You missed the 2010 UPS package bomb plot, also foiled by the Brits. Stopping terrorists is a team effort. It takes a full and robust security program at all levels to keep us safe. Without screeners at the gates, terrorists wouldn’t have to use cargo planes.
The wasn’t the tip of the iceberg that sunk the Titanic.
That’s true. In fact, if the tip of the iceberg had been missing entirely, it still would have sunk the Titanic.
That’s kind of our point.
Ann Coulter – Ann Coulter of all people! – commented on this in a column, circa mid-2004 or so. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was to the effect: Just secure the cockpit doors! I’ll take my chances with passengers with box-cutters.
In a different column about the same time, she suggested that we should all just fly naked.
Then complain and they’ll let you eat your cupcakes on-board.
No, because if you cut off the tip of an iceberg, the remainder floats up, creating a new tip. Now there’s just less under the water to do the sinking. No matter what you cut, you’ll always have a tip.
Same with the TSA. You can’t remove the first line of defense just because all the thwarting has been done at the second or third line. If you remove that first line, then the second becomes the first and the third becomes the second. Then you don’t have enough lines and something slips through.
If my enemy attacks over my drawbridge, does that mean the moat was unnecessary? If I lock the front door and the guard at the back door catches the robber, was the lock unnecessary? So if I stop carry-on threats and I end up catching cargo threats, how can you say that the carry-on screening was unnecessary?
My point is not that we do not have security at airports, but rather that we have sensible security that is effective at airports. The reason this security-porn theater has been allowed to build up over time is because people are letting vague fears cloud their decision making.
With any public program we should be able to ask what is it trying to do and is it going about it in the best possible way? With TSA, some people are letting fear of boogiemen from having a clear discussion of what level of security is appropriate.
You’re missing the big point, which is that passenger screening isn’t actually a line of defense. There was a news story pretty much every week from November 2001 on about how some journalist managed to sneak aboard a plane with a pistol or machete or box cutters or grenade or something.
To analogize as you did, you’re not locking the front door; you’re posting a dead parrot by it to warn you if a bad guy comes in.
He’s not dead, he’s just resting. Lovely plumage…
This logic doesn’t hold.
The moat forces the enemy into a smaller space where you can more effectively attack them.
Security screening to keep out guns and explosives is a reasonable first step, because it forces attackers to try to attack with knives and bludgeons, at which point the passengers can overpower them. Security screening to keep out (some) knives, does not make sense. Because knives are not effective as weapons to take over an aircraft.
Neither are cupcakes, which can be readily distinguished from explosive gels.
If in fact this screening were effective, you might have an argument. It’s been demonstrated over and over again that determined individuals can get contraband past those screeners.
So all you have is a process that is effective at screening people who have no intent to use those items. A big wall of incompetence that terrorists can easily bypass. But it’s a highly visible wall and it calms most of the sheep.
Fixed defenses virtually never work against an intelligent opponent. Israeli-style behavioral profiling is much more effective, but much more expensive. It’s no surprise that we have what we have.
nm
I’m not arguing in favor of the TSA in any of its forms.
I’m just saying that there’s a difference in screening for weapons/explosives (which is helpful if it works) and screening for small knives (which is useless in all cases). One is logically consistent and the other is not.
The biggest problem the TSA has is Bayesian. The actual incidence of terrorists on airplanes is so very small (~20 in the last decade, 3/4 of which were on 9/11 before we had the new security regime) that even a very low false positive rate will result in the TSA’s primary effect being hassling people who are doing nothing wrong. This is true regardless of what ruleset they try to enforce.
