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TSA Screening Barely Working Better Than Chance

Posted by samzenpus on from the am-I-safe-now? dept.

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."

15 of 337 comments (clear)

  1. Fuck the TSA by sexconker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Fuck 'em. Disband that shit ASAP.

    1. Re:Fuck the TSA by trollboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      as a 7' tall man of german descent, I always get "randomly" chosen as well. I assure you it's not so much the "olive skin" as it is the "different" or "standing out for any reason".. which is also deplorable and ineffective for the task at hand.

      And yes, no option to opt out of all the still beta FBS

      --
      That which is not dead may eternal lie,and in strange aeons even death may die
    2. Re:Fuck the TSA by sjames · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Honestly, with the addition of locks to cockpit doors and passenger awareness of the problem, we can roll the rest back to pre 9/11 levels. It worked just fine for the most part, and the locks and passengers no longer being instructed to sit quietly and enjoy the stopover in Cuba would have taken care of 9/11 just fine.

    3. Re:Fuck the TSA by pluther · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I wish I had modpoints left.

      But, this is an accurate assessment. it became obvious within days of the attacks that these two measures were about the only thing that would have made a difference. Every thing else is pure theater.

      --
      If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
    4. Re:Fuck the TSA by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Informative

      They even figured it out on 9/11. Remember there was a 4th plane.

    5. Re:Fuck the TSA by sjames · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'm fine with armed pilots. They should be given frangible bullets suitable for use on aircraft./p

    6. Re:Fuck the TSA by rahvin112 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That plane was full of hero's. They knew they were dead, they called family and said goodbye. They were determined that they would not be used to kill thousands.

      As others have said, the TSA hasn't stopped anything. There have been two major incidents since 9/11 where terrorists boarded planes with bombs. Those terrorists weren't stopped by billion dollar security measures, they were stopped by other passengers beating the shit out of them. Between the air marshals and the other passengers I don't believe terrorists could take another plane unless they controlled more than 50% of the seats.

      Disband the TSA. It's a terrible waste of money and a downright infringement of rights.

    7. Re:Fuck the TSA by swillden · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
  2. Purpose of the TSA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Neither Congress nor the President will withhold funding because the purpose and effectiveness of the TSA is not defined by how many criminals it catches. The purpose, rather, is to condition the American public to accept ever increasing government restrictions on our various freedoms. By that measure, the TSA is reasonably effective.

    1. Re:Purpose of the TSA by artor3 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      No, it's not. Don't be stupid. There's no grand conspiracy out to get you. The TSA exists because after 9/11 people demanded that the government do something to make us safer. And so the politicians created this security theater, because it's what the voters wanted.

      And they still do want it, as the TSA gets excellent approval ratings. They don't know or care that it's just theater, they just want to feel safe.

      It's as simple as that. The people want to feel safe, so an organization was created to help them feel safe, even if it doesn't actually make them safe. And contrary to the ravings of the conspiracy theorists, this IS a democracy. The people get what they want, for better or worse.

    2. Re:Purpose of the TSA by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 5, Insightful

      These aren't wannabe tyrants. They legitimately believe their ideas would make life better.

      You may want to take a history lesson at some point. Go read about the fall of the Roman Republic and how it gradually morphed into a dictatorship. Almost every step along the way was a guy trying to "make things better for the common man," and many if not most of them actually had noble intentions. Take a look at the sequence, from Tiberius Gracchus and his brother Gaius, Marius, Sulla, and Cinna all the way to Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar, most of them were "progressive" reformers, trying to help the downcast and improve the plight of people in Rome in general.

      Plato knew this too, and placed democracy as just one step away from a dictatorship in his classification of governments. The quest to help people can easily turn to a quest for power (since the downtrodden tend to give away any power they have to someone who will given them anything)... and pretty soon you find yourself with a tyrant or at least a "noble, well-meaning" dictatorship at first.

