TSA effective?

How often do regular knives or sharp tools make it past the security at an airport by mistake? How about electronics by themselves which look like a bomb to an expert viewing it with his machine? Since dogs cannot smell all explosives isn’t it trivial to get those thru? Are ceramic knives difficult to detect? The ingredients for an explosive mixture? I have much innocent experience with these issues and I was wondering if others have seen it also. Be careful not to give them any ideas :wink:

It seems very easy to use American Airlines luggage valet program to check a bag without getting on the plane. I have seen this happen numerous times while flying. Is this bad? How can we prevent this? It appears there is no extra inspection done at this point. What about checking a bag the normal way? This gives them extra time to search it?

For what it’s worth, regular (and ceramic) knives and sharp tools are perfectly legal in checked luggage. So are 4+oz bottles of liquid and guns. That stuff is not allowed in carry-on.

Explosives - they are not allowed anywhere on a plane, that part is true :slight_smile:

Based on my impressions from an industry safety-related newsletter email that I receive daily, which offers news stories on different issues but doesn’t go in depth, I’d say that a gun, bullets or a knife ends up on an airplane every day, despite the passenger having gone through screening. Unruly passengers get kicked off planes several times a day.

Often, it is the passenger him- or herself who reports the item to the flight crew when they discover the mistake on the plane (usually when looking for something in their bags). The TSA still detains these people, because obviously people self-reporting a missed banned item are terrorists. I never bother to follow-up to see whether they are charged or where these charges go.
On a comparative level, flap failures causing a plane to request emergency services to standby happens 3-4 times a day in Canada alone.

TSA: Throwing Scissors Away

Um, sharp knives are not a problem any more. Everybody knows the rules have changed, so knives won’t work for kidnapping; and the doors to the cockpits have been changed. You can bring a whole kitchen drawer of knives onto a plane without being able to hijack it.

Well, the theory is to limit liquids in size. Obviously this is useless given that terrorists can operate together.

Bombs are also usually not put in the carry -on lugagge, but in the checked lugagge, because you can make them larger and there’s less screening.

The real question that needs to be asked: What will the next plot of the terrorists be?

Not the actual execution, that’s hard to foresee, but the aim and thrust of the terrorists. 9/11 brought the war to the US; subsequent attempts have made travel a hassle for civilians and brought a feeling of insecurity, along with politicans passing laws that restrict freedoms for citizens. So the terrorists have achieved their aim. If they do nothing for the next 10 years, the security theater will still go on, sustaining itself to keep people employed.

So any further attempts will probably be like the shoe bomber = crazy individuals acting alone.

Real terrorist cells will mostly be stopped, as in the case of the British, by police work discovering the cells before, and not the scans at the airport stopping them.

It seems to me they are an inept, ill behaved lot, but no successful attacks. Of course, the quality of would be high jackers helps.

Well TSAs do get shopped so they are being tested regularly. But I don’t know if the government makes the shops available to the public

I have accidentally brought banned items with me a few times (mostly lighters, before they allowed them again - and one or two bottles of water along with a sharp object once - I travel a lot) and have been “caught” every item. They always just throw it away - I’ve never been really hassled about it (I am white after all) . As far as facts go, I’m not sure, but I will say that there haven’t been any hijackings lately, so that’s good.

No, the TSA is both inept in both their capacity and function. Security expert Bruce Schneier dubbed the concept ‘security theater’, in other words a semblance of security. Without going to deeply into the subject, let me point out the following:

  1. If the point is to prevent terrorism at airports, why create a huge vulnerable stack of people outside the security checkpoint? Blowing up a bomb in the security line would be far worse than on a plane.
  2. The TSA has never apprehended a single suspect (while subjecting all flyers to demeaning and violating searches). Since planes aren’t falling out of the sky, this says that the targets have changed.
  3. The no-fly list has never stopped a single suspect (while preventing hundreds of innocent people unfortunate to have the wrong name from flying). It has been shown (by Schneier and others) that getting on a plane with false documents is trivial.
  4. The case of a group planning on using liquid explosives involved putting the bombs in the checked in luggage. The plot was foiled thanks to intelligence work, not security screening. There is no correlation between this threat and being forbidden to take shaving cream on a plane.
  5. Even then, smuggling liquids on a plane is trivial. The easiest example is lens liquid, which can be brought on board in large amounts. Simply replace the liquid in a lens bottle with something explosive and vacuum pack it.
  6. The biggest threat vector isn’t passengers, but employees at airports, who have largely free access. A mole in the cleaning crew could very likely smuggle a whole cache of AK47s on board a plane.
  7. As mentioned above, the game has changed. Cockpit doors are now securely locked and passengers would no longer remain passive on a hijacked plane. 9/11 could only ever work once.

But as I said, all of this has really nothing to do with terror. It is the airlines’ way of making passengers feel confident about flying.

Well, I’m not going to dispute everything here, but #1 is clearly false.
It would take a much, much bigger bomb to kill 200+ people on the ground, compared to dropping a plane out of the sky.

