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TSA Screening Barely Working Better Than Chance
rwise2112 writes "The General Accounting Office (GAO) has completed a study of the TSAs SPOT (Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques) program and found the program is only slightly better than chance at finding criminals. Given that the TSA has spent almost a billion dollars on the program, that's a pretty poor record. As a result, the GAO is requesting that both Congress and the president withhold funding from the program until the TSA can demonstrate its effectiveness."
The report isn't about the nudie machines or the crotch groping. This was a program designed to spot potential problems based on the way people act. If it worked, they'd ditch the zappers and replace it with eagle-eyed security guards.
But it doesn't work. Presumably, they spent a billion dollars because they really wanted it to work. This is, after all, patterned after the program that they use in Israel, which is very familiar with terrorism, and has been widely touted as better alternative. In Israel, though, it amounts largely to racial profiling, which has its own drawbacks (as the report points out).
This isn't about the effectiveness of the security theater, one way or the other. It's about something that was supposed to make the security less theatrical. Except it doesn't.
I love a good story about government ineffectiveness.
Unfortunately, this particular story is bull. Their conclusions are based on "meta-analysis of 400 studies over 60 years", not an analysis of the TSA's current procedures. They looked at studies on whether college students can tell when reach other are lying.
The TSA has some problems for sure, but this article doesn't address those.
Fuck 'em. Disband that shit ASAP.
I tend to lean your way on that too. Airlines, buss lines, etc. should be responsible for the security of their own equipment and customers (after said customers are off the street, out of the government airport, and into the airplanes, of course).
In Brendan I. Koerner's The Skies Belong To Us he touched on that trend beginning in 1972, when some airlines were beginning their own security measures. That all went out the window and the feds took over after the threat by hijackers of Southern Airways flight 49 threatened to crash the plane into the reactor building of Oak Ridge National Labs.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
They even figured it out on 9/11. Remember there was a 4th plane.
It looked at the meta-analyses to see if there was any support at all to behavioral detection. It looked at the TSA data to see if the TSA could defend its own assertions. The few positive points were basically nullified by poor data collection.
Half of the GAO summary was devoted to the part of the story you ignored, which was the relevant part. It's like you can read, but chose not to for the middle half. The story you will love is that the TSA is inept at capturing relevant data. The GAO is capable of seeing through that.
Don't bother straining yourself, I'll even paste the words here so you can ignore them more easily.
I'm fine with armed pilots. They should be given frangible bullets suitable for use on aircraft./p
Frangible bullets suck. Pilots should be armed with jacketed hollow points, the same thing air marshals and every other sort of law enforcement carries.
Frangible bullets are lousy manstoppers. They tend to make wounds that are wide and shallow. Very ugly, but without enough penetration to reach major blood vessels they have no real effect on an attacker who doesn't decide to helpfully fall down and lie still. And yet they still penetrate walls and such much more than we'd like -- and would have absolutely no trouble blowing through the thin aluminum skin of an airplane.
The bottom line with bullets is that if they have enough penetration to be useful at stopping a person, they're going to be able to pass through a few walls.
But, really, it's not a problem. Airplanes aren't airtight to begin with. They leak air all the time when "pressurized", but continue pumping more in to maintain the desired pressure. Punch a few half-inch holes in the skin and the pumps will just compensate by increasing the flow a bit.
The pilots should be armed with standard defensive handguns and ammunition as a last resort in case the hijackers manage to get through the locked door before the passengers beat them to death. It's unlikely they'll need their guns, but it's better to have them and not need them.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Why do you think the Israeli method is cheaper? They spend about 10 times as much per passenger as we do:
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/01/07/would_you_pay_25_for_71_seconds_of_scrutiny_in_an_airport
Since 2001, the bands used by cell phones have changed and the power requirements of the antennae have changed as well. Due to more concurrent users, you need more cell towers to re-use the frequencies, with the added benefit of a shorter transmission distance and less power required on the cell phone itself to do that transmission. In 2001, cell phones still had the analog bands that stretched city-wide.
You are a conspiracy nut.