I'm no fan of the TSA, but how can you be "pretty sure" when terrorism acts are extremely infrequent events with unpredictable results?
It's perfectly possible that the way the TSA works (e.g. knowing that you'll go through body scanners or thorough patdowns) has deterred potentially nasty attacks. Luckily we'll never know.
Everyone who criticizes the TSA (and with reason) should also think about what they would do if they were given the task of trying to prevent Black Swan events with minimal disruption to the 99.9999 percent of normal travelers.
It's an extremely hard problem. Most people who talk about it simply don't have enough knowledge of statistics, or the psychology of deterrence.
Given that the entire principle of asymmetric warfware, of which "terrorism" is an element, is based on attacking the enemy where they are weakest, the TSA effectively serves no function. If the enemy reinforces security at one location, attack another. It's a fact that you can't protect all locations all the time. There will always be weak spots.
Right now the weak spot is you usually have thousands of people hanging around outside the security gates waiting to get screened. Maybe they should have a pre-screening area for screening people who want to go into the screening line to make sure they're not going to do any terrorism!
If the TSA was disbanded, and instead a Keyser Söze-style response was instituted, where every week a random plane was blown up, the number of casualties would still be vastly lower than the number of people killed in vehicular accidents in the United States alone. Even with this absurd "lottery", air travel would still be safer than most other forms of transportation.
The thing is, air travel is largely safe even with infrequent and devastating incidents.
Reasonable security measures should obviously be employed, but the things they're looking for are not the real dangers.
For instance, if nail clippers pose a threat to the plane, then surely any of a hundred items in the aircraft itself are just as dangerous.
There are thousands of ways to bring down an aircraft and the TSA tests for, at best, a few dozen. It's like fencing off the drive-way of a high-security facility and leaving the rest open.
Motivated individuals will find a way around your security theatre. Meanwhile millions of travellers just trying to go about their business will be terrorized by the absurd TSA screening procedures that make almost anything seem suspicious and criminal.
"Why are you bringing an unusual amount of baby formula?" Arrest that lady with a baby who has an allergic reaction to other kinds of formula!
The FBI, by contrast, has uncovered and disrupted actual attacks because they use an entirely different approach. They try to discover the plan long before it ever reaches the airport.
That's what you should do to eliminate these 0.00001% type events.
Given that the entire principle of asymmetric warfware, of which "terrorism" is an element, is based on attacking the enemy where they are weakest, the TSA effectively serves no function. If the enemy reinforces security at one location, attack another. It's a fact that you can't protect all locations all the time. There will always be weak spots.
Right now the weak spot is you usually have thousands of people hanging around outside the security gates waiting to get screened. Maybe they should have a pre-screening area for screening people who want to go into the screening line to make sure they're not going to do any terrorism!
The thing is, an attack in a queue could happen anywhere, not just an airport. But the effects are highly localized. Part of what makes plane bombs extra-scary is that they could go off anywhere, so not only does the plane blow up, but it falls out of the sky and lands on people. That's more terrifying than a bomb explosion in a fixed location, plus it impacts all other travel arteries, giving the travel network in question the equivalent of a heart attack. A bomb in the air causes a lot more problems than one on the ground.
So of course it serves a function, however badly it does so. They overstepped in this case, but I don't have that much sympathy for the artist. He knew quite well that what he was doing looked like a dry run for a bombing; I'll warrant he just didn't expect to actually get arrested.
Like I said to another commenter, actual prevention and the appearance of prevention are different problems. They are not mutually exclusive.
Reducing the public perception of risk is not the same as reducing the actual number of casualties (otherwise people would stop driving). Most people do not behave as Bayesian rationalists, and policy must take this into account.
By the way, the HN feature of delaying the option to respond as a thread grows (presumably to prevent flame wars) is not a good idea. It stifles interesting and civilized exchanges like this one, and flame wars happen regardless; people just start new comments or edit their existing ones.
Edit: to the commenter below, you argue a false dichotomy that has nothing to do with my comment. Besides, that would be similar to asking the public about the next chess move for Kasparov; most people are not qualified to answer. There are reasons not every public policy decision is a votable proposition.
>Like I said to another commenter, actual prevention and the appearance of prevention are different problems.
That's not the government's job, though. It is not the role of the government to make people feel safe. It is not, in fact, the role of government to make people feel anything in particular, be it safe, happy, calm, or sexually aroused.
It can be argued that the government should -actually- keep people safe, but it is very hard to defend the position that we need to have the Feeling Police, which is a few neural folds away from being the Thought Police.
edit: If you'd like to ask "then, who should make people feel safe?", my answer is "psychotherapists".
I hear this argument a lot, but how do you think most people would respond if asked outright "do you want to increase the size of the federal government, and spend around 8 billion a year on making air travel more annoying and humiliating, while doing nothing to actually make things safer in order that people will feel safer?"
> you argue a false dichotomy that has nothing to do with my comment
I'm not really sure what dichotomy you think I'm arguing. I'm not saying we can only do one of (a) make people safer and (b) make people feel safer, I'm saying that only one of those is a good use of public resources.
> Besides, that would be similar to asking the public about the next chess move for Kasparov; most people are not qualified to answer.
If you're asking people what should be done to make them safer, that is outside their area of expertise, and I'm happy with not asking them about that (they'd probably answer stupid things like a Transport Security Administration or more scanners, or fewer liquids on planes or racially segregated flights, with only English being allowed to be spoken).
If on the other hand the question is 'how much are you prepared to pay to feel safer (while not actually being safer)', that is definitely within the competence (and right) of the public to decide.
