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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.'"
Couldn't you just replace TSA with Federal Government in that story?
Security theater. Education theater. Infrastructure theater.
And near impossible to get rid of once established.
I would bet you will see TSA checkpoints on street corners before we get rid of this cancer at airports and train stations.
The fact is you either get security at the cost of freedom, or freedom at the cost of security. No amount of precautions and countermeasures will prevent the worst from happening; just like with computers and viruses. Doing damage is the easiest thing to accomplish, but prevention is a very inefficient, resource burning measure. Not saying any amount of prevention is necessarily wrong in itself, but it goes to prove my point.
Wow, so Forbes magazine wants to dismantle a government organization and replace it with private industry? What a surprise.
Yes, TSA rules are sort of insane and should be fixed. I'm absolutely mystified by why they think industry would do better. "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." Right, Forbes, like they weeded it out before, you know, 9/11 happened? Give me a break.
Just another blogger.
"but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out."
My ass. No they do not. The feedback loop is way too complex and lengthy (time-wise) to allow for reasonable judgment by consumers that would lead to a functioning market mechanism. Market forces are great where they can work effectively, but that is definitely not everywhere. This is a perfect example of where they not only do not work, but cannot work.
The discernible benefit is no repeats of the September 11th bombings while still allowing random travel. Is it really a problem that people boarding a device that could be considered a guided missile be carefully screened for weapons and explosives? I don't think so.
is that they aim to fly as close to the line as possible.
In a system where safety rating is part of the commercial offering, you'll end up with cheap, dangerous, low margin airlines because (and it's a shame it has to be said so often) enlightened self interest is a myth.
of course the rest of this stuff is spot on. The TSA should be disbanded.
No discernible benefit? You get a free groping and you don't even have to tip. What more could you ask for?
large firms tend to weed out competitive behaviour
Definitely just privatize and let the free market sort it out. I mean, after a few years it'll be pretty obvious which airlines have lost the fewest planes, and we can all just fly those.
All animals are created equal, yet some animals are more equal than others.
The problem is that those people that created the TSA should have to go through this type of security screening. Make these invasive procedures personal to those in power. They'll have a change of mind when Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Nancy Pelosi are getting groped instead of hearing stories about some random grandmother. Too bad those three women always fly privately. I guess we're all equal under the law unless you get elected to office.
This isn't an either-or situation. The TSA's perpetrated a number of civil liberties violations, yes. On the other hand, some kind of free market libertarian fantasy should not come at the expense of public safety either.
The TSA needs to be re-imagined, but we shouldn't revert to the system we had before. But c'mon. A free market system has no incentive to improve in this kind of situation (oh, you died in a terrorist attack? Fine, go to some other airport next time!)
Take off every sig. For great justice.
They're a one-tune-band.
Private enterprise. Rah Rah Rah. Solution to everything .... blah blah blah... Capitalism, the savior of us all... blah blah blah. privatise airports, roads, the police, fire brigade, army, air, water, everything.... right to property, profit, business efficiency.... Private enterprise. Rah Rah Rah.
Here's the bs reply I got when I complained about the TSA security theater to my US Senator, Scott P. Brown (R, Massachusetts):
Dear Mr xxxx,
Thank you for contacting me regarding the recent changes in Transportation Safety Authority (TSA) security procedures. I always value your input on all issues and appreciate hearing from you.
As you know, on June 24, 2010, Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT) introduced the SAFER AIR Act, which would implement new forms of airport screening technology. S. 3536 would authorize the use of full-body scan machinery to search for weapons, explosives, or other hazardous materials that are otherwise undetectable. While this bill is currently under consideration by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, the Administration is testing this type of program and has implemented it in select airports nationwide. Many of the concerns recently voiced about these procedures have surrounded the health implications of millimeter wave technology utilized by these full-body scan machines. The TSA has assured travelers that the non-ionizing radio frequency energy emitted by the machines is safe, and gives off about 100,000 times less energy than that of talking on a cell phone.
For those concerned about their privacy as a result of images taken by the full-body scanning machines, please know that the TSA worked closely with the manufacturers of these machines to make sure that the capabilities to store and send the images were removed prior to installation. Additionally, S. 3536 would go even further by specifically prohibiting the Department of Homeland Security from retaining images used in airport scanning, and also would require that faces of individuals be blurred. You may be interested to know the imaging technology is of lesser quality than that of basic photography and does not present sufficient detail to be used for personal identification.
In addition to the full-body imaging machines, the TSA has also implemented new pat-down procedures for those air travelers who opt out of using the full-body imaging machines. According to the TSA, these new pat-down procedures are designed to prevent another "Christmas Day" style attack, where Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate a bomb concealed in his underwear.
The TSA has stated that these new pat-down procedures are part of a multi-layered security protocol that, along with explosive trace detection, the full-body imaging technology, and canine teams, has been implemented to ensure the safety of the traveling public. Most recently, on November 19, 2010, the TSA agreed to let airline pilots skip the security scanning and pat-downs in response to pilot groups voicing concern about the bolstered security. As the TSA continues to receive feedback from the public, there could be other revisions to parts of the new security procedures.
Our nation's number one goal when it comes to airport security must be the deterrence of terrorist attacks. I certainly understand the concerns of some regarding the new screening procedures, and I agree these procedures must be as non-intrusive as possible and respectful of Americans’ privacy concerns. But when it comes to our families’ safety, I come down on the side of caution. Protecting American lives is the most important thing to me during these times of potential terrorist threats. As a member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, I will continue to be actively engaged in these issues and related policies, and I will monitor the implementation of these new security procedures.
Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. If you have any additional questions or comments, please feel free to contact me or visit my website at www.scottbrown.senate.gov.
Sincerely,
Scott P. Brown
United States Senator
Most of the TSA officers I've seen look like they just stepped out of the ghetto with their shiny new high school diplomas. I don't even think they're salaried employees. It looks like a barely-above-minimum-wage job. You can't expect to get professionals on $10 an hour.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out."
Well, competitive methods only weed that out if you allow some plane to go down. As the companies cutting corners get hijacked, consumers will learn which companies are cutting corners, and then the market will correct them. But the market doesn't do squat before-the-fact. So you have to decide that some failure is acceptable before you let the market take over anything.
We have this same problem all the time in American politics. "The market will fix it." Sure, it probably will, *after* bad things happen to make it fix it.
Personally, I'm willing to accept a lot more risk that seems popular these days, but that's the choice. The market isn't magical.
The Fourth Amendment does not make an exception for domestic air travel. The TSA needs to be abolished entirely. We have the right to travel within our own country without being stopped or searched. That applies to on foot, on horseback, in a car, bus, train, and yes even on a plane. The mode of travel does not make a difference.
Why should anyone want to be in the USA?
Only to re-open it as a business? Are these people high?
"but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out."
