https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Atat%C3%BCrk_Airport_atta...
3 Terrorists total. The attack went as follows : 2 terrorists queue up in an Xray machine line, and suddenly start shooting people. One of the terrorists is shot down and a few seconds later he detonated a suicide vest.
What does an airport security line do at that point ? Well, of course it fails open. Security abandoned their posts and none of the security guards responded for minutes to the second attacker in the line walking around and shooting people. He walked right through, got on an escalator and continued shooting people for ~2 minutes. Eventually a security officer (one wandering around by himself, not identified) shot him from a distance, looked up close at the attacker, and ran away (the terrorist exploded shortly after that, I hope the guy made it out). A third terrorist blew himself up in what was essentially a security pre-check line outside the airport.
Any chokepoint, of course, is a terrorist target at an airport. I've been to Istanbul airport. It's big, but not that big. In this attack 45 people died and 230 were wounded. There are plenty of far bigger airports where that number would have been way up. Thankfully I do think security personnel would not just immediately abandon their posts in the US when something like this happens.
That of course means that TSA makes things worse in some ways and provides a target for terrorists unless they avoid making lines. Heh. "Somehow" that doesn't seem to be the conclusion they're drawing from this. In fact I am unaware of any official responses to these attacks.
The end result, is the airlines have no desire to improve the process. If you get angry at the security theatre, you think to blame the government, not the airline. The government and DHS has no desire to improve the process, they just want to keep costs down, while simultaneously making sure they are publicly notable to justify their existence.
Want to fix it? What if we: made the airlines pay for and run their own security. And make the DHS audit those security practices, instead of implementing them. Just one of many possible ideas.
That is not entirely true. Delta have spent money to improve the TSA process in Atlanta (I believe mostly by adding automation and more areas for people to unload their belongings) and have also spent money at other airports to relieve TSA congestion.
I work for an airport and have heard many times that the airlines have considerable frustration with the process - it's not uncommon to hear people say that they would rather drive than fly due to the hassle of security. Airlines are usually very aware of lost revenue due to these kinds of factors.
I completely agree re where the blame lays.... my understanding is that the TSA have actually asked for additional funding to have more staff on the lines but Congress has denied this. The TSA is not actually a requirement either - airports can run their own security but my understanding is that they would still require TSA oversight so any cost savings are negligible.
This wouldn't help my complaint, fwiw.
My complaint isn't the lines.. i experience long lines all the time, i'm used to it. My problem is this feeling like suddenly, we're all criminals.
We're cattle, on the verge of being violated, and all it will take is a sneeze or an awkward look.[1]
To me, they are like "bad cops". You can meet a good cop and even if you did wrong (speeding ticket/etc), you feel comfortable and at ease (hopefully) around his/her professional attitude and behavior. The bad cops though, they just have this aura of unwarranted power, and you just hope they don't desire to spend some of it on you. That is TSA in the majority of cases to me.
The line isn't the problem for me.
[1]: edit, this isn't true of course, but it's how i feel.
Good to know. My own point at which airlines are worth the hassle has increased from a 6 hour one-way drive to 14 since the security "improvements" began. Which means that I'm regularly spending ~6-8 additional hours on the road simply to avoid an ~2 hours of airport security unpleasantness[1]. Driving > 6hrs generally costs more too. And it's still worth it to avoid the security process.
[1] even better - once through security I can look forward to a cramped, unpleasant experience for the duration of the flight (6'2" guarantees miserable - the $20/inch of legroom option notwithstanding).
Airlines are competing against other forms of travel (I, for example, mostly just drive everywhere I can these days, though this is only in part due to the TSA checkpoints: there's tons of stuff to hate about air travel if you can avoid it) and travel as a concept is competing against other activities (whether leisure or business: if you don't enjoy travel, you are less likely to just randomly hop on a plane and go somewhere; you take more phone calls and watch more television).
Airports are also competing against other airports, and usage of TSA employees is optional: when I was still bothering to fly in and out of the Bay Area I chose SFO over SJC because I preferred the private SFO security guard over real TSA employees. The incentives might be mild (as again, there are tons of other things for them to optimize), but they definitely do exist; if nothing else, "correctly optimize the number of employees to manage long lines" seems like a big win.
https://skift.com/2016/05/27/more-airports-may-ditch-the-tsa...
> Still, airports that have switched to private firms say they consider the contractors more responsive and better able to adjust staffing to address traffic surges and lulls.
> Delta and United airlines will spend as much as $4 million each hiring extra workers to manage the lines at this busiest airports.
This seems crazy to me - the security line at SJC takes about four minutes to get through and you can park about a hundred feet away from the checkpoint. SFO takes FOREVER to get through.
I hope you don't mean the unarmed minimally trained TSA staff that earn next to minimum wage. I highly doubt they'll protect you over themselves. Hell, many of them are obese (this is America) and physically unable to engage in such a scenario.
