Is the TSA going too far?
- Thread starter Nowhere Man
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Nowhere Man
Commodore
Federal courts are suposed interpet the law, not create ways to skirt the law. The Constitution is clear that you can't search people without a warrant or probable cause. If a judge is finding ways for the federal government to get away with searching people without warrants, then that is bullshit. Hence my comment. It's activism, not judging. Judges have been known to make mistakes by the way.
If you believe the numbers in CNN's investigation (which the TSA contends are way too low), even after the number of air marshals were drastically expanded post-9/11, they still only fly on about 1% of total daily flights. There are about 28,000 major commercial carrier flights per day, so that's a hell of a lot of flights to cover, and air marshals require very extensive training due to the potential for subjects taking hostages and collateral damage everywhere.
They work better when you don't know if they're on the flight or not, so that the deterrent is there even if the marshal may not be. An obvious, armed guard can be rushed and neutralized in a small space, and since the cost of having someone so highly trained on every flight would be astronomical, they wouldn't likely be able to afford to cover anywhere close to everything. But you'd know which flights were and were not covered.
I thought so too at first, but what happens in the event of hostages? The armed guard is not only useless, he's armed and that would enable a second hijacker. Not having weapons on planes is the most important thing. No weapon, no hijacking.
Indeed. I'd rather be free than safe because quite frankly, I don't trust many of the meatheads hired to do the screening/protecting. And I don't think that qualifies me as a hippie. What standards are held to those who would "keep us safe?" They generally seem an irritable lot, I fly frequently and try to smile my way through and generally I think that's the way to deal with all of this.
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Here's a thought: Give many of the passengers on the plane a fake (but extremely realistic looking) toy gun. It can't cause any actual harm, but the terrorists would shit their pants if they saw so many people they thought were armed. 
The law is what the Courts say it is. The Supreme Court determines what is Constitutional. That is their function. They don't have to "think up ways to skirt the law" because they decide what the law is. And it's not "a judge" finding ways, it's the court of appeals, which is a panel, deciding what the Constitution requires. They are the ones who determine whether any particular judge has made an error of law.
Nowhere Man
Commodore
The law is what the law says. The supreme court is suposed to uphold the law, not create it. If the law says that you can't search without a warrant, then you can't search without a warrant. No exceptions. If the judge or judges don't see it this way, then they are puposely finding holes in the law that the government can use to get around the law. This is activism and not judging the law to be constitutional. Therefore, I call this bullshit.
To be free, we MUST be safe. The lack of safety equals chaos, and where there is chaos there can be no freedom.
Freedom shouldn't be sacrificed in the name of "safety."
And these new security procedures at airports is doing nothing to make us "safe."
It's closing the door after the cows are out, as Locutus said above. The procedures are reactionary to an attack.
Which, really, is pretty dumb.
And these new security procedures at airports is doing nothing to make us "safe."
It's closing the door after the cows are out, as Locutus said above. The procedures are reactionary to an attack.
Which, really, is pretty dumb.
Nowhere Man
Commodore
Okay... but you can't guarantee safety, it would be irresponsible for a country to create the illusion of safety for it's citizens when it's not really there.
^ No, you can't *absolutely* guarantee safety, but you can try to make things as safe as realistically possible. Better to do that, than not try at all.
Your anger is somewhat contradictory. You complain that TSA has never caught any terrorists, but then claim that the actual chance of terrorism is extremely small. So maybe TSA has never caught one because there aren't any formal terrorists plots.. has TSA caught 19 Saudis trying to hijack a plane and use it as a weapon? No because there hasn't been any. Does TSA confiscate weapons from passangers. Yes every single day.
Airports however are not private institutions. They are government owned entities so airlines cannot have free reign to make their own policies within an airport.
By "weapons" do you mean "devices that the carrier(s) intends to use to hijack the plane" or do you mean "device that some people carry on them all of the time (like a utility knife or a zippo), forgot about and simply left in their pocket/carry on bag."
Because, I suspect, it's the latter more often than the former.
I wasn't angry at all. In fact I was making jokes throughout the post. Also, when you introduce a straw man argument that I never made that doesn't make me contradictory. You conflated two entirely different points.