This is just a free market troll. Competitive mechanisms favor the group that cuts costs, reduces quality and undercuts the higher quality competitors. The end result is the dodgy group raising prices sky high once a monopoly has been achieved.
" 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."
Because what my city really needs is ten private airports taking up space, right? These Forbes guys have got Big Corporate's dick so far up their asses that it's putting pressure on their brains...
I mean, it works great for the prison system right? And why would a private firm do better? Do they have special threat sensing psychics? Unless the private industry has a Total Recall like scanner they will do the same thing. Maybe America should do a gut check and ask whether they want the security or not. Don't want it then get rid of it. Don't replace it with a mirror image and say it's better just because it's privatized.
Blackwater/XE was worse than the military when sent in. I don't see how a company like Blackwater/XE will be any better than TSA in this situation either. This article just wants the US to stop wasting money on TSA and start wasting it on a private company.
This article one of the better I've read, and the author is right: the TSA is flawed to the core. The TSA also makes the case that law enforcement should never be above the law... sexually assaulting people, stealing people's stuff (taking away contraband) and creating a system of checkpoints with a do not pass list all are contrary to existing law and at least as bad as anything Eastern Europe had to offer in the 1960s and 1970s. If we are exempting law enforcement from sexual assault and theft laws, then we need to change that as there is not one good example where law enforcement should be able to rape, molest or steal from a citizen, EVER. The TSA also has little regard for citizen health as seen in it's apparent lack of safety testing for backscatter detectors and their treatment of people in wheelchairs.
TSA isn't impossible to get rid of. All it takes is one Senator or member of the House to stand up and hold public hearings where citizen after citizen get to tell stories of their wives, children, and grandparents being sexually assaulted, relieved of property or denied access to travel without any kind of right of redress, and the people will be more than happy to get rid of the beast the TSA has become. Personally, I have avoided commercial flights since the TSA became more Stalinist in its tactics because I fear that I would lose my temper and be arrested for questioning the TSA's right to sexually assault, irradiate people, steal stuff and impede other citizens right to freely move. I'll continue to fly privately or not at all (if the boarding+flight+bag claim time is under 5 hours, you usually can drive there in the same time) until this changes. In 2001, I flew over 340,000 miles. Last year, I flew 0 on a commercial airliner.
-- $G
....when air travel becomes too expensive due to fuel costs or unaffordable at the volumes currently used due to other economic issues?
The problem isn't that the TSA is harassing the wrong people. The problem is that the TSA is harassing anyone.
If "doing it by the book" involves [...] 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.
Wait. Is it about "harassing anyone" now, or is it about 90-year old breast cancer survivors and such? This very much reeks of "it's about harassing the wrong people" to me after all.
I hear the government is looking for places they can cut spending. This would be an excellent place to start. The TSA has done absolutely nothing to make us more secure since 9/11, and it's about time people start realizing this fact.
giggity
While others have aptly pointed out that the Forbes article advocates (perhaps wrongly) free-market solutions to air security, I've noticed a lot of anti-TSA op-ed pieces in the media of late. Oddly enough it seems that the 95-year-old traveler who was forced to remove her adult diaper, and not the 6-year-old who was molested by TSOs in New Orleans, was the catalyst for massive media criticism. I'd have thought TSA abusing children would have a stronger (albeit only slightly so) impact than TSA abusing adults, even if said adults are senior citizens and/or terminally ill. Either way I'm glad that Forbes, among other news outlets in the US and overseas, is speaking against TSA.
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
This does not change the problem of a organisation that can press out of proportion securty rules.
If there are going to be less flight then they have even more time to harrassand scare people.
Of they are going to do more "security" on sail ships or something like that.
is just crazy. Competitive markets have been shown, time and time again, that they will not implement safety measures unless they can profit from it (car companies through the 70s, power companies, coal mining companies, etc.). I, personally, do not want to live in a country that has planes falling out of the skys because all that happens when something like this happens is the company goes bankrupt and the government is left to pay for the disaster, I strongly suspect that I am in the majority on this. Having a set of base regulations which prohibit known unsafe behavior on the part of any industry should be considered the responsibility of any government. Living in a completely unregulated world is another phrase for anarchy.
Sorry Forbes, but public safety is not one of those things that free market economics has any chance of doing better than government standardized or government run schemes.
It'd be almost an exact parallel of health care in the US. An organization responsible for something generally considered in the public interest, but with motivations other than, and sometimes in direct conflict with, that public interest.
As far as grievous things done by the TSA .. yeah, they are grievous and demand changes to only perform functions that directly relate to security.
As far as the specific example .. it's unfortunate, but as soon as TSA says they won't examine women who have had mastectomy is the day certain nefarious organizations start recruiting women who have had a mastectomy to take a defacto one way flight somewhere.
My basic problem with the ultra-deregulationist, privatize everything crowd is the Bell Curve.
"It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out."
On average, yes, but there will always be poorly managed companies, which will quickly die, but not before causing harm.
That is to say, that the "Free Market" is generally good at, eventually, ensuring that most of the companies do a good job most of the time. But there will always be companies which are screw-ups.
So, privatizing everything, with no regulation, it seems to me, usually gives you about a 95% solution. That is it's good 95% of the time and bad about 5%.
Arguably, that *might* be better than the government. Personally, I like well-regulated markets, not completely free markets, and not government doing everything. The government should be the law-giver, not the business.
The main trouble is making sure the regulator is well-run by the government (e.g. the Minerals Management Service fiasco). That's what our elected officials are *supposed to be doing* - providing oversight of the government to make sure the bureaucracies are staffed with competent people doing a good job, not corrupt incompetents.
If we rely on competitive pressure with airports, we're likely to get a situation similar to the ISP situation. Most people who want broadband in the US have a choice of one or two ISPs. If they don't like the one they're with, either they are SOL or have to go with the one remaining one. This means that ISPs can do pretty much anything they want and the customer has no choice.
With airports, how many do you think there would be in any given area? Probably just one. So what "competitive pressure" would that airport feel to channel funds to something that doesn't generate money (e.g. Security) versus something that does (a third Starbucks in the food court). You won't wind up with secure airlines by relying on "competitive pressure."
Of course, this isn't to say that the TSA should be kept as-is. They should be scaled back dramatically. At least to pre-911 levels. Do the metal detector thing. Don't require people to take off their shoes. Do scan all bags (including checked bags). Don't grope passengers. Do learn from other countries that do security right (e.g. Israel). If the TSA did all of these things tomorrow, I'd be willing to bet that the incidence of terrorism in the US would *NOT* dramatically rise. It would stay completely flat. Flying would be more enjoyable and the TSA would continue to not catch terrorists. (The FBI tends to catch them pre-boarding and the passengers/flight crew tend to stop them post-boarding.) They should only be there to stop the obvious threats. ("No sir, you can't bring a loaded pistol and a 3 machetes on your flight.")
