[rayiner]

Nothing. TSA is a joke. At first, the security theater arguably had a legitimate psychological purpose. The airline industry nearly collapsed after 9/11 because people were so scared of filing. But that was a generation ago—the psychological trauma in the aftermath of 9/11 dissipated ago. But we’re still stuck with the TSA because in the meantime it turned into a massive jobs program.

We’d be better off spending TSA’s $8 billion budget on paying people to dig holes and fill them back in.

[linkregister]

I don't see any evidence of TSA being a jobs program. Their mission and the agents executing it appear to be toward flight security. I'm certain there are many counterexamples of misguided policies and agents exhibiting incompetence. But the general direction of the agency is to screen passengers prior to entering secure airport areas and this is generally successful.

[FabCH]

TSA is famous for failing tests for decades. Here’s the latest one: https://abcnews.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-ope...

Over the years, their failure rate has consistently been 80-95%.

I don’t think you can reasonably call that „generally successful“.

[consp]

I failure is the goal: yes.

[jim33442]

Every other country seems to do the same thing though

[HDBaseT]

In Australia, you place your carry on luggage onto a tray and it passes through an xray machine, at the same time, you walk through a metal detector. Takes about 30 seconds depending on the line.

It still feels incongruent with the reality of the situation in my opinion. I can hop on a bus with 200 other people, or on a train with literally 0 security carrying whatever I want in a bag with no staff nearby either.

[jim33442]

That's basically how it is in the US, except that sometimes there aren't enough machines so the lines are long, and it's the spinning scan thing rather than a metal detector. Usually no line in major California airports when I've gone. NYC is hit-or-miss. Just did a transfer through LHR and the security line was insanely long.

It used to be much worse though. I think the new machinery has made the difference.

The bus/train is different because they're harder to weaponize. Everything we got was a response to the 9/11 attacks.

[somewhatgoated]

I agree with you on train and somewhat bus but cars are extremely easy to weaponise and dirt cheap. Any terrorist trying to hijack a plane and not simply using a car (with or without extra explosives) is an idiot.

Essentially terrorism isn’t about spreading terror, because they are so laughably ineffective at it.

See this excellent gwern article: https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror

[prmoustache]

These kinds of measures are always reactionnary to prior events. For example in Spain you do get your bag scanned (but I doubt scan operators are sufficiently trained to spot anything of importance anyway) at train stations before embarkments and also any governmental/official/administrative office because Spain has a history of bombing (mostly by ETA).

[ajmurmann]

Isn't this because there otherwise wouldn't be allowed to fly into US airspace?

[jim33442]

I mean for a flight that doesn't go to/from the US.

[thombat]

The US requirement is that passengers on flights to the USA have been processed in conformance with US regulations _and_ since that processing have not had any contact with passengers processed otherwise. It's not in itself a stupid rule but does make the US rules contagious, since either other airports re-build to keep the US-bound and other passengers segregated or they have to apply US rules to all.

This hit Auckland International badly: it had a lovely open atrium with a garden but the rules forced a forest of partitioning walls since passengers were transferring from smaller airports that couldn't quickly adopt the US rules.

[N19PEDL2]

I often fly from Milan Malpensa airport, and I’ve noticed there are two separate security areas: one for people flying to the US or Israel, and one for everyone else. I’d always wondered why this was the case, and now I get it.

[stephen_g]

Not to the same extent though - for example I can't remember if I ever had to take my shoes off (maybe there was a couple of months where we had to do it back after the attempt happened in December 2021?), so I was pretty shocked to go to the US for a work trip in 2019 and have to do that. Here in Australia there's no liquid limit in carry on for domestic flights.

[jim33442]

Nowadays I don't need to remove shoes in the US. I vaguely remember times it was randomly required or not, not sure when, and back when it was always required. I'm not TSA precheck or anything. But yeah we have the liquid limit, which always seemed like the one dumbest thing to me, maybe even a way to sell drinks.

