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Sen. Rand Paul Introduces TSA Reform Legislation
OverTheGeicoE writes "Over a month after Sen. Rand Paul announced his desire to pull the plug on TSA, he has finally released his legislation that he tweets will 'abolish the #TSA & establish a passengers "Bill of Rights."' Although the tweet sounds radical, the press release describing his proposed legislation is much less so. 'Abolition' really means privatization; one of Paul's proposals would simply force all screenings to be conducted by private screeners. The proposed changes in the 'passenger Bill of Rights' appear to involve slight modifications to existing screening methods at best. Many of his 'rights' are already guaranteed under current law, like the right to opt-out of body scanning. Others can only vaguely be described as rights, like 'expansion of canine screening.' Here's to the new boss..."
I fly around the world on a regular basis. There is one thing that every single foreign airport I have ever flown out of shares in common: a lack of security theater.
From Mumbai to Istanbul, Narita to that tiny little airport on the island next to Toronto, I never have to:
1. Take my shoes off
2. Submit to a body scanner
3. Suffer a pat-down
4. Wait more than ten minutes to get through security
Flying within and out of the US is slower, more difficult, more humiliating, than flying through airports where terrorism is ACTUALLY a common threat. I am embarrassed every time a foreigner has to deal with my country's ridiculous soap opera of security, and simultaneously enraged when the outside world reminds me that, outside of the US, flying is a wonderfully pleasant experience from start to finish.
I don't really have a new or insightful point here other than to vent, to be honest. It's deeply frustrating to see the ludicrous amount of money we've spent on body scanners that are not only trivially fooled, but simultaneously don't catch anything actually dangerous a metal detector wouldn't have already caught and still require me to take my god damned mother fucking shoes off. Security is worse, yet somehow takes longer. I have to choose between a ridiculous body scan or an intrusive physical search in my own relatively safe country, but can travel in comfort everywhere else.
It's maddening. I avoid flying as much as possible literally because of the TSA. It's a sad state of affairs when a 12-hour train ride (which, mind you, costs MORE than a flight) is an attractive option to dealing with airport security.
It's maddening to the point that I supported Rand Paul's original initiative to ban/reform the TSA. Rand Paul is a lunatic, yet I dislike the TSA so much that he and I agreed on this one issue.
So now, it turns out, he doesn't want to do what he'd said at all. His proposal address NONE of the things that madden me so, and in many cases make them worse. Privatized security theater is no better than public security theater. The THEATER part is the problem, not the public or private part.
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"It was also legal for pilots to have guns with them."
It still is. The laws that temporarily took guns away from pilots were misguidedly attempting to somehow keep us "safe"... from the very people we were trusting with our lives when we stepped on the plane in the first place.
What a boneheaded, f*ed up thing to do.
Fortunately, some politicians who had at least a few working brain cells left got that situation reversed, and explicitly made it legal (again) for pilots to carry guns.
Exactly; just take a look at the private for-profit prison industries.
If you have to have a government service, and there's no way to make it competitive, it simply makes more sense to have the government do it outright. There's no way to make the TSA's job competitive; it's not like there's 5 different airports right next to each other that you can choose from if you don't like the screeners at one airport. By having the government do it directly, it's more answerable to the people than a private company is. However, as in the case of the USPS, it does sometimes make a lot of sense to have the function done not by a government agency, but rather by a government-owned and managed corporation, so it's not subject to as much politicization. But for the TSA, I don't think that's such a good idea; it really should be more like the FBI or police departments.
Yeah you can sue a private screener.
Says who?
You watch, Federal regulations will end up giving these guys immunity in exactly the same way the TSA has immunity.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yeah you can sue a private screener.
Just like you can sue the phone company for spying on you?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The opposite has happened in the private prison industry. Private actors with state power is the worst of both worlds.
thank you
there are plenty of things that should NEVER be privatized
healthcare insurance, for instance
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's tricky. Terrorists are looking for soft targets. If there's no security on aircraft, they'll attack aircraft. If their most 'dead americans per dollar' is in Iraq then they go to iraq, or afghanistan or whatever. Depends also on what metric they decide to use, and what they think will be successful.
In this day and age it's very unlikely they'd be able to take and keep possession of an airplane. That was a one trick pony, and they seriously under delivered. For probably another 20-30 years hijacking an airplane is simply not going to work for suicide bombing. Passengers will resist, improvise weapons or whatever. Blowing up an airplane... harder to say.
But they *are* looking for ways to kill people. And the TSA is terrible at their job. Those two aren't mutually inclusive or exclusive. You need security looking for bombs, and poison gas, you need to secure airports themselves against ground based lasers and rockets and so on (because god knows, if you can blind a pilot to crash a plane they'll try that). Ultimately security like this is an uninsurable problem, it has to be the government running it. The TSA acts like some lunatics crazy scheme that had no chance of success 7 years ago should dictate the experience for everyone flying today - that's fundamentally flawed in a lot of ways.
You could have made the same argument about pearl harbour. Well the japanese only attacked pearl harbour on one day, so if the US had just ignored it everything would have been fine. And that would be complete nonsense. It's taken 11 years to tear apart al qaeda and they're still not gone, and their ideology, even if not their senior membership, is still resilient. Unlike the death of Stalin (korean war) or the death of Hitler, or Mussolini where everyone proclaimed they were going to continue the fight, and then immediately gave up, Al Qaeda was fully expecting bin laden to be killed, and is ready to carry on without him.
There's nothing silly about taking al qaeda seriously. Taking them seriously doesn't necessarily mean flinging hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem, but doing nothing is an invitation for them to cause chaos, and the more chaos they cause the more recruits they get and so on. Having bomb sniffing dogs in airports, making sure the area around airports is secure from anti aircraft missiles, and helping the government of afghanistan (whatever the hell that actually is), fight Al Qaeda is perfectly sensible. Groping 4 year olds and 94 year olds, and using ionizing radiation body scanners on everyone.... not so much.
Remember, they did try and blow up the WTC previous, with a car bomb. And failed. Whatever else they are, they are persistent bastards. Whether that means their focus will move to north africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, the middle east and Pakistan from the US for a while I have no idea.