water supply would be an excellent method. I cannot believe there aren’t terrorists who have thought of that in the intervening 17 years.

I personally have put the lack of successful mass terror attacks on American soil down mostly to the much better efforts of our counter-terror investigative agencies, rather than to any efficacy on the part of TSA at airports. All reports from the lead-up to 9/11/01 show that the FBI, CIA, etc. were very un-coordinated in their efforts to stop such plots. As for hijackings themselves, I don’t see how they could be an effective weapon any more. One of the reasons hijackings were successful in the past was that there was an unstated agreement between the hijackers and the passengers that, if the passengers co-operated, no one got hurt (not always followed, of course, but generally speaking true). After United Flight 93 went into the ground at Shanksville, would-be hijackers have to accept that that agreement is unlikely to be kept to by passengers any more.