This may be the most idiotic attempt at a defense of TSA policy I’ve ever seen. Why not just let TSA use a lottery system to determine which of any fifty common items are banned from flight on a daily basis? Cupcakes, hair driers, tweezers, cellular phone chargers, key rings, et cetera. That way, the terrorists will never know how to disguise their weapons. :rolleyes:
Meanwhile, there are at least a dozen items I can think of off-hand that are perfectly legal to bring aboard a commercial aircraft that can serve as highly effective melee weapons. And of course, one way to prevent virtually any weapon from being effective at September 11 type highjackings, e.g. secure the cockpit door against intrusion, which was a gross lapse in security that was low-hanging fruit for the nineteen poorly trained attackers who managed to shock America using a plot right out of a ten year old Tom Clancy novel.
A brave new world, indeed, where we dislocate our reasoning faculties and follow the herd.
Actually, the reality is that the TSA is a massive goverment jobs program to the tune of 60,000 employees, comprising over a third of the Department of Homeland Security, and on par with say, NASA, USDOT, or DHHS. Most of these employees are not highly trained professional with in-demand skills, so if the TSA were automagically disbanded, it would result in a glut of unemployable workers on the market. And that, dear reader, is the reason why TSA will remain a large bureacracy regardless of the efficacy of the agency’s activies or need for the role.
There you go, bringing not only logic but math into the argument. 
This, of course, is the problem with creating rules to look for “stuff”, particularly arbitrary or poorly defined rules. (I’ve often longed to bring a block of dry ice through security, arguing that as it sublimates from solid directly to gas, it is neither “liquid” nor “gel”.) Looking for terrorist-type behavior patterns would be far more effective than patting down people in wheelchairs and toddlers, but would require a workforce that has more aptitude and training than a shopping mall security guard.
Stranger
Is the fear of a pat down strictly an American thing? Like some sort of fear of being touched? Equating minor “invasions” with severe invasion of personal space. If we allow an inch they’ll take a foot kind of thing? Is that what is at the core of these emotional outbursts?
I just want to break this argument down to the core. My personal opinion is that Americans have an intense fear of some sort of “1984” scenario playing out any second. Some sort of deep insecurity. It’s very common to see a headline involving the government overstepping some minor boundary and people will comment “scary”.
Where did this insecurity and fear come from?
Well, there was this king, see. And crates full of tea…
It might come from being a free people who are not accustomed to such indignities.
One of the reason’s is that the TSA is staffed by the security equivalent of the kid who takes your order at McDonals’d.
That’s the response I expected. And I think what this whole thread is about at it’s core.
My personal feeling is that this vague ideal has made us extremely touchy about a number of harmless issues. Entitled, loud, and proud about something that we can be just as relaxed about.
I just don’t understand why everyone interprets minor “invasions” as someone trying to steal our “freedom”. Strikes me as a bunch of whiny over reactors.
This is true. However, a lot of terrorists are morons. So, I’m okay with not allowing people to take guns or bombs on planes, and having some sort of system in place to prevent people from doing so. We won’t catch everyone, but it does have a preventative value in, at the very least, keeping those terrorists too dumb to figure out how to circumvent security at home. Upthread some, I mentioned a terrorist plot to blow up the Pentagon by piloting remote controlled toy planes loaded with explosives into it. I have no trouble at all believing this was the guy’s backup plan after he found himself stymied by the crack security agents of the TSA.
(That last bit was sarcasm, btw.)
But that’s kind of besides the point, because we’ve been screening for guns and bombs for decades before 9/11. And that screening was, at the very least, effective enough that the 9/11 hijackers used knives and boxcutters to take over their planes, and not guns or explosives. So that observation is not really a defense of the TSA.
Here’s my problem:
Not only is the TSA not protecting us, not only are they creating a false sense of security, not only are they responsible for innumerable civil rights violations, but they’ve also created a new, easy target for terrorists.
What, you haven’t noticed it?
Go to any US airport on any day - especially a heavy air travel day. No matter how “efficient” the TSA is, there are multiple lines with dozens, sometimes hundreds of people waiting to be scanned. Lots and lots of people in a relatively small space before any sort of security check at all.
One person. One bomb. Mass casualties.