Previous thread was closed, but I guess this was the question I was going for. And since there is no factual answer, here it is in GD. My suspicion is no. They will still use the excuse that they are protecting tall buildings, or airplanes, or whatever.
I am fairly upset over this outrageous incident, which, if the person is to be believed, shows you just how much right you have to decline a full body scan.
I flew days after 9/11 with no qualms whatsoever. Anyone with two functioning brain cells could see that it was a stunt that could never be repeated. Now we are subjected to humiliation and expense, to no demonstrable benefit. And I am not the only person who feels this way.
It is time to end this nonsense, and send the TSA workers back to McDonald’s, or the welfare rolls, or wherever they came from. Is there any chance we can come to our senses?
I agree with all your complaints about the TSA, but why would setting off a bomb in a waiting line change anything? They’d change the rules to make the scans more stringent and keep going.
More stringent scans = even longer lines with more people to blow up. Not following your logic.
Like a poster in the other thread said, we’ll need a security checkpoint before the security checkpoint! And maybe one or two more just to be sure! Bin Laden will do what Bush and Obama couldn’t, give us full employment! Of course nobody will be flying, because it will be faster to drive…
Maybe if the bomb went off after the checkpoint, and the checkpoint was leading inside whatever passes as the TSA HQ, thus both proving that TSA is a pack of incompetent thugs, and solving the problem in one fell swoop.
If someone blew himself up in the line, they’d move the checkpoint outdoors or something, and you’d wind up standing in the rain. Or they’d do nothing. The point is not to prevent anyone from doing anything anywhere, but to protect the transportation infrastructure. When I started flying there was no security at all. There has been more and more in response to actual events, not imagined ones.
I don’t know why you think 9/11 couldn’t possibly happen again. Sure they have reenforced doors, but what if the hijackers started killing people?
BTW, the TSA people I’ve encountered range from neutral to friendly. I’d sure hate to have their job, which is both boring and critical.
You’ve missed the point, terrorists do not want to blow people up. This is easy to do. In fact the subway runs right under O’Hare Airport in Chicago. It’d be ridiculously easy to put a bomb on the subway and the subway runs right under to the center of the airport.
The idea is to bring down a plane, not kill people. Killing a bunch of people is easy anyone can do it. It wouldn’t inspire much terror. After all we’ve had people, like at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University do just that.
Walk in and shoot people up at random. People we scared but life returned to normal pretty fast.
Bringing down an airplane is another thing all together. In an airplane you’re trapped, you can’t run away, you can’t hide. If you blow up a bomb in a line, some people will be lucky and miss the blast for various reasons. If you blow up an airplane at 30,000 feet everyone dies.
As for the video and the lady, I’d like to hear the TSA’s side of the story. Something ain’t right. If you listen to it, right away the lady describes herself as very upset and openly hostile to any search. Sounds like they were reacting to her hostility.
Because the cat is out of the bag. In the old days, when the hijacker took over, the best strategy was to sit tight and you’d eventually land somewhere like Cuba and make it through the incident alive. Now, your best strategy is to fight back. A couple of guys with boxcutters vs. everybody else. It would go down something like this.
I bet you could kill more people in a big TSA line than by taking out a 737. Frankly, I was expecting them to move on to other targets. Think, mall, think sporting event, any place where thousands gather. Get us too scared to even walk out the front door. Thank God that never happened.
Fact is, I think it was in a Rand study, the security line is in fact considered a hazard in its own right.
TSA lines hardly ever have more than a hundred people in line. Far less than the thousands at a mall, sporting event, or such that you just mentioned. It’s just small potatoes.
I’m not telling you what I think the TSA should do. I’m telling you that if someone set off a bomb on a waiting line, the government’s response will not be “let’s get rid of the TSA.” It doesn’t make sense. They would change some of the rules and protocols to try to stop someone from doing that again, and they’d give the agency more power and money. A comparison: people have criticized the FBI and CIA for decades for violating people’s privacy and rights. Those agencies both fucked up and didn’t prevent the attacks on September 11. Did the government decide they were unnecessary and abolish them? Hell no. They gave them more power through the USA PATRIOT Act, changed their protocols to promote sharing of information, created the TSA, and a while later they moved all three into a huge new bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security. And since the DHS was created, there have been a couple of other attempted terrorist attacks that were almost successful. The TSA wasn’t abolished in response to those either, but the rules for airport security were changed.
Few people think this has been a success, but there is almost no political will to get rid of any of it because anyone who seriously proposed it would be attacked mercilessly and probably be voted out of office. This is how politicians think.
Yeah, but it would really point up that we are powerless, which unfortunately we are. As a poster said in the other thread, I am surprised it hasn’t happened already.
Don’t know if it’s still the case, but at Denver Int’l Airport there used to be a huge line as everyone queues up in one spot to go through security. Hundreds of people. I always thought that spot was ripe for some trouble. At other airports they have it dispersed by terminal, the build up is not usually as bad, although the lines at Chicago O’Hare can have a couple hundred people or more, plus the hundreds on the other side of the line. LAX often has queues holding a couple hundred at the United terminal (Terminal 7).
Agree, though, that there may be plenty of other more tempting targets for the nut jobs who are so inclined.
While I haven’t changed my life much due to the 9/11 attacks (other than planning more time at the airport before a flight), I do think about this before going to potential large-body-count locations. Do I really want to go to the Mall of America on Black Friday or the day after Christmas? Standing in a crowd to watch the Presidents motorcade go by? New Year’s Eve in Time Square? New Orleans for Mardi Gras?
It’s not a major factory, but I do include it in the decision.
I fully agree that the TSA engages in little more than security theater. In fact, I think it’s counterproductive - to the extent that it caused the 9/11 incidents to be magnified in their cost and acts as a constant reminder of terrorism, I think what they do is actually counterproductive. Every time the TSA hassles a citizen or announces a new restriction on travel, the jihadist community does a little dance.
The “Use the airplane as a bomb” trick became impossible the moment flight 93 crashed. No one is EVER going to let terrorists take over an airplane in flight again. The pilots aren’t going to open the locked door no matter how many passengers are killed. Passengers aren’t going to sit quietly by while terrorists threaten them with crappy utility knives.
And all the TSA security theater does is change the tactics. A guy figures out to put a bomb in his shoe, so then everyone has to take off their shoes. But there are MANY places to hide something small enough that could fit in a shoe, so focusing on shoes is idiotic. Anyone with half a brain and a laptop could figure out how to put ten weapons inside it and still have it pass a functional test. I suppose someone will do that one day, then we’ll have our laptops banned. And it won’t make any difference.
But the TSA is a government bureaucracy. It has taken on a life of its own. It employs over 50,000 unionized workers. Good luck downsizing it substantially. If you’re a betting person, the way to bet would be that no matter what new threat comes along, it will be used as an excuse to grow the TSA, not shrink it. In your case, a bomb in a line would probably be justification to hire more TSA workers to make more lines and spread the people out, or to have multiple screening checkpoints, or some damned thing.
Still like that. I nearly missed my plane to Orange County early one Saturday morning when security took 53 minutes. Of course, this is the same TSA force that when I found an abandoned suitcase by the upstairs food court but 30’ from the closest person, they wanted to know why I didn’t walk around to find out whose it was.