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TSA Screeners Can't Detect Weapons (and They Never Could) (arstechnica.com)
JustAnotherOldGuy writes: TSA screeners' ability to detect weapons in luggage is "pitiful," according to classified reports on the security administration's ongoing story of failure and fear. "In looking at the number of times people got through with guns or bombs in these covert testing exercises it really was pathetic. When I say that I mean pitiful," said Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), speaking Tuesday during a House Oversight hearing concerning classified reports (PDF) from federal watchdogs (PDF). "Just thinking about the breaches there, it's horrific," he added. A leaked classified report this summer found that as much as 95 percent of contraband, like weapons and explosives, got through during clandestine testings. Lynch's comments were in response to the classified report's findings.
... giving you the feeling that your government cares and reacted to 9/11 and other threats is.
Peter.
Nothing happened. No hijackings, no downed planes, absolutely nothing. Maybe we don't need all of this security theater after all and could just leave our shoes on and take some water with us through the gate then? Save a few tax dollars?
Of course it will go the other way and will be a huge call for more strict rules and procedures. Sigh.....
My sister watched the supervisor run her backpack through the xray 3 times before the screener notice the pen knife in it, and my mother actually succeeded in getting a small pen knife onto a plane by "forgetting" it was in her makeup kit. These incidents were years ago. And, they don't really matter; post 9/11, a knife would not be an effective weapon for highjacking a plane. When every passenger makes the assumption they are going to die anyway if they don't take out the highjacker, pretty much every passenger is going to attempt to jump the highjacker and take him out. Even with a knife, you'd be hard pressed to be 100 to 1 odds - people don't die fast enough.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's good to know that when they gently stroke my private parts, it is literally for nothing........
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Look, I hate the TSA as much as (if not more than) the next guy, but can we be clear about the numbers?
95% of contraband, which **includes, but is not limited to** weapons got through.
What percentage of weapons, then?
They might just be terrible at detecting forbidden fruits and vegetables.
"In looking at the number of times people got through with guns or bombs in these covert testing exercises it really was pathetic. When I say that I mean pitiful," said Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.)... "Just thinking about the breaches there, it's horrific,"
News at 11: Rep. Stephen Lynch owns a Thesaurus.
Now, I've never tried to bring a weapon on a plane ... but I've had one screener flag my suitcase in the security line, only to have another screener ask me "what did he see in your suitcase to flag you?", followed by me saying "if I knew that I wouldn't have put it in that suitcase".
Then I asked if he'd show me the xray and I'd try to tell him what it was, he said I wasn't allowed. OK sir, shall I just stare at you as you demonstrate you have no idea of your own job? Or can I go now?
And, on several occasions I've realized my laptop bag still had toothpaste, a Tide stick, and mouthwash in it -- and nobody noticed.
TSA are inept, expensive, and annoying. And I very much doubt they can provably demonstrate they've ever actually stopped anything from happening.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Given that US planes aren't exploding every day, this seems anything but horrific. In fact, it seems like excellent news, because it suggests that the screening is probably not needed (unless you believe that only terrorists are deterred by it).
Number of people surprised that the TSA is completely ineffective: 0.
Not coincidentally, that's also the number of terrorists that the TSA has caught.
They have saved us from the scourge of water bottles and decent sized toothpaste tubes, though.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Ditto for me. The fact that shaving cream and security are even in the same sentence is a testament to how pitiful we have become as a country.
Since their inception the TSA has been repeatedly proven to be almost completely ineffective at prevention, yet there has been no US planes hijacked or blown up since their inception anyway.
This alone proves that any benefit to the TSA's existence is entirely imaginary because the threat is not real.
The TSA were originally created as a perhaps understandable but nevertheless paranoid and ill-informed kneejerk overreaction to 9/11. We need to simply fix that mistake now.
There is clearly no rational reason for the TSA to continue to exist, especially since they cost the taxpayer 7.9 Billion USD every year that could be spent elsewhere solving problems that actually exist.
