I've been anti-TSA for a long time now. They are there to do a very important job, but I feel that - for many reasons - they are completely inept and do the public very little good whatsoever.
Ever since 9/11 our country has been in a heightened state of concern when it comes to travel, specifically air. Under the guise of helping, politicians went to work and created any number of rules to keep us safer. However, being politicians, really what they were doing was finding ways to protect future elections as the measures taken to keep us safe are questionable in their ability to do so.
I have always been a supporter of well trained staff doing the job. Given quality training, pay, and structure many things can go right to keep this country safe -- AND not have to violate the public much more than before 9/11. There have been many things written about the TSA and things it does wrong. The most recent (I've read) being one where the author likened the TSA workers to be being dermatologists. Previously they required inspection of an elderly lady's diaper. And I'm sure that most everyone has heard at least one story of the 'horrific' pat down of a young child.
Now I don't fully believe all of these stories, nor do I think they are representative of the overall day to day experience... "So why do you even bother writing this. I mean, if it's the minority experience, why does it matter if it keeps us all safe?"
Excellent question! The reason I'm writing about this is because it doesn't need to happen at all. Sure sometimes the wrong people will be pulled aside, but it doesn't have to happen like the above stories suggest. I haven't even started talking about the full body scanners delivering questionably safe amounts of radiation through out our entire body and being able to identify what I had for lunch (no, not literally, but they see a lot).
This country has put a lot of money into revamping the TSA. This article mentions 80 million spent with 73 million of that in stimulus funds (please note that I take Fox News articles with a grain of salt... point is that TSA has spent a lot. I'm not going to quibble about number or the source of the funds here). Isn't there a better way to protect us with out having to violate us? I believe there is.
There are parts of this world that have existed with real concerns of terrorism on a daily basis - not to take away from the pain and suffering from 9/11, but there are people in this world that go to work/school each and every day not knowing if they or someplace they are going will be blown up. Within one of these areas is, what most everyone agrees is, the safest airport in the world: Ben Gurion International, in Tel Aviv.
Why are they the safest? It's not because they have body scanners every 3 feet or have agents giving you a rub down without even buying dinner first. It's because of training. Here two articles talk about what the airport does (1); (2).The training is in profiling, but not the sort of profiling US citizens think of. Granted, as the article states, racial/ethic profiling is most likely involved, but everyone gets questioned - everyone. But it's just questioning and how you respond that determines whether you are in column A or column B. The overall security at this airport is also above and beyond what we generally expect, but it's not as intrusive as our TSA practices are now. From this article: "Israeli airport security, much of it invisible to the untrained eye, begins before passengers even enter the terminal. Officials constantly monitor behavior, alert to clues that may hint at danger..." Yes, TSA questions you, but they don't do it consistently and they aren't trained to ask specific questions to look for specific responses. I spoke with one person who was in line for a flight and one TSA agent asked everyone a few questions looking at them while checking the paperwork. The next line over had a TSA agent that barely said anything as he / she looked at the paperwork. This sort of inconsistency doesn't work.
Only 2-5 % of people are selected into column B. Now column B is no picnic. If you are selected you stand to lose hours of your life and have it looked through (as well as all of your luggage) with a fine toothed comb. Also included could be a intense interrogation. But the rest of the passengers pass through with little to no problems.
To put this in perspective I've pulled together numbers from a wiki article for global flight stats. I can't speak to how accurate they are, but they seem reasonable to my untrained eye. Based on the data I took the top US passengers total / 365 / 2. To get a daily departure estimate (assumed 50/50 split arrival and departure). So my assumptions are the following: 872,496 people get on flights in the US daily, 13 airports host these passengers. So based on a 2-5 % column B number, anywhere from 1342-3355 passengers would be set aside from the over 67 thousand passengers that travel per airport per day. This is as opposed to 67 thousand passengers waiting in line for who knows how long to be patted down or scanned and potentially pulled aside for who knows why.
I don't know about you, but I'd much prefer that. Partly because I have nothing to hide, so I think my chances of being in the 2-5 % are pretty low. But also because I feel that properly trained personnel - both in overall security as well as the polyglots who do the questioning - would make flying highly more efficient for the 95-98 % of us who are non-risks.
It's not all sunshine and roses however. I found this short article that sites the Israeli methods are not scale-able to the US. There's actually a few nice comments on this. I think it's very scale-able... it's just a question of how much the US want's to pay. Passengers are always complaining about the price of tickets, baggage costs, etc. If the overall experience of getting to your flight can be improved, it might actually be worth it.
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