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out.' - Yea, just look at how the market weeded out ValueJet. Oh wait, they killed 110 people, changed their name to AirTran to escape their tarnished brand, and are doing fine now.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Sure the TSA is stupid, consitution bending (at least), inconveniant, expensive, and doesn't increase security by any useful amount.
But from that we get private airways? Seriously?
So what companies would buy bits of airspace and set the rules in them? So I'd have to make deals with 20 different companies to fly a small plane between two cities? And the communication protocols and frequencies would change as I flew from one company's space to another?
I'm all for the free market, but sometimes there are some things that just aren't suited to it.
if "doing it by the book" involves [...] telling a 90-year old breast cancer survivor to remove her bra lest it contain explosives [...], then the book needs to be shredded and rewritten.
That the person is 90, a woman, or a breast cancer survivor shouldn't matter. Perhaps the "book" should be rewritten so that a 20-year-old bra-wearing drag queen otherwise in the same situation shouldn't have to remove his bra, just like the old woman shouldn't have to. Randomly deciding some people aren't dangerous is dangerous.
Perform keeping, Come on baby...and Good manNers Current core were What we've known You get distracted
When I do have to fly for work and I hear the TSA or DHS messages over the P.A. system in my mind I substitute "Terrorists Suppressing Americans" for TSA or "Department of Homeland Stupidity" for DHS. What makes it humorous is that the messages fit if there was an oppressive, terroristic, or just plain incompetent group in charge.
Time to offend someone
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of association -- that means the freedom to travel and meet whoever you like. We used to laugh at the Soviet Union for requiring "internal passports" to travel. America, we proudly said, was a free country and we do not have "identity papers," much less need to carry them. Now you cannot board an airplane or train without Identity Papers in what we used to call America. The terrorists have won, we have become Nazi Germany, and nobody seems to care.
... They blow up security checkpoints.
Do a search on "bombing security checkpoint". Terrorists world wide (outside the U.S.) bomb security checkpoints as a matter of course. Terrorists know to do this, and in the U.S. we line people up in dense groupings at our security checkpoints.
If we are going to be bombed, we are going to be bombed. However, ANY huge, predictable, static crowds of people outside security is just BEGGING for an attack. Maybe we need a swift surface security check before an intensive one. But whatever, what we are doing now is obviously stupid.
Toss the TSA, and go back to sane, "walk through the detector" security. Spend the money looking for suspicious behavior, and utilize non-intrusive technology like dogs and electronic bomb sniffers. X-Ray luggage. Follow up on intelligence.
But can the hugely expensive, useless security theater.
It wouldn't bump its butt when it hopped.
You can propose all you want, but does anyone seriously think that in the lead up to a presidential election year this has an ice cubes chance in the infernal regions of happening?
If the politicians don't change anything, they can be mildly criticized if there is a successful attack. They can point to all the money they're appropriating to the TSA, and hold congressional investigations and say how horrified they are and puff themselves up as the great protectors of the flying public. Regardless that they really did nothing.
If they change anything, especially a major change like this, any successful attack will be blamed on the change and in turn, them.
Why would they do something that has at least some chance of hurting them politically when they can do nothing and be safe?
Came here to say this. We, falsely, expect the government to take care of us in every facet of life, when _we_ should do all we can to protect ourselves and our community from those who want to tramp on the values that founded this nation. That goes double for our government.
Slashdot is kind of like Playboy; we aren't here to read the articles.
Raise your hand if you are perfectly willing to:
1 "bare handed" attack a hijacker on your flight
2 enable some sort of device that would crash the plane AT THAT MOMENT (all the way from hacking the planes computers to blowing a wing off the plane)
3 Social engineer the hijackers into surrendering
This is why the TSA is a farce that needs to be completely rebuilt from zero (and the policy makers transferred to GitMo)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I can almost kinda see competition helping scenarios like this as the poster appears to be indicating, but not in any model resembling 'competition' and/or 'free market' as it is now, as neither exist. Wherever government is weakened, regulations (i.e., the rules of the game) are obliterated (or otherwise rewritten BY the 'free market' (i.e., specific big-fish corporations)), and business takes on the mantle of fact-checking itself, what we see, instead of competition, is extinction. A handful of fish eat ALL the other fish and all of a sudden you have cartels or outright monopolies that result. In order for true competition to occur, the players on the field must be unable to determine the rules of the game, while the referee (i.e., government) has the power to enforce the rules, but makes no attempt to play on the field itself. As long as the two blend together, all you'll get is a new TSA that specializes in economic rape of the masses, as is occurring quite ubiquitously nigh on everywhere else the 'free market' has intruded. Profit, as a motive, is very powerful... but when people can fudge, they WILL fudge as that is easier than playing harder (i.e., competing.) So either the people (i.e., government) have to have enough power to kick cheaters entirely off the field or to 'tweak' the meaning of profit (perhaps through credits or subsidies or scenario-responsive tax rates) so that for-profit entities providing security services (a.k.a., police, fire, military, health, environment protection, food protection, etc) perceive success for their clients as more profitable than cutting corners.
TSA as such is not a bad concept. It is the incompetent bosses who come with stupid and invasive policies that is the cause of the evil. I do not think privatizing it is going to be better necessarily.
I agree - it is a jobs program, and therefore difficult to cut. But it's not impossible. TSA should be ordered to slowly scale back what they check for: no more shoe removal, then no more liquid limit. Gradually, perhaps we can get to a point where screenings are more like pre-9/11. With a simplified screening system, fewer agents should be needed.
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."
There is always constant griping about things like the TSA. Get rid of the bastards encouraging things like Guantanamo, TSA, Patriot Act, constant war, etc. I don't mean 'change' Obama style of more bullshit from the likes of Romney, Bachmann,etc. Take a minute to look at Ron Paul, he would end this nonsense in a matter of weeks. He actually has a fighting chance this time around if people actually vote in the primaries (Democrats who are sick of civil liberty violations and war can register R and vote as well - nothing to lose). For Christ,s sake, if you don't vote for a pro liberty candidate then you should bend over for the TSA (and others) and just smile.
The wife went to USA (I decline ever to go there) and she found TSA firm but fair. But her luggage was secretly searched, and things seemed missing. Cue mega complaint, scripted by me. Oops! missing items reappeared in another case, so I had to script a follow-up apology to TSA. Thus our sympathy lingers - how else are Sovereign nations supposed to defend themselves against extremist suicide attack? Do what, exactly?
I'm no more a fan of the TSA than anyone, but the idea that the free market will do a better job of providing for aircraft security is just asinine and completely out of touch with the empirical evidence of economics. Even most libertarian economists acknowledge that there is a set of "public good" services that the free market sucks at providing, and airport security falls squarely into that category. Anyone who thinks that the airlines would provide better security just out of their own financial self-interest has paid zero attention to the safety records of their less-regulated regional carrier affiliates, and those safety records aren't even as clearly a "public good" as airport security.
