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by frickinLasers 3383 days ago
> I miss the old days too, but I wouldn't vote to water-down airport security

Do you mean the "security" theater with a 95% failure rate? http://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-find...

To which the response is "cavity searches!" which will only continue to fail. http://kxan.com/2017/03/06/tsa-changing-pat-down-policy-afte...

The most effective change to security protocols was reinforcing the cockpit doors and changing how authorized people enter the cockpit. Every high-profile attack since 9/11 has not involved hijacking, has not been stopped by the TSA, but has been handled by better educated passengers and flight attendants. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/shoe-bomber-subdued-fl... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Farouk_Abdulmutallab#Atta...

Terrorists don't kill people on any scale worth worrying about. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/2...

The barely trained high school dropouts in blue uniforms at the TSA only serve to increase our sense of servility to a government that is increasingly afraid of its own citizens.

1 comments

Plus... the TSA exclusively searches people who are already in America. People support it on the generally prevalent notion that it prevents a flow of terrorists, which is just obviously not true. The TSA does nothing to prevent terrorists from flying planes into America. If anything it would prevent terrorists from hijacking planes to divert to other countries. I genuinely think the only reason people support it is the mental association "of planes bring people here" and "terrorists are other places".

The TSA notionally prevents the use of domestic and outbound international airplanes as weapons. In order to hijack a plane you would need to subdue hundreds of people (because why take over a small plane), find and subdue the air marshall, break into the cockpit, and know how to fly a massive jetliner. It is an insane concept. You could just buy a schoolbus(legal), steal a truck, or even just rent a big uhaul, fill it with explosives(undetectable and not even checked for), and drive it onto a big bridge or next to a stadium(also legal). You wouldn't even have to kill yourself to do it, you could kill many more people, and it would be almost impossible to stop.

If you just wanted to kill people you wouldn't even do that. You'd just set up IEDs like people do in Iraq and Syria. That would be way more terrifying than plane hijacking- the bombs could be everywhere. There would be nearly nothing we could do about it.

The fact that none of that happens says that terrorism is just not a threat in the way we think of it. The TSA is the most useless government organization in the US.