Abolish the TSA

Sure, if you view “some get patted down and some don’t” as absolutely equivalent to racial profiling.

“Not unless we force ourselves to pretend?” What is that, the “c’monnn” defence?

I don’t believe I’m defending anything in that statement. What I’m saying is our current system misdiagnoses the problem (all people are equally likely to be terrorists) and prescribes bad medicine (ergo, all people are equally deserving of being patted down) as the solution.

I have no problem whatsoever with not patting down little old white ladies because they’re incredibly unlikely to blow up the plane.

Racist!

I do have a huge problem with then turning around and patting down an Arab (or, given the realities of transportation screening, a Turk or Filipino or some other random ethnic minority) who also is incredibly unlikely to blow up the plane.

Oh, I see. Your views are more evolved than mine because you assume I’m advocating for increased security measures when considering Arab passengers, while you specifically state you aren’t (although you haven’t really explained what it is you’re actually in favor of).

I’m against security theatre

Hooray!

but even more opposed to “security theatre for some, tiny American flags for others.”

Oh. So, we’ll just keep doing it, then. Thread closed, everyone.

Sure, if you view “some get patted down and some don’t” as absolutely equivalent to racial profiling.

How about “kinda equivalent?”

I’m imputing views to Rand Paul, who I already dislike and who at any rate probably would gleefully argue the point for dog whistle points, I’m not trying to impute any agenda to you, so I dunno if we have any special reason to get into a line-by-line quote war.

The solution to security theatre is get rid of security theatre.

Getting rid of security theatre for some people but keeping it for people of Officially Scary Ethnicities, dressed with whatever fakery to pretend that it’s something else would save money. It would also - unlike getting rid of all theatre - be semi-saleable politically to whatever moronic constituency security theatre has. I understand that.

But it’d still be billions of dollars burned in a pile to satisfy morons, and it’d be a more overtly pandering-to-racists pile than it already is. Probably the most cogent counterargument might be what could be done with the savings, but to me keeping “government policy” and “racism” away from each other is a really big deal.

As much as I like the angle of Rand Paul being all “keep your government off my body” while on his way to an anti-choice rally the topic has veered into a weird territory.

I will say this: there is a well known and very accurate profiling tool that airports are still not using: one way tickets bought with cash at the last minute with little or no luggage. Any two of those are way more helpful as a red flag than what nationality the flier is or what country he’s from. And more accurate than pulling out paint swabs from Home Depot for skin color comparisons.

very accurate profiling tool

No, it’s not.

Despite this, the proposed fixes focus on the details of the plot rather than the broad threat. We’re going to install full-body scanners, even though there are lots of ways to hide PETN – stuff it in a body cavity, spread it thinly on a garment – from the machines. We’re going to profile people traveling from 14 countries, even though it’s easy for a terrorist to travel from a different country. Seating requirements for the last hour of flight were the most ridiculous example.

The problem with all these measures is that they’re only effective if we guess the plot correctly. Defending against a particular tactic or target makes sense if tactics and targets are few. But there are hundreds of tactics and millions of targets, so all these measures will do is force the terrorists to make a minor modification to their plot.

It’s magical thinking: If we defend against what the terrorists did last time, we’ll somehow defend against what they do next time. Of course this doesn’t work. We take away guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We take away box cutters and corkscrews, and the terrorists hide explosives in their shoes. We screen shoes, they use liquids. We limit liquids, they sew PETN into their underwear. We implement full-body scanners, and they’re going to do something else. This is a stupid game; we should stop playing it.

Statistical profiling does not work.

There are two kinds of profiling. There’s behavioral profiling based on how someone acts, and there’s automatic profiling based on name, nationality, method of ticket purchase, and so on. The first one can be effective, but is very hard to do right. The second one makes us all less safe. The problem with automatic profiling is that it doesn’t work.

Terrorists can figure out how to beat any profiling system.

Terrorists don’t fit a profile and cannot be plucked out of crowds by computers. They’re European, Asian, African, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern, male and female, young and old. Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was Nigerian. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was British with a Jamaican father. Germaine Lindsay, one of the 7/7 London bombers, was Afro-Caribbean. Dirty bomb suspect Jose Padilla was Hispanic-American. The 2002 Bali terrorists were Indonesian. Timothy McVeigh was a white American. So was the Unabomber. The Chechen terrorists who blew up two Russian planes in 2004 were female. Palestinian terrorists routinely recruit “clean” suicide bombers, and have used unsuspecting Westerners as bomb carriers.

Without an accurate profile, the system can be statistically demonstrated to be no more effective than random screening.

And, even worse, profiling creates two paths through security: one with less scrutiny and one with more. And once you do that, you invite the terrorists to take the path with less scrutiny. That is, a terrorist group can safely probe any profiling system and figure out how to beat the profile. And once they do, they’re going to get through airport security with the minimum level of screening every time.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, we’re all more secure when we randomly select people for secondary screening — even if it means occasionally screening wheelchair-bound grandmothers and innocent looking children. And, as an added bonus, it doesn’t needlessly anger the ethnic groups we need on our side if we’re going to be more secure against terrorism.