I understand that it's tempting to have a single answer for everything in the realm of policy, but as H. L. Mencken famously said "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." More often than not in economics and policy, that answer is "let the free market decide". The empirical evidence says that the free market is amazing at a lot of things, but it also says that there are a lot of things that it sucks at. Trying to use the free market to solve this sort of problem is like trying to treat a head wound with a tourniquet around the neck.
Terrorists don't have to get past airport security. They can wheel in a huge bomb on an airport-provided trolley and blow up the queue for the scanner.
If there's no terrorist attacks in the USA it's not because of the TSA, it's because there aren't any terrorists who can be bothered to do it.
If you don't believe me I've got a magic tiger-repelling stone I'd like to sell you.
No sig today...
No, they don't.
Competitive mechanisms work to centralize profits and power, which tend to dump any resulting problems on other parties. Like the government and the citizenry.
So we are left to clean up what is inconvenient or expensive for private concerns to deal with.
And so we will turn around and regulate them, to force them to clean up their problems themselves.
Which we should do from the beginning: airlines are attractors for terrorist threats, airlines must prevent terrorist threats according to specific guidelines, like use a centrally trained and accountable police force. And all police forces need to learn and improve their procedures and remain accountable.
It's painful but unavoidable iterative work.
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Ben Franklin Bin laden could have never of dreamed of how successful he would have become and must be laughing in his grave that Americans are allowing organizations like the TSA to do this.
You forgot one thing: If you cut too many corners then you might find your passengers vote for your competitor (with their wallets).
The real problem with the TSA is that even a child can see they're not actually increasing security. Mostly they're just making scanner manufacturers/shareholders rich and keeping unemployment figures down. All at taxpayer expense and passenger inconvenience.
No sig today...
Free markets are good at striking the right balance between risk and profit. What's the acceptable level of "bag thing" (car with a dangerous defect getting sold, restaurant giving somebody food poisoning), and how much is it worth spending to preventing it? The problem here is that we seem (probably quite rightly) to want no risk with air travel. So I'm not sure that a free market is what's needed.
To play devil's advocate here... Aren't these same "competitive mechanisms" the same arguments that are regularly cited as the reason open source software is better than closed source? Whoever makes the best product or implementation wins? The only difference being that it is somehow assumed that profit is never a motive for any open source project. (Easily proven false, but that is always the assumption...)
I agree that the article is in fact standard issue Forbes free market trolling.. but you should really come up with a better argument for it. OSS proves that competitive mechanisms don't always favor groups that cut costs, reduce quality or undercut "higher quality" competitors. Or at least that they don't HAVE to favor those things.
...is that none of the people who can make these decisions have ever experienced going through security checkpoints at the airport. And until they do so, they will continue to have no clue.
There is no information about how good a job the TSA is doing.
They could be collecting thousands of pounds of explosives every day and we would never know about it. There could have been 20 major airline bomb incidents this year that were stopped and we would never know.
Or there could be nothing. With no information most people are assuming that there has been nothing. I have heard from "reliable sources" that the TSA has actually prevented some significant incidents but no information beyond that. If they think they can continue to spend billions of dollars and provide the current hassle to people they are with no justification whatsoever, I think they are wrong. Eventually the PR nightmare will catch up to them at a Congressional level. Either their funding will be cut or they will be forced to go public. If there is in truth nothing being being found by the TSA searches, it is likely the agency will cease to exist.
How damaging would it be to reveal what they have actually done last year or this year? Like an annual report? Nowhere near as damaging as not reporting anything to the public. I suppose there is some top-secret report that a few in Congress get to see, but that does nothing for the public distrust.
"...before we get rid of this cancer..."
Yeah, I'm not a fan of back-scatter x-ray either.......
I kid :p
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think the poster has been drinking too much wonders-of-the-market koolaid. With the very low incidence of terrorism, what we'll get, is all sorts of silly-ass marketing of safety -- security theater, but this time with dancing girls. No doubt there would be weird interactions with insurance company policies, and you have to worry about market size (who refuses to fly, for what reasons), and you have to worry about civil rights suits, too.
I just had this scary vision, of privatized security, hiring an actual designated A-rab, to repeatedly stand in line, and be obviously searched and questioned, just so that all the Upstanding American Fraidy Cats can see this happening and be reassured that they were secure. And I ask you, why wouldn't a privatized outfit deploy exactly such (literal!) security theater? I dunno -- maybe a market solution would be ok after all, at least until this "security fraud" was breathlessly reported on whatever your favorite "news" source was.
It's all so depressing and boneheaded -- we mostly die from our own dumb choices. Al Qaeda's about as dangerous as falling out of bed.
Don't be an idiot. If the TSA were having measurable successes like those, the leaders would be on TV regularly extolling their successes.
With political incentives like they are, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
The liquid limit is to prevent the now-well-known binary explosive/incendary problem. You have one water bottle filled with hydrogen peroxide and one water bottle filled with something else nasty - the choices are many and a lot of them are quite stable at room temperature. There is virtually no way to filter all of this stuff out by any scanning or even dipstick testing method.
Since the "formula" was disclosed a few years ago anyone with half a brain knows how to do it now. I am surprised it hasn't been used in a bank robbery or other totally home-grown effort.
In this instance however, you are right. The TSA current system has not been functioning for years - that is why it is called security theater in the first place - and yet there has been no real incident. So companies would not be able to compete on actual result (better security) but only on BS like ISO certification, government audit, marketing, ... ?
That is of course not better at all, we want to get rid of the security theater, not an security theater industry.
Competitive mechanisms don't weed shit out. Just look at the current state of the American dream, I mean economic disaster. It creates weeds you dweeb like in the finance industry.
Not really, if it then just shifts to hassle whatever other mode of transportation you choose to take (train, bus, ferry, private car, etc.)
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/06/tsa-swarms-8000-bus-stations-public-transit-systems-yearly
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The point of the market is to maximize profits. Competition cuts into profits. To maximize profit then, you must (eventually) eliminate or co-opt your competition until there is none left. THAT is what the free marketeers advocate, in a nutshell. They get around this by asserting it can never happen, even though it happens with depressing regularity in REAL life. The only way to prevent it is with regulation, something the corporate shills... err... free marketeers will oppose to their last breath, denouncing it as 'socialism' or 'force' - when it is, in fact, moderation, that most evil of sins... You know, making sure that freedom doesn't end up 'freedom to enslave'.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
You forgot one thing: If you cut too many corners then you might find your passengers vote for your competitor (with their wallets).
I've been finding more and more lately this is only true if you make EXTREMELY large quality cuts. Lots of people just put up with garbage as long as it is not too terrible. I don't know if I have faith in the free market anymore.
So you're attempting to equate the TSA with the people who keep bridges from falling down? Anyone from NYC see a problem with this logic? (or lack there of...)
Competitive pressures weeds out nothing. It is just that you can not do anything exactly by the book. There is a gray area. The place where you use your better judgement. The place Americans seems hell bent on denying it exists.