[fluidcruft]

Unless it has changed for a while the TSApre lines don't make you take off shoes and belts vs the regular lines. I also think they stopped making TSApre tahe laptops and iPads out of bags. But it may also have to do with equipment upgrade cycles and what was deployed to which lines.

[jim33442]

TSA precheck was originally for avoiding removing shoes, belts, and laptops. I had it at some point and gave up because random lines kept making me remove stuff anyway, but only telling me that after my bag was already taken aside for search, so it wasn't worth.

Newer xray machines don't require anyone to remove laptops. It's about 50/50 whether I get a new machine lately. Just today at SFO, had to remove laptop but not shoes.

[Loughla]

It's not just security theater. It shifts the attack vector entirely. Instead of airplanes as weapons that could be used to kill thousands, terrorists can blow up a few hundred people.

Those checkpoints are only there to provide a soft target instead of letting it be a plane.

[jim33442]

I agree. Sure you can still get weapons through screening, in fact I've accidentally done it twice with like 4" pocket knives, but not sure what the odds are. A lot of the "security theater" argument seems to be annoyance at having to go through TSA, cause what's the alternative, just barely screen people like before?

[rayiner]

No, the “security theater” argument is because TSA consistently fails penetration tests: https://abcnews.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-ope...

“When ABC News asked the source if the failure rate was 80 percent, the response was, ‘You are in the ballpark.’”

[simoncion]

> Instead of airplanes as weapons that could be used to kill thousands...

As pilots had been screaming for for years prior to 2001, cockpit doors have been reinforced and locked, and cabin procedures have changed so that those doors are rarely unlocked. [0] This happened shortly after the WTC bombings that totally destroyed the buildings. This means that the only people who can get control of an aircraft are the crew of that aircraft.

The first of the two things that stops "another 9/11" had a one-time monetary cost and was done twenty five years ago. The second was the murder of everyone on board three airliners by hijackers. Prior hijackings were a diversion and an annoying delay. Now that "hijackers will kill you all" is on the table, hijackers will be outnumbered ten or thirty to one and will not succeed. Remember that the plane intended to crash into the Pentagon crashed in a field somewhere because its passengers heard about the ones that hit WTC and -correctly- determined that they had absolutely nothing to lose.

> ...terrorists can blow up a few hundred people [at a checkpoint].

The fact that this doesn't happen indicates that even a jetliner with a flimsy, unlocked cockpit door wouldn't be used as a weapon to kill thousands. Murder -let alone mass murder- is vanishingly rare. By and large, people simply don't want to kill or injure each other... they just want to go about their business.

To support this point, I'd like you to tell me when was the last time you heard about a cell-phone-battery-bomb? You may remember those from back when Israel's military booby trapped the batteries of phones that they believed were going to be delivered to many members of the opposing military... and then set off those bombs all at once. Shorty after the bombings, Bunnie Huang [1] did some thinking and came to the conclusion that not only is it pretty easy to fabricate such remotely-triggerable bombs with like five-figures [2] worth of perfectly ordinary equipment that is entirely legal for anyone to have, if one built such a bomb with the explosive force of a hand grenade it would be [3] undetectable to a TSA CT scanner operator, and -because batteries are sealed- entirely undetectable to explosives swabs.

If The Terrorists Are Constantly Out To Get Us, why haven't we seen these bombs? It has been what, three years or so since those very clever booby traps were distributed to and used against opposing forces? Where are the domestic bangs and booms?

[0] One expects that airlines did not wish to do this because its cost was greater than zero. I wonder how the cost compared to the destruction of three airliners, two skyscrapers, all the deaths and cleanup, and twenty five years (and counting) of security theater.

[1] Huang is a fellow with fairly substantial commercial electronics design and fabrication experience

[2] USD

[3] ...in part because of the variance in battery construction from manufacturer to manufacturer and even from model to model...