Don't worry, they've been aware of this for YEARS
Indeed they have. I'm not sure if they could have asked for a better outcome from 9-11 actually. It seems like quite the victory to me.
Anyone flying has lost a sizable percentage of their personal freedoms going forward, and the bad guys don't have to lift a finger. It's also a huge drain on the economy. Not only in the amount of money spent, but on the amount of time lost by everyone standing around (TSA-Thousands Standing Around). At least the TSA has stopped irradiating us though. That's a baby step in the right direction.
I've said it before, but I still don't think they even want a successful attack going forward, on the US at least. The failed attempts have been much more costly for everyone. All they have to do is give a complete bomb to some patsy and be sure it is configured to malfunction. One idiot gets caught and everyone in the US goes bonkers over it. After the 9-11-01 attacks, everyone in the US was more united than any time I can remember in my adult life. 95%+ of the population was ready to attack anyone over it. The failed attempts seem to remove the threat of retaliation and unifying the population. In fact they tend to keep everyone arguing and wasting more money on prevention of something that will never happen again.
The purpose of federalizing airport security was to create more union members to funnel federal tax dollars to the Democrats.
https://www.opensecrets.org/pa...
Looks like I was right.
Do you have ESP?
How will people respond accordingly if it's illegal to carry a gun into a flight?
Newsflash. There are ways of dealing with Bad Guys other than shooting them. It doesn't even matter if the Bad Guys are armed themselves if the number of passengers is greater than the number of bullets. Anyone trying to hijack a plane today will get beaten down almost immediately by the passengers. No point in sitting quietly if you think you are going to die anyway.
Is there an officer in each flight?
Not relevant. Nobody is going to wait for the police. Anyone starts some shit on a plan now and half the passengers will curb stomp them and tie them up until the plane can land.
On the other, I'd hate to give inept dummy terrorists the idea that they should give this stuff a try since we're catching so little.
Having the information out there is better.
The effectiveness of a terrorist attack is proportional to how much people believe they are protected from a terrorist attack. In other words, the attack effect is amplified by the idea that the attack is impossible or unlikely to be successful.
One of the reasons for using a commercial jetliner, rather than simply using the money, which these groups has in abundance, and buying or leasing business jets, and filling them with explosives, and then using those to crash into the targets instead was obviously to prove that the screening at airports was not enough to keep the public safe from such attacks.
How much worse would the public overreaction to a subsequent attack, if the public had the perception that the security theater was in fact actually security, and terrorists were able to penetrate it anyway? How much more would the public be unlikely and unwilling to trust government reassurances that they are protected from terrorists?
I can think of about 15 ways to crash the U.S. economy, and I can thing of at least 9 ways to crash the economy of the Western world, and I can think of about 11 more ways to crash things using domino attacks vs. European only targets, or a specific nexus or set of nexuses that don't look like they'd need protecting.
It's pretty obvious that the attacks were not intended to crash the economy.
In fact, if you think about it some more, the fact that there have not been subsequent large scale attacks... the terrorists must feel that they have achieved the goals they intended to achieve through them: massive losses of civil liberties, civil unrest relative to that, and so on.
Security theater in the form of the TSA -- the inability to take bottled water not purchased at the on the other side of the security checkpoint aboard a plane, the inability to see friends and family off at the gate at departure, or greet them at arrival -- merely serves to rearm the weapon of a public perception of security where none actually exists.
Once again: Having the information out there is better.
Why are you so angry? And also your garbage is constantly wasting screen space and resources. Can your hosts-file tool block your comments? Or does that require something special to block portions of a page from the same origin...
For the body scanner, put it on your sides. The plane of the scanner field only rotates across your front and back; it will miss anything directly on your sides. Wear slightly loose clothes and you can strap a weapon (or other object) a number of places outside the areas that the scanner "sees". Upper arms near your elbows (well out to the sides in "scanner pose"), sides of your torso unless you're super skinny, outsides of your legs if it doesn't show through your pants, insides of your legs (especially near the ankle) if you keep your feet a little wider than you should, etc.
