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Aviation Security Debate: Bruce Schneier V. Kip Hawley (Former TSA Boss)
Fluffeh writes "A nice summary at TechDirt brings word that Bruce Schneier has been debating Kip Hawley, former boss of the TSA, over at the Economist. Bruce has been providing facts, analysis and some amazing statistics throughout the debate, and it makes for very educational reading. Because of the format, the former TSA administrator is compelled to respond. Quoting: 'He wants us to trust that a 400-ml bottle of liquid is dangerous, but transferring it to four 100-ml bottles magically makes it safe. He wants us to trust that the butter knives given to first-class passengers are nevertheless too dangerous to be taken through a security checkpoint. He wants us to trust that there's a reason to confiscate a cupcake (Las Vegas), a 3-inch plastic toy gun (London Gatwick), a purse with an embroidered gun on it (Norfolk, VA), a T-shirt with a picture of a gun on it (London Heathrow) and a plastic lightsaber that's really a flashlight with a long cone on top (Dallas/Fort Worth).""
There's no limit to the amoung of thermite you can carry on, and no limit to the amount of calcium carbide.
Just to name two.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
For congress, and they were, as usual, too spineless to tell the TSA to take a hike. After all, it's congress who spent all that money to line Chertoff's pockets (guess who makes the useless scanners now), and they didn't want to look bad for it - hearings are just photo-ops for the next election, to give the appearance of "doing something" when of course, the only thing going on is bribes and blackmail. Ever notice how DHS gets every excessive dime they ask for? Well, I know if I had warrantess wiretaps and all that kind of thing, the first thing I'd do is get the dirt on congress for future blackmail. This would occur to any bureaucrat in a few seconds. So you have to assume that's why these agencies never get seriously questioned about their ridiculous antics and waste, eh?
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
(from http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/823)
Adam Barnes
March 30, 2012
Adam Barnes
Our debate has now ended and those supporting the motion—that changes made to airport security since 9/11 have done more harm than good—have won handsomely. ...
Voters have roundly declared that the frustrations, the delays, the loss of liberty and the increase in fear that characterize their interactions with airport-security procedures vastly outweigh the good these procedures achieve. For some, indeed, the benefits are essentially non-existent: any sensible terrorist can find a work-around or choose a different point of attack, as Bruce Schneier explains. And so the widely expressed hope is that changes made to security in the (near) future will make the whole regime less reactive, more rational, more flexible and more intelligence-driven. The results of this debate suggest that these changes should be made with some urgency: passengers are angry.
Schneier sent the Kipster off, wearing his arse like a hat.
Too bad that the "reality-based community" is attached to persuasive argument, reason and evidence. Those are now the desperate hopes of the powerless.
You see, they'll be doing whatever they want to you, anyways.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
They're in the business of making passengers feel safe. Passengers like that. They'll gladly suffer through free prostate exams if it means they can sit comfortably on the flight, believing they won't be one of the next set of 9/11 martyrs.
And it's a popular product: Look at how many people fly. If people didn't like the product, they wouldn't buy it. So whenever someone says "Ah! They're taking away their civil liberties!" ... Well, yes, but that's no worse than you forcing your own beliefs on them that they shouldn't be able to buy free prostate exams.
At the end of the day, you can only be responsible for your own behavior: These people aren't being forced to board a plane at gunpoint. They wllingly accept what the TSA is doing, regardless of whether or not it is necessary.
If you want the situation to change: Don't fly. Let the airplanes rust in their hangars. Let the corporations go bankrupt one by one. The TSA is only allowed to live by the patronage of the passengers. No passengers = No TSA.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It's clearly ineffective, but never mind that: we don't have the money for it. In case we haven't noticed, we're spending 1 point some odd TRILLION more every year than we take in.
Unfortunately, like most large bureaucracies, the TSA is self sustaining. It work hard to justify itself, despite never having caught a single terrorist in its entire existence. Replicate that to hundreds of other useless federal agencies, and you have a government that far overstepped the bounds of what it's supposed to be for, and now exists to give jobs to the phone sanitizers (RIP, DA) of our country.
Yet Americans will cheerfully keep voting for Republicrats, no matter what they do, so I guess the TSA is what we deserve. You get the government you deserve, they always say.
I cannot speak for others, but I have stopped flying. Period. Instead we drive where the distance is reasonable and simply don't go many places we once went. So the argument that 'people are flying anyway, the security theater must be ok' is weak as the number flying might be much higher. Not that airports have the capacity for more air travel anyway...
Kip was a decent boss at Skyway, too bad they didn't say 'No' to the jerks who bought out the company and ran it into the ground, while skimming money off the top, every stinking month.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Thermite makes a wonderful toothpaste...
Actually, by itself it's a powder mix. It's convenient to add a liquid binder to make a paste for easy application but it can also be pressed with any of several other binders into any number of solid forms. Plaques, for instance, to be awarded at a conference. Carry on 20 kg of award plaques and Security might ask to see them but they won't blink at you carrying them on. The rest is obvious to any sophomore engineering student.
And TSA knows about these [1], but since there's no practical way to screen for them they just hope that the Bad Guys are too stupid to bother with a sure-fire way to remove planes from the sky.
