Slashdot Mirror
Time To Close the Security Theater
An anonymous reader writes "An editorial at Forbes calls for the dismantling of the TSA, pointing to recent headlines as the latest examples of 'security theater' at its worst. From the article:
'The problem isn't that the TSA is harassing the wrong people. The problem is that the TSA is harassing anyone. The TSA is encroaching on fundamental liberties and providing no discernable benefit. ... Naturally, the TSA responds to incidents like these by saying that the agents are highly trained and that they have followed proper procedure. This indicates a signal failing for the agency: if "doing it by the book" involves touching people in ways that would be considered sexual assault in virtually any other context or telling a 90-year old breast cancer survivor to remove her bra lest it contain explosives (as happened to a friend's grandmother), then the book needs to be shredded and rewritten. Better yet, it needs to be replaced with a competitive market for air travel in which the airports, the airways, and the airliners are in private hands. Some might object that private firms will have incentives to cut corners on safety. It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out.'"
So when a colleague of mine went to catch his plane home, and they asked him where was the latest place he visited, he said "I was in a meeting with the Defence Minister".
So they locked him in a cell with an armed guard outside. After several hours they were persuaded to, you know, actually try the Ministry. Most of whom had gone home. They eventually reached the Defence Minister, who confirmed that indeed Dr X. Y. had been in a meeting with him that morning and had left to catch a plane to the airport.
Now, you would think that in any civilised country an apology would be in order. Not in Israel. Instead, they refused to speak to him or make eye contact, and eventually almost pushed him onto the plane home without a word of apology.
This apologia is unwarranted. Israeli security goons are surely no better, no worse than security goons anywhere. There are just far more of them and they search far more people more thoroughly.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The Israel's airport security model is very effective. But it is very difficult to follow in the US..
Yes. Because 1) Israel has only one major airport (Ben Gurion) and perhaps 50 smaller ones 2) It's the physical size of New Jersey and 3) They do obvious racial profiling.
The latter point alone is responsible for most of the TSA excesses. Undressing children and grandmas in wheelchairs (anybody could be a terrorist) is the price we pay for political correctness.
Like a lot of nice solutions, it just doesn't scale well.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yeah, the point of Flight 93 is that terrorists are never going to gain control of the plane again. I was on some of the first post 9/11 flights and at that time the social contract among the guys on the plane was rather explicit. Those first few months everyone made eye contact and there was lots of implied "we've got each other's back" subtext to all of the conversations with strangers on the plane. Anyone trying to hijack a plane with boxcutters post 9/11 would have been torn to pieces before they got the first demand out of their mouth. Heck, even a bunch of AK-47s would have failed, unless they managed to kill every person on the plane.
If there's some doubt as to the intent of an assailant, it is in your interest to mitigate the conflict and get out alive. If you know for sure they intend to kill you and everyone else, your incentive to cooperate drops to zero.