I wasn't criticizing the TSA for not stopping any of the extremely rare well-planned and coordinated terrorist attacks like 9/11. 9/11 was in part a combination of lack of the concurrent administration's interest in foreign terrorism, inefficiency in intelligence gathering and sharing/responsiveness, over-reliance on electronic intelligence instead of human intelligence, and the terrorists simply adapting to the things we don't screen for (that being said, even if things were working perfectly we might not have stopped it anyway. Sometimes shit happens, but it's so rare that we shouldn't go overboard worrying about it).
I was criticizing the TSA for taking over-the-top measures that are always reactive to the last incident, when the existing pre-9/11 security procedures coupled with better intelligence beforehand (not TSA's responsibility) and better behavioral profiling and questioning as the passengers move through security (TSA's responsibility) would do the trick in almost all cases.
For example, pre-9/11 we screened for guns and bombs, so the terrorists resorted to using commonplace items like box cutters and corkscrews. Does that mean we should should take away all sharp objects from the passengers? No, because the countermeasure to that type of attack already existed on 9/11 with United Flight 93. Once the passengers knew that this was not an ordinary hijacking scenario where you need the passengers alive as hostages, they rose up against them.
Now they can't use box cutters and corkscrews any more, because the passengers will stop them. So they went back to bombs. Except, due to the x-ray luggage scanners and metal detectors that already existed pre-9/11, they can't smuggle aboard any kind of complex bomb, so they have to resort to makeshift devices using PETN that require a lot of time and effort and obviousness to detonate (like lighting your shoes or pants on fire), and guess what? The passengers stop them again.
My point is that our airport security pre-9/11 was actually very effective and forced the terrorists to adapt. That, coupled with passengers knowing that hijackings nowadays are very likely to be fatal for all involved, better intelligence gathering, and hopefully at some point some improved behavioral profiling training for TSA personnel instead of having them dick around (pardon the pun) feeling people up, should prevent almost all terrorist attacks. Inevitably another major one is going to get through. Unfortunately that is the price of having a free and open society. But it's such a rare occurrence that we shouldn't compromise that freedom and openness in order to try and guarantee total security, which is impossible.
You're absolutely right that TSA does confiscate weapons every single day. I never said otherwise. Nor am I criticizing the TSA personnel working the security checkpoints as the incompetent ones. They're just following instructions from the higher-ups, who are the incompetent ones I'm talking about. But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that those were terrorist attacks in the making. They were rednecks who didn't feel safe traveling without their gun, gangbangers, pro athletes, and just plain old idiots. And I'm fine with banning full-sized knives because they can certainly wound or kill a lot of people, even though those won't get you control of an aircraft anymore either. But pocket knives, Leatherman multi-tools, nail files and the like is a bit much.
You know what all the knives and guns the TSA stops every day have in common? They were all stopped by pre-9/11 screening procedures like metal detectors and x-ray luggage scanners for carry-on items. You know what probably wouldn't have been stopped by the reactive measure of the millimeter wave full-body scanners? The shoe bomber, the liquid bomb plot, the London Tube bombings, or the underwear bomber that inspired the new security measures going in in the first place. It's security theater; the illusion of security, rather than actual security. Existing pre-9/11 security measures, the new post-9/11 reality of planes being used as bombs and the passengers rising up to stop it, post-9/11 armored cockpit doors and locks, improved intelligence gathering and dissemination, and better behavioral profiling training for TSA personnel will stop almost all attacks and force the terrorists to adapt newer plans. Fortunately all but one of those are already in place, though the intelligence gathering can always use some improvement.
But thank God that guy sitting next to me in coach can no longer trim his fingernails, drink a Snapple, and print out the cover sheet on his TPS report when he lands, and that I can choose what's behind door number one: an unflattering naked picture, or door number two: having my man-baggage fondled by a middle-aged dude named Jesus with two rough hands and one clear word of English; all without even the common courtesy of dinner and a movie first. I feel much safer now.
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It's really disgusting how people are just tolerating it like the lemmings they are. But since air travel is so necessary, they have us, ahem, by the balls.
It feels extremely strange being the one who doesn't care. C'est la vie.
With everything TSA does today, if it was in place pre-9/11 the 9/11 attacks till could've happened. (Removing the passenger-factor and changes to the flight-staff's procedures as well as equipment on the plane.)
How could they have still happened? I mean the body scanner, the groping, all of that! Just ask Adam Savage. (Won't link to it, it's already in this thread a few times.)
How could they have still happened? I mean the body scanner, the groping, all of that! Just ask Adam Savage. (Won't link to it, it's already in this thread a few times.)
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