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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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The TSA wouldn't bother me so much if (a) it was just the airport and (b) they operated with professionalism. BUT in reality the TSA is expanding its operations to our streets, with random stops-and-searches along interstates (border states), bus stops, train stations, and publicly-open facilities like malls, unemployment centers, hotels, post offices, and most recently: Chicago parks.
As for (b) I have close to 1000 stories about the TSA groping women's breasts, men's penises, forced strip searches of elderly women, dumping urine or feces bags on the floor, forcing a woman to demo a breastpump (else they'd steal the ~$100 device), tackling a woman like she in a football game, holding a man in St. Louis because he was carrying ~$3000 in cash (not a crime), detaining a Senator because he opted-out of being groped & wanted to be scanned, forcing a woman to stand inside a glass jail for over an hour because she had milk for her child (which was then dumped & she missed her flight), and on and on and on.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
"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. You can't sue the government. Well, you can, but the government won't let you win the case, as happened recently. A man was thrown to the ground and severely injured, so he sued the TSA, and the TSA refused to turn-over the videos because of "national security". The man was forced to drop the case since the evidence was being withheld.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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
The key point, which is not addressed at all within the press release is whether the Govt. will subsidize private screening or not. This is important because if so, then the TSA will simply be subcontracted out to Halliburton or other firm, and waste, fraud, and abuse will only increase, more security theater = more screeners = more equipment = more profit!
If, instead, airport screening was funded by the airport or airlines themselves (yes, either way, the air traveler ultimately picks up the tab) then they'd have an incentive to maximize passenger throughput while minimizing cost. They would still want reasonable security measures for safety's sake and to keep insurance premiums low and lawsuits to a minimum.
If JFK Intl still insisted on Whole Body Imaging, pat downs, no fly lists, liquid bans, shoe removal, and all the other nonsense introduced over the past decade, they'd probably have to charge about $15 per passenger to cover the cost. Therefore LaGuardia may then see that by just relying on metal detectors, X-rays for carry-ons, and canine patrols, they could screen each passenger for about $2 each, while having fewer delays and fewer upset travelers.
The upshot in this hypothetical example is that passengers who are still worried about another 9/11 style attack can fly out of JFK and feel reassured that they'll be perfectly safe from terrorists and will gladly pay for the privilege of being strip-searched, irradiated, groped, and prodded in exchange for this reassurance. Those who'd rather not pay to be humiliated can fly out of LaGuardia instead. Even humoring the idea that they'd be twice as likely to die in a terrorist incident as those who opted for the "enhanced" screening at JFK. Or in other words, instead of 25,000,000:1 odds, they'd be facing 12,500,000:1 odds.
Would traffic out of these two airports remain largely unchanged, would travel dry up out of LaGuardia out of fear, or would traffic dry up at JFK due to invasive security theater. I'd place my bets on the third scenario. However, in a true Libertarian sense, whatever imbalance was created if any would be corrected in short order by one airport adopting the policies of the other which took away their business.
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Boogers -- my mod points just expired and you need someone to mod you up.
Anyway, here's another example. WA state used to have state run liquor stores and used the profit from those stores to fund state services, like fire departments and whatnot. Now, WA did have some of the higher booze prices in the nation, but we also don't have an income tax, so it used a "sin tax" in part as a way to make up the difference. The stores had a really nice selection too.
Here is the last price list the state published:
http://whatcomnewsforums.com/misc/washington_state_liquor_control_board-MAY_2012_PRICE_LIST.pdf
On June 1st, the first day of privatization, selection went in the toilet, and prices skyrocketed. Here's one example from page 6 of the price list for Red Breast Irish Whisky.
The state store price was $49.95 out the door.
The state retail price was $39.11
The wholesale price can be calculated (*): $25.66
Fred Meyer is currently selling Red Breast at a special price of $60 (reg is $65). This is pretax.
Many voters favoring the initiative stupidly believed that "competition" was synonymous with "lower prices," but I-1183 included a provision that wholesalers would have to pay a 10% fee, and retailers a 17% fee, to make up for the loss to the state from losing the stores. The Office of Financial Management, as required by law, evaluated the law and concluded prices would rise. This summary was even in the voter's pamphlet, but if many slashdotters can't RTFA, most voters only watch TV and totally bought the notion that competition and lower costs go hand in hand -- they never read more than the title let alone the summary -- just voted like the ads told them to.
Anyhow, starting with a wholesale price then of $25.66, after the wholesale fee, it would be $28.23, and after the retail fee, $33.03. The reg shelf price at Fred Meyer is almost a 100% markup, and even the sale price is an 81% markup, to which the old state taxes are added, making the out-the-door price of the bottle of Red Breast, $75.13 (on sale) or $81.16 (reg price).
Now, certain store brand rotguts are perhaps 50 cents to a buck cheaper than rotgut carried by the state stores, but anything decent is at 25% more expensive and some things are substantially more, Red Breast being about 60% (reg price). Worse, the profit the state would have used to benefit all Washingtonians, is now largely exported. It has been partly replaced by the new fees, but surely an initiative will kill those in the future and it is at that point, a WA income tax would become more likely. I'd really rather just decide whether to "sin" and pay a sin tax, than to have an income tax shoved down my throat every year.
So, this is an example where privatization costs the public much more in the short run, AND increases the likelihood of an income tax, which will cost the public much more in the long run. But Costco will make gazillions so its all good right? Corporate socialism is the name of the game now.
(*) WA markup was 13c for a 750 ml bottle, plus 51.9% http://liq.wa.gov/stores/liquor-pricing
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.