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Schneier Talks to the Head of TSA
Bruce Schneier recently had the chance to sit down with Kip Hawley, head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and discuss some of the frustrations travelers experience head-on. "In April, Kip Hawley, the head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), invited me to Washington for a meeting. Despite some serious trepidation, I accepted. And it was a good meeting. Most of it was off the record, but he asked me how the TSA could overcome its negative image. I told him to be more transparent, and stop ducking the hard questions. He said that he wanted to do that. He did enjoy writing a guest blog post for Aviation Daily, but having a blog himself didn't work within the bureaucracy."
Bruce Schneier recently had the chance to sit down with Kip Hawley, head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and discuss some of the frustrations travelers experience head-on.
I have flown quite a bit this past year and visited airports across the country (for pleasure, never for business) and have never once had a run in with the TSA. My issues are solely with the airlines and their "customer service".
Last night was a prime example. Flying from SAV to ATL and on to MSP. My flight out of SAV was delayed from 19:42 to 22:15 and then in ATL we were originally delayed out until 01:20 then moved back to 22:10 (which I would have missed the connection) and then back to 00:10 (which was actually 00:30). We arrived at MSP 45 minutes late (which isn't that bad overall).
The flight from ATL to MSP has a TERRIBLE track record according to Flight Stats (0.9 out of 5 stars).
Then with Northwest's pilots calling in sick and them dropping ~9% of their flights for the weekend (170 to 200 flights) is just a joke.
The TSA hasn't exactly been friendly or courteous but at least they are doing their job. The airlines, OTOH, aren't doing anything except making a big hole and getting bailed out by the taxpayers while paying their CEO's millions.
And they really seem to get into the details of airport security. Certainly doesn't seem like PR fluff, could be an interesting read.
...but is it art?
They're not first-class seats per se, but you can already do this on United and a number of other carriers. For more see:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=44 2986
On my last few trips to the USA I have been pulled over by the TSA on about a third of the flights (several internal flights on each trip), and by customs once. Since they were not pulling over one third of the people in the line, I presume something about me had me flagged as a potential terrorist. Every single time, the operatives have been polite and efficient.
Last but one time it was not at all surprised to be flagged, since I had only noticed that there was a screw up with my booking when I went to collect my ticked and I was, in fact, booked on the flight exactly one month earlier (fortunately the airline just charged me a token 'don't be a numpty again' fee and let me on). Even I can see this is quite suspicious behaviour (although the fact my connecting flight was booked on the correct day would have been evidence of incompetence, rather than malice, on my part). The guy who checked my hand luggage was very friendly, and since I wasn't in a hurry (and the airport wasn't busy at that time) we chatted for a bit after he had decided that I probably wasn't a terrorist. I was a bit worried about being searched then, since my laptop had one broken hinge and being opened carelessly would have probably snapped the other one and pulled the screen off, but they let me open it and after I pointed to the damage were very careful with it. They wouldn't let me have another go in the machine that blew a puff of air at you from all directions to find explosive residue though.
The next time I think the security personnel were more interested in seeing what the Nokia 770 I was carrying could do. It took about five seconds to assure them it wasn't a bomb, and then another five minutes of demonstrating the various features and discussing with them and whether they should buy one. I felt like I was trapped in a parallel universe where 'does it run Linux' was a more important question than 'is it a bomb.' While that might be true on Slashdot, it probably shouldn't be to security people.
I haven't been in an airport where I couldn't see at least a couple of ways of bypassing the security[1], but I've also never been inconvenienced by it. At Narita, I arrived at the check-in desk as they were packing up and my flight was due to start boarding. They rushed me through the pilots-only lane in security and got me from the airport entrance to the boarding area in ten minutes (it would be the furthest terminal away from the entrance when I was running late...). It's a shame airports aren't always this efficient.
[1] Interestingly, some of the security is expressly designed this way, as a honeypot. They make a few ways of bypassing it obvious and then have a secondary check which picks up the people who do.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
(IANAL)
A terrorist with 5 pounds of C4 surgically implanted in his abdomen can do far more damage than I could with the liter water bottle that TSA just made me throw away.
But there is no effective screening method for that, so we'll pretend that little problem doesn't exist.
Ever departed from the Tel Aviv airport? That, my friend, is security. Sure, they have all of the neat whizzy gizmos that TSA has (better, probably, but it's been a while since I've been through TLV), but the crux of what they do is to interrogate the passengers. Not kidding. They stop and intensely question each and every passenger and assess their motives for being there. I was on a professional trip as part of a scientific delegation, and had to not just produce documents to that effect, but demonstrate that my name was in the conference program, and give part of my talk (naturally, since the agents aren't in my particular profession, I doubt they cared about what I was saying nearly as much as how I was saying it, and whether it appeared I was demonstrating fluency in some topic). There's about 10-20 minutes of this, and it's intense. They're trying to trip you up, to find someone who has something to hide. Like motives for having had surgery to implant C4 in their abdomen, as the parent post suggests.
