Happy Birthday to the Transportation Security Administration, more infamously known as the TSA, which was created on this day in 2001.
Every day since then, at least one American has probably asked, "What the hell for?"
The Aviation and Transportation and Security Act, which Congress passed in November 2001, authorized the TSA. At that time, the airlines handled passenger security. Admittedly, the airline security was fairly amateurish, as we saw on September 11.
But should we have created an entirely new federal agency to protect airline passengers? After two decades of experience with the nosy, intrusive, idiotic, incompetent TSA, the answer is a resounding "no."
"The TSA is failing to defend us against the threat of terrorism," security expert and frequent TSA critic Bruce Schneier pointed out in 2015. "The only reason they've been able to get away with the scam for so long is that there isn't much of a threat of terrorism to defend against."
Indeed, terrorists don't hijack planes anymore. Locking the cockpit door took care of 99% of airplane hijackings. What's more, the data shows how rare terrorism is.
"Terrorists are much rarer than we think, and launching a terrorist plot is much more difficult than we think," Schneier added. "I understand this conclusion is counterintuitive, and contrary to the fearmongering we hear every day from our political leaders. But it's what the data shows."
TSA failures are legion. Security exercises have shown serious breaches of security where guns and mock explosives were smuggled on board with relative ease.
The TSA blog carries constant reports of weapons confiscated from people who forgot to remove them from carry-on bags. But the Homeland Security Red Teams in the 2015 test actively concealed forbidden items just as real criminals and terrorist would. The result was that "TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints."
Two years later, a Red Team test at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport achieved the same 95 percent failure rate to detect explosives, weapons, and illegal drugs. Repeat national tests in 2017 also went badly, "in the ballpark" of an 80 percent failure rate.
Shouldn't an agency created to protect airline passengers and funded to the tune of $11.2 billion for FY 2023 be able to prevent more than 5% of concealed weapons and explosives from being smuggled on board?
Sheesh.
The TSA is hamstrung by orders that don't allow agents to search passengers based on race, ethnicity, or any other common-sense criteria.
What the TSA is good at is high-visibility groping, scanning, and confiscating. Making people drop their pants, take off their shoes, and surrender their shampoo annoys people in a way that says "we're doing something" without actually accomplishing anything. It's what Schneier calls "security theater."
"Airport security has to change," Kip Hawley, one-time head of the TSA wrote in 2012. "The relationship between the public and the TSA has become too poisonous to be sustained."
"After 20 years of failure, the Transportation Security Administration continues to waste resources, harass travelers, and actively mug air passengers. It is far more of a threat than the dangers from which it supposedly protects us," writes Reason's J.D. Tucille.
It's high time we ended the TSA's reign of terror.
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