Someone mixing up some TATP in the lavatory is about as likely as the TSA stopping twenty terror attacks just this year but has been keeping quiet about it.
Knows that the TSA is a jobs program. Airport 'security' has been and continues to be a giant charade to make people feel 'safe' (and on the flip side to remind them that there are soooo many bad people out there to get them).
For every bad example of things 'the gov does wrong' that someone wants to trot out there are at least as many, if not more thanks to them being more likely to be successfully covered up, 'things that priv companies do wrong' examples. But of course that does not phase those who like to scream free market! as the ultimate answer to everything.
However I really want to know how 'free' a market it would be. Would we have multiple companies at each airport? Would they compete to see who gives the best customer service, quickness, and price to each gate? Or if Company X was cutting corners on their screening process and as such their screeners were groping people worse than the TSA now would that company risk losing it's gate to Company Y?
Or! Would be more like the 'free market' cable/telco market we have now where a single company gets to own the whole airport (last mile) and they do whatever the fuck they want because the cost to change both in real money and politics would be far too high for it ever to happen.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
This is just a free market troll. Competitive mechanisms favor the group that cuts costs, reduces quality and undercuts the higher quality competitors. The end result is the dodgy group raising prices sky high once a monopoly has been achieved.
Yeah, that's why Skybus is the only airline left in business. Competition does result in reduced costs but quality can only be reduced to what the majority of customers are willing to accept.
They could be collecting thousands of pounds of explosives every day and we would never know about it. There could have been 20 major airline bomb incidents this year that were stopped and we would never know.
and using that argument there could have been 20 bombings that happened and they gagged the media and everyone involved..
think about it - in your normal day there are only 1-200 people you see - normally less than 20 you converse with - the rest is media/net.. prove the statement wrong?
after reading that - take your frame of mind and read your statement..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
On the other hand, some kind of free market libertarian fantasy should not come at the expense of public safety either.
The public safety issue was solved at 10:03AM 2001/09/11 over a field in Shanksville PA by average Americans intuitively understanding the security equation. It was then solved again the next year with hardened cockpit doors.
Only private risks currently exist, and their cost is smaller than the cost of the security theatre.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
That the person is 90, a woman, or a breast cancer survivor shouldn't matter. Perhaps the "book" should be rewritten so that a 20-year-old bra-wearing drag queen otherwise in the same situation shouldn't have to remove his bra, just like the old woman shouldn't have to. Randomly deciding some people aren't dangerous is dangerous.
May your wife have breast cancer and she be groped every time she goes through the airport and force you to listen to her bitching about it for the next few days after. That is the real boat that people are in right now, but because it is happening to other people and not yourself you can shrug it off. You would be amazed how much your wife will effect your opinion over time.
Passengers at airports get the shit end of the stick right now. You don't deal with this kind of crap on any other form of mass transportation. This disparity is a magnitudes larger issue than the "randomly deciding that certain people aren't dangerous" problem and serves to further highlight that something is very very wrong.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Just one question.... how am I supposed to vote for a competitor airport with my wallet?
You see, not every city in the world has 3-4 airports nearby to chose from. And even when they have, not all air companies/destinations are available from those destinations.
So basically you are providing a monopoly without any sort of oversight and hoping that, "somehow", the owner of the monopoly won't try to profit from it. If that is the case, I have a bridge to sale that you may be interested in.
Why can't
Unfortunately, the TSA has an effective monopoly on air flight for Most People. Short of a private airplane, the only way to avoid them is Not To Fly. That won't last forever, either, as I'd be surprised if they don't want to expand their coverage to trans and buses as soon as it's feasible.
The formula for TNT or nuclear weapons are available too, but I couldn't make them on an airplane: they require too stable of a workspace, and that's something which is extremely unlikely to be feasible on a moving airplane. Burris' link to the Register covers that part pretty well.
The liquid limit is to prevent the now-well-known binary explosive/incendary problem. You have one water bottle filled with hydrogen peroxide and one water bottle filled with something else nasty - the choices are many and a lot of them are quite stable at room temperature. There is virtually no way to filter all of this stuff out by any scanning or even dipstick testing method.
You want to bring that drink onto the plane? Fine. Take a swallow and take a seat in this liquid waiting area for half an hour. [After all, the guideline is for you to arrive at the airport two hours prior to your flight for security screening, isn't it?] If you're fine after that, we'll let you into the main waiting area.
Since the "formula" was disclosed a few years ago anyone with half a brain knows how to do it now. I am surprised it hasn't been used in a bank robbery or other totally home-grown effort.
So what do they do at the front of the line with any liquids you may have brought that are over the limit? The last time I flew (which admittedly was several years ago) I think they just dumped them in a trash can. How much damage could such a binary compound do to a long line of people waiting for their turn to be screened? If they were really that concerned, they'd treat the liquids as hazardous materials.
"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.'"
This is clearly crap. There is definitely a role for the government to play in security. What has been well documented is that prior to 9/11/01 the FAA tried to have upgraded cockpit doors and locks installed on airliners. This was resisted by the airlines, as it would cost money and take planes out of service while being upgraded.
Private enterprise cares not about safety, or anything else that cuts into profits. Turn security over to them, and the result will be that the airlines will do a risk analysis of the security measures, coupled with legal terms attached to the purchase of a ticket limiting rights to sue and disclaiming any liability, and proceed to fly with the greatest profit margin they can.
Before you object, take a look at product safety issues though history, and see how many times people were killed by products because of defects or design decisions the manufacturer was aware of, but chose not to fix because of a risk and cost / benefit analysis.
-- "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." - R.A.H.
I have been calling it TSA Theater for years, usually while I am in line, waiting to get groped while I anxiously watch to make sure someone doesn't make off with my laptop and cameras while I get me TSA crotch massage. And really, guys - I can put explosives in my Tevas?
I have one leg. When I travel, I wear shorts, cause it just makes things a little quicker - they usually just wave me into the little glass cubicle and mutter "male assist" into their shoulder. Then they explain to me that they are going to touch me as they pull on their rubber gloves (not the most reassuring of sequences). And then the fondling begins. And then they wipe down my hands and prosthesis with a swab and go check that out for explosive residue. Like I couldn't/wouldn't clean myself if I was a bomb maker.
For the record: All TSA employees have been courteous and polite, and many have had a sense of humor about it, laughing when I offer to just strip naked and let them run my clothes through their x-ray (which I will do if they ever say yes. I'm not proud). I have never had a negative experience from TSA - except for the actual experience, of course. Thankfully, cause I don't think I would sit very quietly for the kind of shit I hear about. Though there was that one time the fondling got a little too personal...
It's just theater, folks. They might catch the most stupid of terrorists (you know, the ones that actually answer yes when asked if they are carrying explosives?), but google "myth busters" and TSA to see how one of the MythBusters guys (Jamie?) accidentally took some really sharp blades onto an airline flight.
