The task of the TSA–as stated, since I believe other purposes have been added–is to sift potential threats from law abiding citizens. As I mentioned in I think the previous post, the only way to ensure that no “signal”–a terrorist with the intention and physical ability to commandeer or destroy a plane in flight–gets through is to treat everyone like criminals. There is no logical limit to this, if we have no idea what the actual signal is.
Put another way, it is quite possible we would have few to no incidents every year if we did NO security screening. We don’t screen buses, yet none have been blown up. We don’t screen trains, yet none have been blown up. We don’t screen subway passengers. Yet, in that confined space, a well constructed bomb could kill nearly as many people as destroying a plane in flight.
Some 32,000 people died last year in traffic accidents, or about 93 a day if memory serves. None died in terrorist attacks on our airliners. Nor the year before that. Nor the year before that, nor. . . to 2001, which was an exceptional year, both looking to previous years, and since.
The statistical chance of each of dying at some point is 100%. The question is how far short of our otherwise maximal life expectancy this will happen.
I literally believe that it would not be that big a deal if an airliner or two got hijacked or blown up, for the simple reason that we are already accepting 32,000 annual deaths as the cost of the freedom to drive. Is adding a few hundred to that, in the grand scheme of things, really that big a deal?
Nukes are huge threat. Crashing jets, not so much. We know now that if they get commandeered, we need to shoot them down. Commandeering them quickly, now, is very difficult simply because the cockpit is locked.
The net is that as far as I can tell, the actual signal is at or close to zero. The efforts to detect it–with massive abrogations of basic freedoms–are nowhere near proportionate to the actual threat. The threat is being used to curtail rights; the screenings are not, therefore, primarily being used to catch would-be terrorists, but to condition Americans to accept increasingly intrusive Federal government.
Now, I have argued and continue to believe, in the abstract, that the only sensible explanation for the collapse of Tower 7 on 9/11–which most people have not even heard of–is that more agents were involved than those in the airplanes. I make that case here (and in the link embedded in the front). This in turn implies that the entire set of events of 9/11 included participants who have not been identified.
We are seeing the TSA act in increasingly paramilitary ways. They have formed what they call “Viper” teams, which in effect takes the worst elements of airport “security” on the road, such that they can perform physical searches of random people who have done nothing but buy a bus ticket. Presumably at some point they will want the authority to stop us in the mall or grocery store, all for threats which have taken no lives in ten years.
I am increasingly persuaded that the most paranoid takes on 9/11 may have been in broad stroke accurate, in that the fear of terrorism that was invoked is being used to erode our fundamental freedom. TSA’s mandate of nudity or molestation is a blatent and utterly indefensible violation of the Fourth Amendment, whose essence is that if you have done nothing suspicious, you are to be left alone. It would be more effective from a crime fighting perspective to spend all day stopping and searching random people, but that is effectively a Fascist State, quite literally. It is being enacted under our noses.
But let me put on my rose colored glasses, and look at this in the most benign way possible. What people have to understand is that government agencies take on lives of their own. In the private sector, competition forces companies to improve quality and cut costs. The motivation is the desire for profit, and to avoid business failure.
In the public sector, however, “profit” is calculated entirely differently. It is figuring out ways to get more people on your payroll, and how to get them paid more money. People making careers out of it learn to figure out ways to create problems that may or may not exist, so that they can justify higher and higher allocations of our tax dollars.
In the private sector, sustained incompetence leads to bankruptcy. In the public sector, there is no cost to incompetence, since the only punishments are political, and which can be managed entirely externally to actually effectively accomplishing your stated mission. Everyone involved has every reason to increase the size and scope of the mission, and ZERO–make that NEGATIVE–incentives to economize, unless and until the legislators and executives get after them.
To be clear, there is no cost to the people who spend other peoples money of spending that money. They actually benefit more, the more they spend. Add to this the patently farcical claim that government jobs are sustainable and good for the economy, and you have a huge problem.
The TSA obviously benefits by increasing the scope of its mission. Since they have not stopped any terrorist attacks in ten years, plainly either they need to be downsized, or lighten up on security, but even absent the consideration of more sinister motives, they have every reason to grow every year until Congress stops approving the funding. To grow, obviously they have to move into new “market segments”, new allocations of labor, and that too–combined with utter and complete Constitutional ignorance, failure of the basic process of perceiving long term consequences, and excessive machismo–would also explain the VIPER squads.
This certainly does not apply to all of them, but some cops really get off on uniforms, and with taking away people’s rights. I think we can with safety assume the Obama Administration is looking for and hiring those sorts of people preferentially.
If you watch that video, what these jackasses did was literally make an entire busload of people take part in what amounted to a training exercise. This included patting down and searching the baggage of people they had no cause to suspect had committed a crime, and who had not authorized this search in advance.
That should make everyone with a heartbeat and a shred of common sense very nervous. These are Federal agents, doing things even the FBI can’t get away with, and who ultimately report not to Congress but to the President.
Personally, I think the TSA and DHS should be disbanded. As Reagan said, though, approximately, there is nothing closer to eternal life than a federal agency. That, for the reasons I mentioned. Too many careers and incomes become dependent on sustaining the thing, and they are always spending someone else’s money.