To be fair they don't even have non-lethal armaments, but it does again point to how useless the operation is in the face of a person who isn't just mad because their flight is delayed.
Makes testing expensive
I think they need to setup a maze system where passengers/fans queue in to a system where can be scanned as they go through and directed to lower and higher risk areas something bullet/blast resistant where people can be physically isolated from each other (and from gaining access) as they pass through security and everyone can be locked down (or automatically directed to exit the facility) if an event happens so there isn't a free run through security. And make it large enough where people can get in to the system quickly so you don't have large groups of people standing waiting outside. Something with lots of angled areas as you enter and get you isolated, scanned directed in to the facility or over to higher security area for further processing.
Can every church and store and mall and stadium in the world do this? If not it won't do anything. And if so, then we move on to other ways.
They will say they are trying to kill people to help their cause, but it's more likely that they operate as any other 'business'. They try to impress the 'investors' (e.g. Wahhabis with oil money), so they can get more resources and expand into other 'markets'.
This is security theatre. Trying to apply logic doesnt work. There was a report a few years ago, accidentally leaked, by TSA showing that 911-style hijacking was no longer possible. Nobody with small knives could ever take a cockpit, not with 100 post-911 passengers watching.
But if the terrorists are mainly just causing fear instead of harm, doesn't it make sense to counter it by making people feel safer instead of actually making them safer, especially if you practically can't do the latter?
Food for thought...
As for the point of sense of safety vs. real safety (impossible) is a well taken one. But this false safety could be dispensed with much lower costs for the citizens (both in terms of money and inconvenience).
If we are talking about suicide bombings, I don't see how this changes anything. If they don't get through, they will just blow themselves up as soon as they get randomly selected.
Or in other words, ignore concerns about profiling and implement an Israeli style security operation.
I think it has a lot to be said for it. Profiling + politeness + a firm boundary on mandate (e.g. no drug convictions by airport security) doesn't seem that bad. Especially compared to what amounts to the same thing except with a vast security army of more poorly trained agents.
Ethnically profiling selection without ethnically profiling assumption isn't a nuance I'd trust the average TSA agent to perform well.
Being brown skinned an arab or a muslim isn't what would put you on top of their threat ranking.
It would be the exact opposite if 100% of the ethnically profiled individuals were terrorists.
The video playing ? "we are working so you won't get hit by diseases"
There must be some real sadists working at government airport regulators.
No need to carry around all of that extra bulk and weight on your body when when you can pack it into a wheeled carryon bag. You don't even need to keep it under carryon size since the airlines don't (usually) screen for size until you get to the gate.
Strap on 20 - 40 lbs of extra weight and you won't move naturally anymore, at least without lots of training.
The security lines are definitely a softer target than needing to get on the plane, but soft targets are easy to find anyway.
Reason has nothing to do with it. The number of deaths due to car accidents, even falling down the stairs, is much greater. The main impact of terrorism is the irrational fear, not the rational risk aversion. But it's much easier to stamp out terrorism by force, hard as that may be, than to convert human beings into rational animals.
The goal of terrorists is to achieve power through violence. The gold standard would be the PLO, now the PA. The ANC also did extremely well with this strategy.
There are two effective ways to combat terrorism. One is to surrender to the terrorists. Neither the PLO, nor the ANC, nor the IRA, is setting off any bombs these days. Works great especially if surrounded by a cloud of euphemisms.
The other is to treat the terrorism as an isolated incident and counterattack on the political front. Consider the response to Timothy McVeigh or especially Dylann Roof -- textbook. Great stuff, America still knows how to do it.
If terrorism is committed in the name of the Confederate flag, ban the Confederate flag and crack down on white nationalists everywhere. Even the peaceful ones. Especially the peaceful ones. No one ever said that the best way to defeat racist terrorism is to satisfy the legitimate grievances of moderate racists. But if the USG adopted this strategy, the GOP would probably grow a "militant wing" in well under a decade...
Let's talk about this.
What kind of objective is this? For insight into the psychology of terrorists can I consider the psychology of "trolls"? (i.e. mostly harmless Internet trolls). Or people just generally trying to wreak havoc "for the lolz"?
Or is it different? What I mean is that people like Chomsky accuse the United States of being "terrorists" in whenever he thinks the United States meets some technical definition -- but the United States has some kind of political goals and it's not an end in itself to just have a bunch of people "scared" or "killed and injured". The U.S. doesn't say, "hey could we scare a billion people!! Yeah let's do it!!" Which is precisely what you quoted as the terrorist's objective: "it is to scare people".