[1] And many, many others. Ask a sophomore engineering class to come up with methods and you can have hundreds. Fortunately, Bad Guys are never geeks.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
a T-shirt with a picture of a gun on it
TSA agents are probably on a level with mall cops. Or lower. Some analyst probably evaluated the possibility of taking over an airliner with a fake gun. One way to slip a fake gun onto an airplane would be to make a cardboard replica that could be folded flat. With a couple of photos of a real gun affixed to the sides, and a terrorist waving it and screaming and the flight crew could be fooled. So a regulation was created to prohibit photos of guns. Now, if you explained that to a logical person, they could easily distinguish between a t-shirt print and a full sized side view of a semi-auto. TSA agents aren't hired for their judgment, but for their ability to follow rules. Simple rules. So the rule 'no pictures of guns' will be interpreted literally. And this will cover everything, including an image of Elmer Fudd with his double barreled shotgun.
Have gnu, will travel.
(Not that that list was anything but a mental list, nevertheless)
I live in switzerland, and for the last three years I've traveled to america every year for a conference. This year I decided to go to a european conference instead, for the sole reason of TSA, Security Theater and having to essentially waive all my rights(!) just to be allowed to enter the country.
While I'm only one person, flying only once per year to america, I wonder how many others did the same.
Your sarcasmometer is overdue for calibration.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I present to you the TSA VIPR program.
Note how it consists of some Mall Ninja acronym/name, like the murderous "Fast and the Furious" program put on by the justice department and ATF clowns.
The reason I suggest it might not be too late is because they pissed off Amtrak by molesting train passengers (leaving the train, no less), and were banned from Amtrak property for a while (still?).
So, at least a government-sponsored entity is willing to tell these jack-booted thugs to go pound sand.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
The TSA guy said that by preventing terrorists from using complicated liquid explosives, they have to move to more exotic explosives. Ignoring the very porous security perimeter of an airport (many tons of airline parts and supplies are trucked in every day, there's no way to inspect everything), what's going to keep a dedicated terrorist from using old fashioned C4 explosive hidden in an obvious body cavity. I've seen enough internet porn to know that with proper training and motivation, a quite sizeable chunk of explosives could be hidden within the body. With surgical help and no desire to stay alive for more than 12 hours, I suspect that even larger portions of explosives could be hidden within the body.
He's doing a marvelous job of systematically shredding the bullshit that the TSA is trying to sell.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I have no problems with the government (the TSA) in this case running airport security.
What is needed is to undo all the post 9/11 "Security Theater" (liquid ban, body scanners, pat-downs, nail clipper bans, toy guns being confiscated etc) and go back to a sane level of security.
. . . surgical help and no desire to stay alive for more than 12 hours . . .
There have been a number of stories about TSA getting very curious about fresh surgical scars.
I've never had to disrobe for a TSA scan, how would they even know I have a fresh sugical scar?
> more intelligence-driven
An Israeli expert suggested separating risk assessment from implementation. A simple organizational change, but it would mean that the TSA could no longer expand its empire by exaggerating risks.
normally would not use the term "dumbass"..
The amount of economic damage from one talcum powder bomb in a chip fab says you are looking at the wrong metrics for what terrorism hopes to accomplish.
-- Terry
Why would a terrorist bent on making bloody mayhem even bother with forging an ID? He could just wander into the crowd of people waiting for the security theater ritual. There's a far higher density of people there than you get on a plane, and it would certainly get just as much press as bringing a plane down.
Of course, there's another thing that Bruce is too polite to mention about the security theater is that its actual purpose is to compel the public to make a conspicuous show of obedience to arbitrary, useless, and idiotic authority figures. They might as well just demand a stiff-arm salute and a heel click in the direction of a photo of the Godlike Leader Whom We All Love Or Else.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The TSA guy said that by preventing terrorists from using complicated liquid explosives,
Instead the "terrorists" dump their explosives in the garbage can next to the security line.
You either treat that bottle of water as a bomb, and dispose of it properly. Or you let me take it on the plane.
> The Economist is left leaning by U.S. standards
This may be true; I haven't read it regularly in a couple of years. But I do think it's true that extremists in either US party would find much of what appears in The Economist very uncomfortable. It's probably the most fair and balanced news source around these days and most USians aren't accustomed with that.
TSA stands for Teamsters, Service Workers, and AFL/CIO. It makes work for the otherwise unemployable.
On the one hand, thank god there are some rules to constrain what these morons can do to as a security checkpoints. On the other hand, I want my pocket knife back that these pricks took from me in San Diego, just this week (Swiss Army "Super Tinker" model with its devastatingly dangerous 2.5" blade, $20 on Amazon.COM). (Note that neither of those hands speaks positively about the TSA.) I get so tired of having to be so polite to those people just so I can get through their little power bubble with the least amount of hassle.
I think it was Schneier that said there are only two real improvements to airline security since 9/11:
1. Locking cockpit doors
2. Passengers that fight back
Everything they do at TSA checkpoints is ineffective window dressing.
Yep. If they had reason to believe someone had released mercury in a cargo hold, the outcome would be like the old practical joke where someone releases two pigs in their high school building late at night, with "#1" spray-painted on one of them and "#3" on the other.
They will never find pig #2, but they will take the whole school apart with a screwdriver looking for it.
That's basically the TSA's entire organizational charter: "Find Pig #2."