Sigh. It won't go away, though. Too much money being made by the private sector who build the machines, and contract the labor. Money talks, and we get fondled.
... overnight your luggage under an assumed name the next time you need to fly in the US.
I think Obama is a horrible President. He seems to have no idea how to implement a lot of high minded, but ultimately poor ideas. He has no idea what to do to improve the lives of average Americans, nor does I think he cares about doing so. However, if he were to eliminate the TSA, not only would I start flying again, but I'd vote to reelect him in 2012.
Competition in a free market is desirable over government regulation for the reason that it gives you what you want rather than what some bleeding heart government official wants. If competition creates an environment filled with cheap, dangerous, low margin airlines, it would be because that's what people want. You may think it isn't good for them, or that dying from freak accidents is hurting their families, or whatever. The bottom line is that by buying what they wanted - cheap tickets - they signalled the market what sort of products should exist and the market delivered. Getting what you want is happiness. If you want a supersafe airline, you certainly are welcome to buy a plane and start one. Start with a small Cessna and as you get profits you can buy larger planes. On a free market that's easy. Today, government regulations on commercial air travel pretty much ensure you can't.
Archie Bunker's solution was to hand everybody a gun as they boarded the plane so that if a terrorist tried something, they would be outgunned.
A knol I wrote covers that: http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
And from my site:
Our world has the physical capacity for everyone to have a very nice life materially. But our mainstream economic dogma emphasizes competition and an income-through-jobs link. That pretty much ensures most people will suffer needlessly as our labor-based economy continues to implode in many areas. This creates a vast amount of social stress in a society.
That effect is strongest in the USA right now. But in the absence of broader socioeconomic changes, it will spread to other countries as they too go through the curve of increased technological capacity. Even China is starting to automate heavily due to issues about rising wages and issues about increasing expectations about quality. Countries that have better social safety nets (like universal health care and broader social welfare and more public investment in infrastructure and social programs) will have more resiliency in the face of economic problems, but even those conventional programs as-is, that still assume such social assistance is "temporary", may not be enough to deal with the huge changes ahead.
Eventually, the balance will change in one of several ways. Here are three possibilities. People might engage in a political struggle leading to broad changes and broader equity in global resources (which is what is going on in some parts of Europe right now, as in the past). Or, some compromise might be achieved where lots of make-work is created (through needless wars-of-choice, endless bureaucracy, endless schooling, expanding prisons, or widespread avoidable sickness) that props up the income-through-jobs link (which seems to be the path the USA is going in part). Or poor people might essentially be starved to death or worked to death, and the remaining wealthy people will, among themselves and their robots, essentially produce a new society of the remaining people that is based on a new paradigm of broadly shared wealth (there are aspects of this that have been going on for a long time in the globe). That last option would be ironic because the robots, in combination with the material resources of the solar system, could just as easily produce wealth for quadrillions of people as for millions of people, and a bigger society is probably going to be more interesting. In practice, we seem to be seeing a mix of all three of these approaches. Which one will dominate long-term remains to be seen. Also, there may be other possibilities, of course.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I wouldn't take that bet, even if you gave me million to one odds.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
If they did find anything, they'd be sure to march it in front of all the cameras and get as much publicity as possible for self-validation. Then they'd use "But look, we caught 'X' about to do 'Y' due to how great we are.", followed swiftly by "So we need a bigger budget and more power so we can continue to catch the Bad Guys.".
As it happens, they haven't caught anyone or anything other than people with drugs for their personal use, and a few odd items (eg. small animals).
Now, those people who have been caught were stopped by the public. Yes, the public. Not those who have the responsibility (by occupation, not civil duty) for such a thing, but by those who were travelling along and had been subjected to such "scrutiny" at the sucurity gates.
Life is a risk. Flying is a risk. Walking across the street is a risk. Eating a hamburger is a risk. We can reduce them by various actions, but there is also the point of diminishing returns, aka. loss of freedoms. Land of the Free? Fat chance. This is America, free enterprise will triumph over everything (increase the lobbying budget), perhaps even the TSA.
I remember going through Eastern Europe under the Communist regimes. It was a hell of a lot easier than dealing with the TSA.
You forgot one thing: If you cut too many corners then you might find your passengers vote for your competitor (with their wallets).
Not if the corners they cut are inherently invisible to the end user. Things like safety inspections not being done on a regular basis. Recurrent pilot training and evaluation. Maintenance of replaceable parts.
E.g., during normal operations, a pilot who hasn't had recurrent sim training on emergency procedures for two years will never need them. It's during the emergencies that he will, and that's the wrong time to find out he hasn't had them.
That tire that looks a little worn? Replace it next month, save a bundle of money. It likely won't blow out.
Yes, at some point the lack of safety MAY catch up with the company and they'll lose passengers. Is the cost of those passengers covered by the savings of not doing regular inspections? Could be.
The other reason it wouldn't cost them pax is if everyone is doing it. When everyone charges $100 to check the first bag, that becomes an irrelevant issue in choosing your air carrier.
Outside aviation, consider Walmart. Is everyone flocking away from Walmart because they've cut corners too much? I don't think so.
The real problem with the TSA is that even a child can see they're not actually increasing security.
No, actually, the real problem with TSA is that they aren't actually increasing security, not that a three year old can see that. One would expect a healthy normal three year old to observe this fact, so that one can see it can't be the problem.
The REALY REALLY bad idea in the suggestion of privatization is privatizing the AIRSPACE. The airspace is a public resource, just like the airwaves. Imagine an aviation system where large chunks of airspace are raffled off and only Delta can use the space surrounding Chicago, for example.
...I'd be surprised if they don't want to expand their coverage to trans and buses as soon as it's feasible.
Have you been living under a rock the last six months? They are already moving that direction. Here's a short list of links, for your reading/viewing pleasure:
...and again.
In train stations.
In a bus station.
Video of the Savannah, GA train station search.
TSA's spin^Wresponse to the Savannah, GA search.
What a VIPR operation is.
Napolitano musing about expanding the scope of TSA's operations before the above searches happened.
HTH!
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Please tell me youre not going to pretend that all private market software is inferior to OSS. I would remark the other way around, that market pressures force privately developed software to apply a good layer of polish.
I mean, Vista was bad, but I dont think Microsoft in the last 10 years has had a Unity-sized failure (a failure, that is, to give a hoot about what your users actually want). Without monetary incentives, you get all the sorts of complaints that users of firefox and gnome and all the rest have-- that the developer only cares about their needs so long as it fits their vision.
Try that with commercial software, and you rapidly lose your customers.
Thats not to say things are peachy on the commercial side; Symantec makes some truely awful software; but people are buying it, so clearly theyre doing SOMETHING right (even if its just polishing a turd-- at least that polish is there).