So what is the actual motivation of terrorists? Why is it motivating to "scare people"? (For the same reason as trolls are motivated?) Some people ascribe religious motivations for it, but I read through the Koran (you can read it easily here[1], it should take you under an hour, it's very repetitive. Copied into a Word document in 10-point single-spaced font it's 180 pages but you can scroll through it very quickly) and I did not once see anything like "Thou shalt scare people" or "Thou shalt wreak havoc by killing and injuring the highest number of people." I searched for "scare" and did not see that word. So in effect I don't understand why you say the primary rational objective of terrorists is to scare people.
It doesn't really make sense unless it's the same as Internet trolls. I'd like more insight.
[1] http://www.archive.org/stream/thekoranalquran02800gut/koran1...
If you want to get it down to 181 pages to read quickly 1) open the above link 2) select all of it and copy it 3) In word select 10-point font, single (1.0 spacing), 3) paste it into word using the Paste dropdown button in the ribbon, to paste as text only which is the third dropdown option (alternatively you could paste it into some plain text editor and then select all and copy it again and then paste it into Word or I guess since it's .txt you could just download it). This will just paste the text but have a bunch of extraneous line breaks. Next do a search and replace for every instance of "^p" (without the quotes, which means new paragraph) with nothing or even better as a single space (since replaced with nothing, some words run together but this didn't bother me). this will substantially reduce the thing. If you did the single-spacing right you will get 181 dense but highly repepetitive and readable pages of the Qu'ran. I next used the scroll wheel (by pressing down on it) to begin scrolling through all of it and attempted to alight my eyes on each section enough to read it "at a glance" (like speed reading.)
At 24 seconds per page (I timed it and this is what I considered a readable scroll speed) the whole thing should take you about 1 hour 16 minutes. I encourage you to do it! Just focus. Stop if you really need to focus on something.
I read War and Peace this way. It's about some Russians. (I'm kidding, this last part is a woody allen joke.)
You won't find "scare" as the objective for any terrorist. After 9/11 OBL made a statement on their attacks and what he hoped would happen. He also included his long, rambling list of objectives AQ was after.
Why would any country say, "Oh hey so those 12 civilians your foot soldiers just killed with that truck attack in Berlin really got us thinking. So anyhoo what do you want we'll gift you whatever. We know you don't celebrate it but consider it our Christmas gift. Merry Christmas. :)"
I mean who reacts that way? It seems the stupidest possible way to accomplish anyone's goals of any kind. It just seems like a much worse form of pointless trolling, except with real casualties. It just gets a rise out of people.
So I essentially don't get the cause and effect that you seem to describe. It just seems like a bunch of trolls, not actual people meeting actual political goals. It seems stupid and unconstructive. We know there are stupid and unconstructive Internet places (thankfully Hacker News isn't one of them) - so isn't it just the same thing on a much larger level? Just toxic stuff?
The point of those attacks in western countries is to force their hand and make them withdraw their occupying forces. To rethink their foreign policy and make sure they don't see it as worth it anymore.
The biggest hawks were for the Iraq War before they were against. Then the troop body count was getting higher from sniper and IED attacks. A few years later a new president and electorate doesn't see the cost as worth staying and the withdrawal occurs. Terrorists mission accomplished!
The colonial forces largely employed guerrilla tactics as well, out of necessity when facing a larger, better financed and trained British army. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare#American_Re...
Is it illogical that someone would react that way though? Not at all. Here is the logic: "Someone killed people in my country. I like people in my country. I happen to be a leader for my country. I'm responsible for their protection. I should prevent more people dying. Why are they dying? People are killing them. How do I make them stop? Give them what they want? What is it they want (now listening to them)?" etc.
This is why there is a "we will not negotiate with terrorists" rule. If not for that rule I think it'd work pretty well.
For my discussion, I simply used the Merriam-Webster dictionary[0]. It says "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion". You are correct, their final objective is not to just scare people but to get something else. But I believe the immediate objective of the terror action is to scare people so to get to their final objective.
I would like to understand this train of thinking because I don't see any consequence to scaring people. Online trolls don't accomplish any larger objective, for example. What do terrorists have in mind?
I am inclined to just think of them as trolls.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_California_medfly_attack
- foster Islamophobic sentiments in neighboring regions
- destabilize local power structures
these people are getting exactly what they want.
If this is the threat model, why a rational terrorist should try to put the bomb on a plane? The Brussel Terror Attack has shown exactly this[0]. Terrorist killing themselves at the check-in counter (but they could have chosen the security lanes).
Obviously, we need airport security because the threat model is not only terrorists but also hijackers and smugglers (and non-rational terrorists?). Obviously, the risk of using the hijacked plane as a bomb, like in 11/9 is still a risk, but other measures like reinforced cabin doors are more effective for that.
So, basically, the TSA is a failure in making people safer and but a huge success in making traveler life miserable. TSA Pre-Check is nothing but them keeping on with their "good work".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Brussels_bombings#Brussel...