      All through a sequence of people with good intentions and ideas to "make the world better." So was Hitler. Seriously -- this is one place it might actually be appropriate to bring him up, along with just about every other wacko dictator in history. Almost all of them started from a place where they legitimately believed their ideas would make life better.

      "Tyrants" don't have to be "wannabe." They just happen when somebody's "good ideas" turn out to be really bad for lots of people.

      And like all people, when they do something they don't believe in, they rationalize it. They convince themselves that it is for the best. You do this too. We all do.

      Yeah, the issue is that you need to draw the line somewhere. There has to be some action you can't rationalize just to make your vision for the world come true. Unfortunately, I seriously think that most people who have the initiative to get very far up the ladder in government usually are the people who don't have that "line," or at least it's so malleable depending on circumstances that they'll do whatever to maintain their position or power or ability to try out their "good ideas" for the world.

      So, no, I don't and cannot rationalize the way "rights" have been rapidly redefined in the U.S. in recent years. Most of our public officials are clearly even embarrassed themselves by what they're doing, since they bury their actions in secret documents and clandestine actions or try to hide things in piles of legislation.

      It doesn't take a grand conspiracy to erode rights, and it doesn't take a "wannabe tyrant" to end up with a really, really bad government. It just takes a series of gradual shifts, and people doing what they can to -- as you put it -- "spread their good ideas to more people."

      The danger is when people like you fail to see that a sequence of such bad trends can accumulate into something really bad, without necessarily a grand conspiracy of any sort.

  3. But what about the arts? by naoursla · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is just another example of the government cutting funding for the arts. Sure, it may be security theatre but these days that is the only kind of theatre I see to have time for.

    Maybe we can get the National Endowment for the Arts to pick up the slack. Or they could move to an NPR model and hold pledge drives.

  4. Re:i wish you could read by Bite+The+Pillow · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    Further, the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) April 2011 study conducted to validate SPOT's behavioral indicators did not demonstrate their effectiveness because of study limitations, including the use of unreliable data. Twenty-one of the 25 behavior detection officers (BDO) GAO interviewed at four airports said that some behavioral indicators are subjective. TSA officials agree, and said they are working to better define them. GAO analyzed data from fiscal years 2011 and 2012 on the rates at which BDOs referred passengers for additional screening based on behavioral indicators and found that BDOs' referral rates varied significantly across airports, raising questions about the use of behavioral indicators by BDOs. To help ensure consistency, TSA officials said they deployed teams nationally to verify compliance with SPOT procedures in August 2013. However, these teams are not designed to help ensure BDOs consistently interpret SPOT indicators.

    TSA has limited information to evaluate SPOT's effectiveness, but plans to collect additional performance data. The April 2011 study found that SPOT was more likely to correctly identify outcomes representing a high-risk passenger--such as possession of a fraudulent document--than through a random selection process. However, the study results are inconclusive because of limitations in the design and data collection and cannot be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of SPOT. For example, TSA collected the study data unevenly. In December 2009, TSA began collecting data from 24 airports, added 1 airport after 3 months, and an additional 18 airports more than 7 months later when it determined that the airports were not collecting enough data to reach the study's required sample size. Since aviation activity and passenger demographics are not constant throughout the year, this uneven data collection may have conflated the effect of random versus SPOT selection methods.

  5. Re:yes and no by sjames · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Had flight 93 had a lock on the cockpit door (a measure that I DID say is appropriate), it wouldn't have crashed at all. None of the other planes would have crashed either had they had locks. The problem is entirely solvable by a trip to the hardware store.

    As for weapons, one of those dinner plate sized belt buckles will mess you up before you can even get close enough to someone to harm them with a box cutter.

    So yes, I absolutely positively *DO* advocate a return to pre 9/11 when people were free(ish).

    If you like, the cabin crew can have guns.,/p>

  6. Ignobel Prize by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 5, Funny

    Of course, a much simpler solution might be a trap door in front of the door...

    I believe you were joking but look at the 2013 winner of the Ignobel prize for safety engineering.