Vanity Fair On the TSA and Security Theater

OverTheGeicoE writes "Perhaps it's now officially cool to criticize the TSA. Vanity Fair has a story questioning the true value of TSA security. The story features Bruce Schneier, inventor of the term 'security theater' and contender for the Most Interesting Man in the World title, it would seem. With Schneier's mentoring, the author allegedly doctors a boarding pass to breach security at Reagan National Airport to do an interview with Schneier. 'To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost.'"

Comments

Get a clue Big Sis

[koan]

Israels airport security has not been breached since the 70's
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/01/whats_so_great_about_israeli_security.html

"All passengers waiting to check in speak to a polyglot agent. The agents, most of whom are female, ask a series of questions, looking for nerves or inconsistent statements. While the vast majority of travelers pass the question and answer session and have a pretty easy time going through security"

This method requires competence on the part of the interrogator though, so in effect that leaves out TSA employees.

Re:Get a clue Big Sis

[TubeSteak]

Israels airport security has not been breached since the 70's

You know what's wrong with Israeli airport security?
Besides the institutionalized racial/ethnic profiling, It doesn't scale up.

Ben Gurion airport handles ~12 million passengers per year
JFK International* in New York handles ~46.5 million passengers per year.

The number 1 airport in the world is Atlanta International and they handle ~89 million passengers per year.
There is no reasonable way to intensively screen 89 million passengers per year

*Adding Newark and LaGuardia gives you the biggest clusterfuck in the USA & #2 in the world.

Re:Get a clue Big Sis

[hawguy]

And it scales well to all three of their international airports.

TLV handles 12M visitors a year (11M of them are international).

If they can make it work at a large airport of that scale, surely a country with the resources of the USA could figure out how to scale it to all of our large airports. There's still plenty of opportunity for ex-TSA execs to get rich, it's just that they would run agent training companies instead of selling scanning machines of dubious effectiveness and safety.

Re:Get a clue Big Sis

[meerling]

Of course it doesn't fly in the USA, the Palestinian guy is probably in the back room getting a body cavity search by the TSA and missing his flight, that he may not even be able to get on since he hasn't even been informed yet that he was put on a no-fly list because he his last name is similar to someone that is under suspicion of having ties to terrorists. Oh, did I forget to mention that the "Palestinian" is a native born American who's parents were Palestinian immigrants?

It can and does happen. Haven't you been reading the new the past couple of years?

Re:Get a clue Big Sis

[mseeger]

First: Overall security seems better to me in Israel. But experience breeds progress. The U.S. has an abysmal terrorist rate. Should you increase that, the counter terrorists will become better as well. For various reasons i discourage walking that path.

Second: If you carry lot's of gadgets (like me), the check while leaving may take 1+ hours for doing the x-rays alone.

Third: The checks start a lot earlier than the airport.

Fourth: There are good security people and not so good, even in Israel. User experience may vary ;-). Security was more thorough 15 years ago. Seems more relaxed lately.

Fifth: Ask Israeli businessmen what they think about the security people. The don't like them more than their counterparts in the U.S. do.

Sixth: The terrorists already win, when flying becomes more of a burden. Life is a bitch :-(.

Re:Get a clue Big Sis

[AJH16]

I would add chemical sniffer to that list. It's another fairly cheap, non-invasive test that detects most of what a metal detector wouldn't. Actually between the two, the chemical sniffer is probably more valuable than the metal detector since metal detectors primarily detect things you could use to take over a plane (as you pointed out, there is a fat chance in hell that will ever happen again), where as the sniffer will detect things that could destroy a plane.

Re:40,000 Dead each year

[element-o.p.]

40,000 dead each year, and likely to get worse:

According to the results of a survey just released by the US Travel Association, two-out-of-five travelers this season are saying they’re trying to skip the plane and those pesky lines and checkpoints in lieu of other methods of transportation. It might not seem like a substantial number, but the association’s CEO, Roger Dow, tells US News & World Report, "Our research shows that reducing hassle without compromising security will encourage more Americans to fly — as many as two to three additional trips a year — leading to an additional $85 billion in spending that would support 900,000 American jobs."