How much bigger? You don’t think a full sized travel trunk full of C4 and heavy ball bearings will turn the entire security line into pulp? Hell, I’m sure you could smuggle an artillery round in there without anybody noticing, precisely because the target is outside the security checkpoint. Why even bother knocking a plane with 200 passengers out of the sky when a well coordinated attack against a terminal will kill five times that amount, without the risk of getting stopped and caught? You’re pretty much making my case for me.

Have the at all TSA negated the risk of getting blown up (or shot, or knifed) inside a terminal? Even being generous about their general competence and ignoring the rather obvious methods I mentioned above of smuggling contraband through the checkpoints, all the TSA have managed to do is transfer the threat area 30 meters in one direction, at great expense to our right to privacy.

The threat of terrorism exists with or without the TSA, and denying evildoers access to airports and aircraft merely modifies the venue. As has been proven many times since 9/11, any large gathering of people is a valid target. The money being squandered the TSA’s security theater could be used in proactive intelligence gathering (which unlike the TSA actually has given results and foiled plots), which leads me to conclude that the TSA is not only ineffective at preventing terror, but even increases the threat by wasting resources that could be put to better use.

The list is B/S.

First of all a terrorist goal is to strike terror not kill people. I could plant bombs all over shopping malls in 100 different cities, if my goal was to kill people. A plane being bombed out of the sky is dramatic, that is what they want.

Second, the fact that the TSA hasn’t apprehended a suspect, doesn’t mean they aren’t doing their job. What it could also mean is the suspects, no longer are choosing to fly. If you remove them perhaps they will come back. Same for the no fly list. If people think they’re on it, they don’t fly at all or make other arrangements, like private flights

And I could go on. This is like saying, no one has ever stolen my car so why bother locking it.

You may not be able to stop them but the point is you don’t want to make it easier for them to do it.

Terrorists don’t want to kill or disrupt. They could easily do that if that was their goal. America’s malls, buses, subways, theme parks are woefully unguarded. But a plane is different, so is an airport. It’s a contained small place that drives an economic region.

So, you’re saying that planting bombs in shopping malls in 100 different cities wouldn’t strike terror? Are you serious?

The victims of the attacks in Bali, London, Madrid, Sharm al-Sheikh, Mumbai and many others since 9/11 would very likely beg to differ. Remember that we already had plenty of planes dropping out of the sky far prior to 9/11, Lockerbie being a prime example. Plenty of terror can be wrought without even blowing stuff up, for example by sending anthrax through the mail (which need I remind you was domestic).

9/11 was an anomaly in the death toll and destruction involved, but the fact that planes were used was just an implementation detail. Had the towers not collapsed, the death toll would be in the same range as what we brush off in the news a couple of times a month.

No, but the fact that the TSA’s security measures have been negated by fantastically inept attackers does.

And again, getting on a flight with false documents has been done, both domestically and internationally by others (that last link is hilarious, by the way). Incidentally, none of the eleven suspects of the British liquid explosives plot was even on the list. Face it, airport security would never have caught them. If not for intelligence gathering, they would have boarded their flights with impunity.

Your analogy doesn’t hold. Cars are stolen all the time, and locks and alarms are a proven deterrent.

The TSA is the equivalent of locking the doors to your convertible but not closing the roof.

No, you want to use intelligence to actively hunt them. Hoping to catch terrorists in a wide net is on the other hand pointless. One will always swim through, and one is more than enough.

Sure they do, and thus create panic, fear and influence opinion. Look at terror operations worldwide in the last 20 years, from Jerusalem to Oslo: the main goal of terror isn’t economic disruption, it’s to cause a society to give in to fear and paranoia and to begin to view a small minority as a threat to its existence.

Funny, a “small place that drives an economic region” is exactly words I would use to describe a mall, central railway station, metro system, business complex or downtown area.

Lots of opinion here but no data to answer the OP’s question. How often do weapons make it through the TSA screening process undetected? ABC News reported this in December 2010 (bolding is mine):

Wikipedia points to other reports of undercover operations to measure effectiveness. The results are universally awful.

In this article: The Things he Carried a journalist reports carrying all manner of contraband, as well as items intended to trigger suspicion (such as Jihad flags and hezbollah videotapes) AND passing security with a fake boarding pass.

They don’t catch everything. I accidently carried a large swiss army knife onboard in my jacket. Apparently the leather stopped the x-rays from seeing it on the conveyor belt or they were just not paying attention. I just made sure I packed it on the return trip.

There’s also the matter that, on any given flight, at least half the passengers have a bomb with them in their carry-on. You want to take down an airplane? Wire a few extended-endurance laptop batteries in series, and short them out. That’d be a lot easier than trying to do the same with bottled water.

Thousands Standing Around

My last flight was out of Ohara. I was pleasantly surprised how quickly they ran hundreds, thousands?, of us through security. However, we were just inside from ground transportation. Steal a bus, pack it with ammonium nitrate and diesel, drive up front of security and detonate it.

Bah.