Game Over For The TSA?

It's time to shutter the TSA.

Everyone knows that the TSA security process is slow and time-consuming. It causes delays and consists mostly of taking naked pictures and molesting people. It's time to shut it down.

1) The expensive scanners that take nude pictures are good at taking naked pictures of people, but are terrible at detecting concealed weapons. So the TSA is good at selecting passengers to molest, but bad at actually spotting weapons.

2) The TSA's system for determining threats is based simply on banning the specific objects used in failed plots. You have to remove your shoes because one guy made a pair of shoes out of bombs, duct tape and a ratty pair of sneakers. It failed to detonate because of how it was concealed. You have to go through the nudity scanner (which uses a generic image for the security officers) or be molested because one guy hid a bomb in his crotch. It failed to detonate because of how it was concealed. You can't take drinking water on board the plane because a terror cell speculated that it may be possible to conceal liquid explosives in transparent containers. Except it may have been impossible to pull off, was highly unlikely to succeed otherwise, and required multiple moving parts to get to implementation.

3) The TSA doesn't even catch anyone anyway. A series of seventy tests revealed a failure rate of 95%. The TSA only caught contraband in three of seventy tests. Three may simply have been lucky accidents, and is clear proof that TSA procedures aren't simply ineffective, but entirely pointless. The naked body scanners, molestation, partial stripping and tedious line-ups are all for nothing. The TSA cannot find a bomb, knife or gun, but they can find laptops and tech to steal, as well as cash to sieze.

4) There's no reason to search people for concealed weapons or small explosives. Both the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber were stopped by passengers on the plane. On a post 9/11 place, no passenger will allow unidentified anyone to seize a plane. It was, in fact, the natural reaction of people to resist takeovers, but from the 1960's onward, people were lectured on passive noncompliance or even active compliance in cases of assault or hijack. The planes on 9/11 were not seized by use of box-cutters or violence. They were seized by a group taking advantage of thirty-years of lecturing that if someone wants to seize a plane, let them.

No one will permit such a thing to happen on a plane for decades. It will take decades of lecturing to convince Americans to allow it again.

It is that, not the TSA, that will protect American aircraft. Get rid of the TSA and re-establish the checks that pre-existed 9/11, searching only for explosives and drugs. With modern cockpit defenses and resistant passengers, even firearms would be insufficient to take an airplane today.

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I'm still trying to get to the National YR Convention in Chicago at the end of the month, so that I can participate and report on the events of the YRs on the national level. There is still an opening, but I'm short funds, so if you value my reporting on the local scene, and my commentary, and would like to see it on the national level, please help send me! Right now, you can send any donations my Paypal account, greenwoodjw@gmail. The sooner I receive donations, the greater the likelihood I will be able to go. (Prices rise as dates approach, as you know)

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