For the baggage X-ray, just put "safe" stuff around the prohibited item. Tablet computers are great here; for some reason they're considered safe despite usually having plenty of metals, including potentially-dangerous lithium, in their chassis. Laptop power bricks and external hard drives are pretty hard to scan through; I've seen what they look like on the screens. Small items like pens, mint tins, coins, keys, flashdrives, jewelry, and so on can clutter the X-ray image and conceal stuff behind them, directly or by simply breaking up the outline sufficiently. A bag of toiletries containing a bunch of sub-3-oz tubes of this and that is *supposed* to be run through separately, but I've never once had a problem leaving it in my bag and I fly over a dozen times a year.
It's embarrassingly easy to get shit past those morons. Sometimes I do it by accident, like forgetting a pocketknife or bottle of soda. If it's not on the outer part of the bag, they usually miss it.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
It's not uncommon for me to find a magazine, fully loaded, in a backpack or something - even my laptop bag. I have way too many and they tend to get left and forgotten because I prefer to not keep a round in the chamber and not even to have a magazine in the firearm for a good portion of the time. I'm not always in a position where I can wear my firearm(s) and I'd much rather that it require effort (loading, cocking, removing safety) before it can be used. A bullet, by itself, is pretty harmless most of the time. If it's a modern center-fire then you can (don't do this) chuck it in the fire and the projectile won't really go anywhere.
Again, don't do that... You probably could get away with it but it's not a wise choice. The area around where the primer sits should allow for the gases to expand more rapidly which, while counterintuitive, means the gas will be mostly escaping out the back and not in a concentrated form. Of course, there's also no barrel for accumulated gas build-up. This is not true with the ammo that I typically carry - I'm almost always limiting myself to .22 LR. I'm comfortable with that choice. It also meshes fairly well my mentality of keeping the firearm unloaded, with no magazine inserted, and nothing in the chamber. There are times and places where this changes but that's often the case - frequently even when the firearm is on my hip.
I should also add, I don't live in a very urban area. There are a total of six houses in the township where I reside.
I guess my point is that I agree and could easily be guilty of having a spare magazine, spare rounds, or something similar in a bag and have missed it while packing. I do dislike the TSA and one of the things that I've learned is that, if you're in a group, and you're not in a huge rush, chartering a plane as pricey as one might expect. You can do it for just yourself and your mate but that's a bit pricey for most folks. I've chartered a flight from Maine to BC with six friends and put the pilots up in a hotel for a week while we fished. With all the baggage and equipment, it wasn't that much more than if we'd all flown business class and paid for the equipment to fly with us. As I recall, it was actually about 10% cheaper than first class seats would have been.
Bonus? No TSA. We hopped on a plane in the little Augusta airport by riding in a van though a gate. We went right to the plane, helped the pilots load the plane, and we were off in about an hour. No TSA, no screening, no anything. We did have to go through customs in Canada and then when we came back. The flight was much slower than it would have been in a jumbo because we needed to refuel more often (twice, as I recall) but it wasn't a bad flight or anything.
So, if you want to avoid the TSA and there's a few of you going AND it's not, you know, all the way to Africa or something then check out some of the charter prices. If you're open-ended they sometimes have other/quasi-regular flights where you're not quite in charter status but not quite a red-eye. You won't be flying drunk with a bunch of your buddies but you'll fly for a not-to-bad price. And, if you're not too drunk and you're well behaved, they might even let you sit in the co-pilots seat and fly the plane for a whole. It's legal. You just can't land it or take off with it. Well, they tell me it is legal. I've not actually checked the laws. I'm inclined to believe them.
Anyhow, there's an option if anyone's interested. It works. It's really not as pricey as you might think. If you're going off to a conference or a convention, give it a look. They've got some great pilots and they could probably use the business.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."