Sorry, are you linking to opinion pieces as evidence? Both the she bomber and the underwear bomber had last minute tickets purchased one way with cash at the last minute. Here’s an opinion piece that backs me up. The 9/11 hijackers bought one way tickets two weeks before the flight.

…which completely misses the point of the two notes by Mr. Important Security Expert, that filtering by known-true data points about (some subset) of terrorists doesn’t work. The false positive rate is gigantic. Even if it did work, terrorists aren’t stupid; they’ll switch tactics.

I don’t really see the problem with what Jason linked to, reliability-wise. I think I need a new login somewhere if we’re going peer-reviewed-journals-only.

Yup. Not going through with the check is a pretty major civil offence, actually.
(The intent is to stop probing of the system by terrorists)

And the problem with (the effective) behavioural profiling is that the TSA monkeys won’t be able to do it. It’s a difficult-to-learn skill.

How else is the supervisor going to magically know that someone is not a terrorist?

Are terrorists forbidden by their Code of Conduct from wearing suits?

The most obvious answer of what rand paul was thinking about here is that he doesn’t look Muslim. Maybe I am mistaken though so you tell me. When Rand paul makes comments about how supervisors should know some people aren’t terrorists and pass them through quicker, how does he believe they should know?

Well, obviously I don’t mean JUST use that tactic, I was talking about profiling in general and how there are more accurate and helpful things to look out for than skin color/nationality.
Sorry if I was vague.

I don’t really see the problem with what Jason linked to, reliability-wise. I think I need a new login somewhere if we’re going peer-reviewed-journals-only.

Of course you Jasons would stick together. Bastards. I just meant there are no facts given at all. In fact a couple of the experts in the second link say that certain profiling works. Like the profiling I laid out!

Peer reviewed articles? We can do that.
Here’s one about strong profiling. Really short version is, “It’s a hard problem and sorting people into ‘safe’ and ‘non-safe’,” doesn’t even come close to cutting it.

Behavioral profiling also [has problems. As Bruce Schneier observes, it catches folks up to no good, but mainly garden variety criminals, not terrorists.

Also consider the dilemma of the conflicting goals of the TSA. “A Policy Maker’s Dilemma: Preventing Terrorism or Preventing Blame.”

(found via quick googling and referenced from Bruce Schneier’s excellent site at http://www.schneier.com](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/06/behavioral_prof_3.html))

There’s a lot of really good information and analysis of this stuff out there if you look for it. These aren’t unanswerable questions by any means. What becomes very clear very quickly is that the TSA performing theatre, not real security.

Yeah, this is one of those areas where the solutions sounds obvious but statisticians have looked at it and it is surprisingly complicated.

Bruce’s simple calculations on what the false positive rate looks like even for implausible good predictors, for example.

Simply put, I think each airport should be allowed to have their own procedures, except for maybe the 35 hub airports.

I don’t think Greensboro, NC needs the same procedures as New York City.

I am definitely on the side of “The TSA is security theatre and adds little value.” I fly about 40 times a year, so it matters to me. Nonetheless, I think your idea is a bad one, as it’s pretty easy to get on a flight anywhere, then connect through LGA, ORD or another of the majors without going through additional security. This is a case where the chain is as strong as its weakest link.

This would be a bad idea, as much as I hate what the TSA does every airport needs the same security measures. When you pass security at one airport you can connect anywhere and not have to go through additional security on that connection.

Yep, the New York Daily News reports that a woman flew 938 miles from Orlando, Fla., to Newark, N.J., on Thursday with a loaded .380 in her purse. United flight 15 was airborne before she realized what she’d done—and airport screeners had missed.

Yes, I feel so safe. Why don’t we fondle my nutsack some more while someone just walks on the plane with a gun they didn’t even hide.

TSA “officer” steals iPad: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-airline-passengers-claim-tsa-ignoring-theft-reports/story?id=17351373#.UGZa1k3A9AU

Absolutely - differences in domestic and international airline security are something which /was/ exploited on 9/11. And it was a known security hole.

I was really surprised they didn’t prosecute her. I suppose they have to do the reasonable thing once every 5 or 10 times to convince the suckers it’s safe to self-report in the future.

from the link

Earlier this month, a poll found that nearly 46 percent of frequent fliers said they felt screening procedures were not effective in preventing acts of terrorism on an aircraft. But a separate poll reported that 54 percent of Americans (fliers and non-fliers) think the TSA is doing an excellent or good job of handling security screenings at airports

I am really surprised only 46% percent of frequent fliers feel this way. Waiting in TSA lines I’ll often make a sarcastic comment when the mother of 3 forget to remove the sippy cup from her purse. about how I feel so much safer with that bomb off the flight. It pretty much always elicited chuckles, and often conversations about TSA. They are never favorable.