Cheat the moderation system - here's where countertrolling explains what he's doing while he trolls others (to his fellow trolltalk.com friends) to downmod them via his registered account, logout, & ac stalk, harass, and troll them:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2245866&cid=36491652
Here's where countertrolling's "troll mechanics" for downmodding others is explained in detail by someone that got sick of it happening:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2271908&cid=36579618
As far as bogus up moderations, the trolltalk.com bunch (tomhudson, countertrolling, & others) collectively "team up" to upmod one another, in teams, as favors to one another.
(Talk about low, and bogus!)
---
In fact, here's what he says about it, why he does it, and to all of us here as to what he thinks of others as he trolls & harasses them:
"What the skiddies here don't understand is that I don't give a shit about dumbass 'karma' on the internet.. I'm here for the jollies with nothing to lose or fight for.. watching them destroy their world.. They can go absolutely nuts as far as I'm concerned.. It's nothing but pure entertainment (and data points) for me and mine... Tragicomedy is probably the best word I can think of to describe it" - by countertrolling (1585477) on Thursday June 30, @10:26AM (#36622502) Journal
QUOTED VERBATIM FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2281808&cid=36622502
Sounds like a sick individual to me.
And a few years ago, wired.com (IIRC, I don't have the link handy right now) talked to an explosives expert who said that the process is time-consuming and very, very smelly. You won't be able to mix up a batch of your favorite binary explosive while sitting in the passenger compartment, and you aren't likely to be left alone in the airplane's john for a couple of hours while the strong odor of the requisite organic compounds wafts out to the other airline passengers, either.
In other words, the threat of binary liquid explosives being brewed in-flight is yet more nonsense fear mongering, courtesy of an out-of-control bureaucracy that has a vested interest in keeping you afraid. And you bought into it.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
No, because every single downgrade is a small one and takes time to show in statistics. However, the savings is immediate, which means your competitors follow ASAP to stay competitive, so by the time planes start falling there is nowhere to go. And of course all this assumes the passengers know where to get trustworthy statistics.
"Buyer beware" doesn't work. That's why there's safety regulations in the first place.
How is it a problem that a racket is inept? At least this way it might get changed.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
How does your neat theory explain Apple?
[FUCK BETA]
Yeah, that's why Skybus is the only airline left in business. Competition does result in reduced costs but quality can only be reduced to what the majority of customers are willing to accept.
I think Skybus shows something diffferent. The majority of the customers (flyers) don't need to accept a cut in quality from one provider, only a sufficient number of them that the cut-rate airline can continue to operate at a profit.
As long as a company can accept being a small airline, they don't need to worry about attracting a majority of customers, only "enough". The other side of the coin is that the majority airlines don't need to provide all the services that the majority of passengers desire, just more than the cut-rate outfits do. When both sides of the coin are examined, you'll find that services and other expenses have been cut by all airlines, some of them more than others.
Then it all just depends on the incentive you give to provide quality. If the CEO of a security provider is held criminally-liable (and I mean PMITA prison) for any security breaches that occur on his/her watch, you can bet that company will have proper incentive to ensure security.
Markets break down when the consequence of failure for the participants is not dire.
The free market is highly incentivised to keep the customers alive long enough for their checks to clear.
Come on, any major bomb or hint of a bomb, and everything gets shut down for several hours... I really doubt the TSA would discover a bomb and just say "oh good job we caught that one. Next!"... If there had been 20 bombs this year, there would have been 20 airport shutdowns, 20 airspace shut downs, and 20 instances of week-long yapping of every moron who can get on TV...
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Private airline eh? I wonder if a major airline can just declare itself a private club which flies people, and people can be a member for free, and pay a price for flying each time. Private club would mean private security, and one that doesn't molest people... But anyway, the FAA would probably not let them fly..
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Competitive mechanisms favor the group that cuts costs, reduces quality and undercuts the higher quality competitors.
If by "Competitive mechanisms" you mean "consumers" then you are sometimes correct. What opposite troll here doesn't realize is that there are two dimensions to a free market, the suppliers AND consumers. Suppliers don't just get away with whatever they can to increase revenue, they get away with what the market will bear. If consumers want lower prices then suppliers will figure out a way to lower prices. Business is not 100% to blame for sacrifices in quality.
The best solution to the 2 party system is instant run-off voting. Most people seem to think we can get rid of the 2 party system by voting for third parties, and this has never worked in American history. In practice what happens is that you temporarily get three parties until one of the three parties dies off, then you're right back where you started: a 2 party system.
The system itself needs to be altered. This cannot be achieved through mere voting.
To paraphrase the project triangle of engineering example, here's the bomb triangle :
You pick 2 of them.
So, after all, you can't get dramatic results.
Either you'll only set your own pants of fire (it will fail to do any dramatic explosion), or you need a whole truck worth of bombing material (not something you can easily smuggle in a shoe or under your clothes), or you need a real lab to make it (not something you can improvise with a couple of bottles in an airplane's toilet)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Sadly, I suspect you are right, but what's even more troubling is that in America every single time one hears any so-called reporters complaining about the TSA, not a single one of these half-assed stenographers ever thinks to ask who was responsible for vetting them? For doing those background checks on them? (Last time I checked a few years back, it turned out to be none other than Blackwater USA, today called Xe Services.)
TSA is proving to be a major political liability for the administration. So the fact that we have not heard anything means one of three things.
1. Like most people assume there is nothing.
2. As you point out there have been some major busts; and reporting of them is being held until nearer election time when it will do them more good.
3. The abuses we have heard about are going unanswered beyond, procedure was followed, because TSA is doing things far more abusive than we know but its yielded rusts, in terms of nabbing criminals/terrorists/whoever is on the presidents enemies list.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
We also need to get this assclown out of the Whitehouse post-haste. This Libya crap is nothing more than warmongering, not "kinetic military action", and is certainly impeachable but there seems to little support for that in Congress currently. Such a backwards slide this country is going in.......
Yep, this is exactly the problem with all the retards who want to privatize everything.
Free market competition works great for many things. It's why China's economy has been booming the past couple of decades. When different companies have to compete to make products to sell to consumers, it generally results in lower prices and better quality as long as there's no monopoly and there's healthy competition. For essential governmental services, or things where there's a natural barrier to competition (like the fact that you can't reasonably put 20 different full-size airports in a single city, or connect 20 different sewer pipes to every house in a subdivision), it breaks down and you need regulation by a government where there's no profit motive.
The free-market extremists, however, think that monopolies are great and somehow qualify for the term "free market".
Won't work. FAA has rules about what's considered "commercial travel", and playing with words like "club" isn't going to get around the fact that you're flying planes with dozens of paying passengers.
Don't forget Healthcare Theater. That's coming soon, too.
Please tell me youre not going to pretend that all private market software is inferior to OSS. I would remark the other way around, that market pressures force privately developed software to apply a good layer of polish.
It's not that simple. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends on the market.