The part that makes this mechanism tolerable, this mechanism which provides far better security than any purely technological solution, is that they have sufficient bandwidth to process many people despite imposing a 10-20 minute delay on each. There are banks and banks of agents, not just 2 or 3 inspection booths as in the US.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Here's something I observed, and fortunately was not directly affected by:
United flight from Hong Kong to Chicago. There's two of these a day. The day before our flight, both flights had been overbooked and everyone showed up. So they had to pay people effectively $1200 each to stay an extra day in HK. The day we were flying everyone showed as well as the people who had been left over from the previous day. They paid 56 people $1400 to wait around in the hopes of getting the second flight that day. One of them had been bumped twice the previous day and had no reason to hurry home so he had gotten a total of $5000 in order to delay his flight a day or so. Keep in mind the plane tickets themselves were $1200 each when we purchased them.
The weird part is that once we were on the plane and they had already paid 56 people who were at the gate to not get on the plane, they had to ask another 10 to get off because of weight restrictions. So the airline paid out $92000 on that flight alone because they overbooked it. This is why the airlines are going bankrupt, because their predictive models of who is going to no-show isn't working anymore. I have several relatives who always build an extra 2-3 days into their travel schedules so they can volunteer to be bumped. As a result they usually end up essentially getting upgraded to business or economy plus AND getting to fly for free.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
That's the most insightful thing I've seen on /. in a long time; thank you for that.
That's the part everyone missed/is still missing post-9/11. There's no security that can overcome the compliance of all the people on the plane. The problem wasn't lack of security in boarding, or lack of air marshals on the plane (which may or may not have helped*), or even easy access to the cockpit.
The problem, as you state, was that everyone from the passengers through the captain was trained to do what the hijackers wanted. The (presumed) worst-case scenario was they'd all have a frightening three months in Tehran, then they'd all get to go home.
That is no longer the presumption; that attack will never work again. Flight 93 demonstrates that perfectly well. I imagine the group of people most irate at the 9/11 hijackers are all the other organizations who were thinking about hijacking a plane in the more traditional fashion; now they can't.
All the new tightening of security is, literally, meaningless. Boxcutters weren't the problem; the attackers having a scheme whereby everyone on the plane is helping them was the problem.
*Odds are not bad that the air marshal, even if present, would have judged the risk to the plane of acting against the terrorists not worth it - that's certainly what everyone else judged the case to be.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
the airlines take the gate fees, fuel costs, all the required maintenance and the expected unscheduled maintenance, the staff to do it, the rent on the space to do it, Ticket counters costs the staffing of them and the airplane and everything else, roll them up into a single number and then figure how much it will costs the plane to traver per mile based on that.
Of course being High dollar union employees, Most of the workers get a large salary plus lots of benefits and all. Then for each route, they divide the amount of passengers up into weight that the plane can carry and then figure this into the the amount of passengers the plane can hold. First class might cost more because it takes the space of more seats up (potential passengers). They might subsidize the coach fairs but it is more likely that if your taking the space of two passengers, you ticket will cost relatively the same plus the added benefits like more personnel and luxury items being stored, profit and all that.
This is one of the reasons why if you book your flight several months in advance, your tickets are cheaper then last minute flights. they attempt to make up the short comings at the last minute. You can also look a this as why they over book flights sometimes too. The want to make sure that with all the last minute cancellations and all, that all the seats are sold.
When I got my pilots license, they taught us to calculated the cost of the flight on the total weight of the plane as it would fly along with a fraction of the required maintenance. It boiled down to a unit we could multiply against the cost of fuel and accurately cover our expenses. Of course I can only fly single engine small aircraft for private use but the principle is the same.
I never said I feel "safe" just safer... and i'm not saying alot safer either
Okay, that's fine, the part about "I'd rather be inconvenienced and safe then killed in an avoidable plane crash... " was just hyperbole, because you know that you aren't being made safe, and that none of this security theater would make a plane crash "avoidable".
The question is why do you feel any safer when you're forced to take off your shoes? That vector has only been attempted once, and any future terrorist is going to hide their explosives somewhere that isn't checked, an absolutely trivial exercise. Would you feel safer -- not a lot, but some -- if there was a switch on the side of the metal detector passengers could hit to disable it? I mean in theory a really half-assed terrorist wouldn't hit the button so they might be caught! Is that easy enough security to get around for you to not consider it a deterrent? Because that's what checking shoes is like.
I mean, you yourself thought of an attack vector that completely avoids 100% of the security currently in place, and I think we will both agree that you aren't very serious about planning and executing terrorist attacks, no? So you don't think even the shoe-bomber, clearly not the brightest match in the book, would if given another chance be able to think of a way through security? Even he could think "put the explosives on me, but not in my shoes".
life isn't safe...if I wanted to be safe i'd curl up in a ball in the corner of a bomb shelter somewhere
Exactly. So stop adding completely useless and unnecessary "safety" precautions to my life just so you can feel "safer... and i'm not saying alot safer either ". It doesn't actually help, we could all still be killed by a thousand things including but certainly not restricted to terrorists, so why would you even support something so superfluous?
basically it's only a minor inconvenience and you are all a bunch of whiners...
And you are perfectly willing to inflict inconvenience on me for no reason, because you're a scaredy-cat who thinks terrorists are going to release botulism on an airplane, and somehow thinks checking shoes makes you even the tiniest bit safer. You're happy to be inconvenienced for the Paper-Thin Illusion of Security that can quell your fear, even if only a little.
It's not the inconvenience. It's that it's pointless outside of convincing the gullible that Something Is Being Done. That is why I'm against it.
The enemies of Democracy are