To decide that people's money should be spent 'for their own good' on making them feeling safer and not even being prepared to ask them if that is true is arrogant, patronising and the opposite of safeguarding freedom.
Even with this absurd "lottery", air travel would still be safer than most other forms of transportation.
I believe that actually depends on the metric you use. I think it was something along the lines of, compared to car/bus/train/etc it is the safest per mile, but not very safe per trip.
Right, what I'm saying is you should be careful and explicit about your metric and why it is your metric. Otherwise it's just the same old "lies, damned lies, and statistics".
> Everyone who criticizes the TSA (and with reason) should also think about what they would do if they were given the task of trying to prevent Black Swan events with minimal disruption to the 99.9999 percent of normal travelers.
I'm deeply annoyed by your implication that we haven't. I'm not aware of any TSA critic who hasn't thought of a different approach that they'd prefer to see. Sometimes that preferred approach is "cut way back on airport security and let airplanes get blown up sometimes", which is still a completely valid opinion.
You're absolutely right that it's a hard problem. However, the problem can trivially be solved better than the TSA is solving it. There's a big difference between a problem that's hard to solve extremely well (as this is) and a problem that's hard to solve better than it's currently being solved (which this is not, at least not in the US).
As an analogy, it's a hard problem to achieve six-nines reliability with a network service, but we can still observe that holding nightly chants outside the datacenter to appeal to the gods of uptime for their blessing is a bad approach.
Bruce Schneier has observed that only two things have been done to improve air travel security since 9/11: locking and reinforcing cockpit doors, and convincing the passengers to fight back against hijackers. I agree with him completely. None of the other measures taken have helped at all.
I can easily do better than the TSA. Easily. For example, ditch the liquid restrictions. Done. We're no less safe than before, and a huge hassle and cost has been removed. Improvement!
For a more comprehensive approach, you'd probably want to cut down on the invasive screening of every passenger. Ditch the body scanners, which provide very little benefit but huge costs. Go back to the metal detectors and regular X-ray machines for baggage. Then take the money you save from this and put it into behavioral profiling, to detect nefarious people rather than nefarious items, and intelligence, to find terrorists before they get anywhere near the airport.
The TSA has not actively stopped any terrorist attacks, we know this. More so, we know that the TSA has failed to stop several terrorist attacks which have only been foiled through other means. The shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, the Christmas Day Detroit attack. The TSA was powerless to stop these attacks. Instead, what has worked has been police work (both in the US and abroad) and passenger vigilance. It's possible that the TSA has deterred some attacks, but given how easy it is to get a bomb on an airplane despite the TSA it raises the question of whether it's worth the expense, the hassle, and the degradation of our civil liberties.
The problem isn't trying to protect against black swan events, it's convincing people that they are protecting them, especially those in congress writing the checks and the idiots who believe if you aren't reporting your suspicious travel mates, you are as bad as the terrorists.
An Israeli-style defense is far more likely to catch the black swan events, but it requires much more training for agents. We'd rather build an obscene list of everything you can't do and pay cloned storm troopers to go down each item on it.
It's not either/or. Actual protection and the appearance of protection are separate problems, which is one of the reasons it is such a complex issue.
Also, Israel and the US are not easy to compare. The types of threats, population sizes, and public opinion are so different that it probably would not make sense to go for the Israel approach in the US. That said, Israel is a testbed for approaches that the US sometimes adopts.
>It's perfectly possible that the way the TSA works (e.g. knowing that you'll go through body scanners or thorough patdowns) has deterred potentially nasty attacks. Luckily we'll never know.
You can't justify national policy by saying "it's immeasurable, it could work!" That is like proving the existence of god by saying "we haven't not seen him, he could be there!"
>Everyone who criticizes the TSA (and with reason) should also think about what they would do if they were given the task of trying to prevent Black Swan events with minimal disruption to the 99.9999 percent of normal travelers.
A key feature of black swan events is that you'll never be able to predict them. It seems like this fact is behind 99% of the criticisms you hear about the TSA. Perhaps we should stop chasing the boogeyman and start figuring out how to deal with him when he comes.
> Everyone who criticizes the TSA (and with reason) should also think about what they would do if they were given the task of trying to prevent Black Swan events with minimal disruption to the 99.9999 percent of normal travelers.
First, I'd consider if it was worth it.
It seems to me that by the time you get to the point where a group has come up with the desire, the plan, and the execution of a terrorist attack, then stopping them at the airport is too late. Sure, it might work, but they could just target something easier.
I'd spend all these resources beefing up our intelligence agencies and go back to pre-9/11 air travel.
That's if the end goal is decreasing deaths from terrorist attacks. Ideally, I'd prefer to live free and unconstrained and accept a slightly higher chance of dying in a terrorist attack.
Paranoid passengers dogpile people who aren't terrorists the moment they do anything even vaguely unusual. Now imagine what would happen if this guy actually got on the flight. How long would it be before they turned the plane around?
> Everyone who criticizes the TSA (and with reason) should also think about what they would do if they were given the task of trying to prevent Black Swan events with minimal disruption to the 99.9999 percent of normal travelers.
I was thinking they should probably reinforce and lock the cockpit doors. That would eliminate all attacks that are more deadly than hitting a high school football game or even a crowded mall.
If they ever do that, they can get rid of all of the nudity scanning devices and we'll be back to the same amount of danger as walking around in public.
>Everyone who criticizes the TSA (and with reason) should also think about what they would do if they were given the task of trying to prevent Black Swan events with minimal disruption to the 99.9999 percent of normal travelers.
I suggest you look up a guy named Bruce Schneier. He's my go-to authority on these sorts of things.