If for instance, you're an "enterprise" software maker ("enterprise" is a synonym for "crap"), then you don't have to bother with a good layer of polish. You just make some crap software, and sell it to big companies for enormous sums of money and ridiculous maintenance fees. How can you do that? Simple: there isn't a lot of competition, either from open-source software or other proprietary software. The customers needs some weird business application that 1) no OSS developers have any interest in making for free, or even bothering as a small OSS company (charging for service kind of deal), and 2) few or no other proprietary companies have bothered to make. If there is any competition, the other company's product is also horrifically bad, and horrifically overpriced, so the bar is pretty low. On top of this, the software is probably rather complex out of necessity, so it's not like the customers can just whip up a few Perl scripts to do the job.
Similarly, MS has put out tons of crap software. Here again, there was little competition: they were basically a monopoly, customers were locked in because all their apps only ran on Windows, etc. The cost of abandoning Windows for some kind of alternative was much greater than just dealing with it, so that's what customers did. Of course, MS found out the hard way that there is some serious competition to their OSes: their older versions of their OSes! People and especially businesses simply refused to "upgrade" to Vista, and stuck with XP. But this isn't as much of a motivator as having a real competitor trying to steal your customers away.
I mean, Vista was bad, but I dont think Microsoft in the last 10 years has had a Unity-sized failure
I'd argue that Vista was in the same league as Unity. The customers didn't like it, and went back to XP. It was only when 7 came out and fixed most of the complaints that people finally started moving off a nearly decade-old OS version.
(a failure, that is, to give a hoot about what your users actually want).
The thing about Unity, however, is that Canonical doesn't care about what their users want. They're trying to woo new users with Unity, and to hell with their current ones. This is likely because their current crop of users isn't giving them enough revenue to be in the black, so they're hoping they can get a bunch of new ones to replace the old ones. To me, this sounds like a seriously risky business strategy, and not really a good idea.
Try that with commercial software, and you rapidly lose your customers.
It happens in both OSS and proprietary software, to an extent. Vista didn't lose MS too many customers, because of lock-in and familiarity, and the fact the XP didn't stop working, but they took a big hit in revenue because people stopped upgrading and stuck with their old XP. With Ubuntu, however, users are leaving it in droves, many of them to the very similar but Unity-free Linux Mint. The thing about Linux is that it's pretty easy to change distros, and it's cost free, and there's no software lock-in so all your software will still work. This is totally different from the Windows ecosystem. However, also unlike Windows, Linux changes rapidly, and many people (especially those running desktop distros instead of server distros) want to keep up with the latest-and-greatest, because things really are getting better all the time: the apps keep getting better and more featured, the OS gets better and faster, it supports more hardware, etc. Compare a Linux distro from 10 years ago to one now; you wouldn't want to run something from 2001 on a modern computer. Windows wasn't quite that way, and doesn't include the applications an
The free market allows the consumer to choose the product that best serves him. That may mean sacrificing quality for lower cost, because he wants to spend his pennies somewhere else. In this case, a consumer may choose sloppier security because he doesn't perceive the increased security to be worth the additional hassle.
Maybe it's because there aren't actually any scary supervillains trying to blow planes out of the sky. Maybe it's all bullshit. Has anyone else considered this possibility?
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
I tried to vote with my wallet the other day. They said my Visa was expired and tried to deport me.
How many aircraft have been blown out of the sky in countries that DON'T have stupid shoe-removal and liquid regulations? Most of the world doesn't do this, and last time I checked there isn't a problem with shoe bombers and liquid explosives outside the USA.
sustainable living
You forgot one thing: If you cut too many corners then you might find your passengers vote for your competitor (with their wallets).
And exactly how will anyone do that? The passengers pay the airline companies. The airline companies pay the airport. The airport pays the security company? Are you going to set up your own competing airport that hires a different security company?
The only way the passengers are going to know how bad a job the security company is doing is by how many planes explode. That's a very expensive way to determine which companies are the best. As I understand it, when it was a private marketplace security was actually worse. Many private companies made no effort at all to implement real security because it was cheaper to negotiate with hijackers than to stop them. The companies were focused entirely on appearing more secure by passing the inspections. The security companies were advised ahead of time when and where they would be tested and had to find several fake items that would be planted in carry on luggage. The testing was ineffectual and it was the only thing that really affected the companies because they would be fined if they failed to find the items.
The airports hired the lowest bidders because the government and the airlines paid the price of security failures. The market won't find an effective solution to the security problem unless regulation is passed that ensures that the originating airport is responsible for all costs from a security lapse, even then security issues may be so rare that they will simply buy insurance against it. Of course that might be the correct response.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I can give the two-word reason why there won't be any impeachment and removal: "President Biden".
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Not if we go on strike, and don't go near anyplace that has Homeland Security in their name or Organizational chart, like the TSA. A day or two of No Fly by the citizens will hammer the industry and the lobby monkeys will start calling different tunes in DC.
Most people are mostly good most of the time.
You're an anti free-market troll. No airline in competition with others, freely, will want to be blown up by anybody! One downed plane and your companies stock is tanked. Get a clue man. Government regulation is what brought you junk handlers at the airport! You want butt scopes too? Kinky government safety nuts.
Most people are mostly good most of the time.
This is where the "free market" delusion falls apart: NO, people will NOT switch companies if they are abused and dying.
1. because social engineering (in the form of "marketing") creates a perceived reality, in which they can keep those evil companies. (Look at the political system: They vote for the party that raped them the second to last time again and again. Because the campaigns before elections brainwash them.)
2. because there will be no other choices left to switch to, and there will be no new ones, as they will be destroyed by giant all-powerful monopolist. (Again, look at the political system: Two pseudo-parties, and every other potential party has no chance. You can vote between shit with rape and rape with shit.)
"100% free market" is just another way of saying "100% lawless" or "100% law of the jungle". Which is the opposite of democracy.
Also, I know your US view of what "government" is distorted, because your government is so fucked up, (no, ours in not really better) but government is meant to be the voice of the people against despots. That was the whole fuckin' point!
If you remove it (which you MUST, if you choose a "free market", as explained above), the despots aka. monopolists will have power, and you will have no voice and no power at all.
I am 100% sure you don't EVER want that to happen.
The thing is: You have to make your government into a "for the people, by the people" one again. And there, only a revolution and making "lobbying" of any kind a form of treason, punished by death, can help.
There could be successes they don't know about. They don't check confiscated liquids to see if any of them are explosives. In that case the bomber is free to try again, and again and again.
There could be failures they don't know about either. Bomb gets on by fails to detonate. Bomber chickens out or can't get his underpants to explode.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yep, Apple has certainly shown us that.
I just took my 90 yo mom & 85 yo uncle from Florida to a funeral in Ohio. Both of them got the full TSA screening both up and back, while much more likely terrorists zoomed through, including a 20-something woman in a moslem head-scarf. I did get some funny pics, though, of my mom's screener trying to find her boobs.
http://www.talktsa.com/