91–100 of 120 posts
So they think patting down 5-year-old girls and 90-year-old grandmas and grabbing my testicles each time I have to fly - not actually making the country more secure? Banning cupcakes and handbags with gun-shaped emboidery is actually not protecting us from terrorists? I can't believe it...
Why do people accept this reality when talking about the TSA, but not other government agencies? All government agencies are like this, especially the Federal ones.
I flew yesterday and found a rifle bullet+cartridge on the "secure" side of the TSA checkpoint. Yet somehow the gift-wrapped paperbacks in my checked luggage were deemed suspicious and unwrapped. Useless fools.
You know, it's not entirely unreasonable that someone could package a bomb to look like a gift-wrapped paperback. So if their technology can't distinguish your book from a potential explosive via X-rays alone, it may have to get opened. Explosives detection results in false alarms, unfortunately, but as far as I know most countries do it and it rarely results in such inconvenience to passengers. The rifle cartridge i…
Rather, this seems like a perfect example of the self-perpetuation suggested in the article. It takes a while, so there's a line, it look very meticulous and the victim isn't going to complain, or he might risk finding himself on a do-not-fly or do-harass list.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You trust a private corporation to strap you to a flying hunk of metal, but not to ensure your safety? Sounds logical..
Airlines, at least in the US, are quasi-government corporations run by courts and unions in a state of near perpetual bankruptcy.
So they think patting down 5-year-old girls and 90-year-old grandmas and grabbing my testicles each time I have to fly - not actually making the country more secure? Banning cupcakes and handbags with gun-shaped emboidery is actually not protecting us from terrorists? I can't believe it...
Now, if this bothers you, you should probably pay attention to the fact that the market for these toys is expanding. Rapidly.
http://www.propublica.org/article/drive-by-scanning-official...
You know when you're about to step through one of these scanners at an airport, but now one can drive right past you in your car without your knowledge! Despite their lack of concrete results in airports, the back-scatter X-Ray machine market is exploding into new form-factors, and it's all thanks to U.S. taxpayer dollars.
The horrible punch-line to this is that these back-scatter vans face an almost impossible task. It's hard enough to tell bombs from batteries in the controlled setting of a an airport security check-stop. Imagine trying to distinguish bombs from the random things people keep in their cars! The crews operating these vans must generate so many false-positives that, in order to reach the point where they can actually provide some real measure of security, they would need to be supremely competent, supremely dedicated, and entrusted with extraordinary powers to search suspicious vehicles. All of the above are improbable. I will eat my shorts the first time one of these back-scatter vans actually finds a real car-bomb.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A fair point. I spent only about 30 seconds on this, but found: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4943959 , "Surprise Gallup Poll: People Think TSA Does A Good Job". This is a poor article: it's merely reporting on a public poll of the TSA. I didn't expect the public to be so approving; I expected views of TSA to be like views on taxes: they're necessary, but everybody still hates them. But perhaps the public is so…
> There have been no terrorist attacks (excepting the shoe bomber, but there have been no shoe attacks since shoes started to be inspected), but does that prove the TSA is effective? Hard to say. No, really, it's not. Of prevented terror attacks since 9/11, TSA has prevented exactly 0% of them. The shoe bomber was on the plane with the bomb when he was subdued by fellow passengers. The underwear bomber also made it o…
So they think patting down 5-year-old girls and 90-year-old grandmas and grabbing my testicles each time I have to fly - not actually making the country more secure? Banning cupcakes and handbags with gun-shaped emboidery is actually not protecting us from terrorists? I can't believe it...
The TSA is clearly flawed, but I'm happy that planting bombs on oblivious children and elderly is an ineffective tactic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pre-2001 screening was perfectly fine, and would still work today (maybe excepting the improvements to detecting plastic explosives, although I imagine that screening would have picked up the detonators just fine). The other major improvement to security was locking, reinforced cockpit doors, which should have been the standard on all commercial aircraft from the start. What went wrong during 9/11 was that passen…
> only an idiot would try that again; there are targets with far higher value (and probably much more exploitable security flaws) if someone wanted to send a message again. Specifically, the large gatherings of tightly-clustered people waiting at a security checkpoint are much more vulnerable than any plane full of passengers.