My cousin in the early 2000s worked for a R&D company who did some work on the early generation of sniffer machines that detected trace residue of explosives, and biological agents in airports. He had to go to a meeting and flew from Atlanta to boston with a prototype of the machine. He packed it in his carry on case along with his basic tool kit. When he got to security screening he realized that he also had vials of simulants for anthrax, sarain, various explosives, etc etc in that case. He gets into the security screening line and the TSA guy starts asking him all kinds of questions and he just knows he is about to get detained for the simulants which were not clearly marked as such. Instead the guy is like “You can’t take that screw driver with you”

This was figured out in an Dept. Homeland Security "red team" test of the TSA a few years ago, where the TSA failed like 95%+ of the tests against them: https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-fin...

I think the TSA has switched strategies recently, and they've been improving since then. But ultimately, its not the "bag check" where the TSA catches goons, its the random more intense check that they do these days. And sure, going from 95% failure to 80% failure isn't much of an improvement, but its still going to change the calculus of an attacker. When you have a 20% chance of failure before you even board the airplane, that's an issue to your plans.

Furthermore, TSA includes air marshals and the Israeli-style "behavioral" cops who are scanning airports. These are the more successful cops at the job, and the ones we are relying upon for real.

I wouldn't discount the entirety of the TSA just because of the failures of the bag-check program. Again, US Air marshals (armed cops who sit on every aircraft secretly with plain-clothes) are under the TSA and I think the US Air Marshals contributes a LOT to our real security.

Unfortunately, the bag-check thing is mostly security theater, but at the same time, the more "serious" checks vs attackers are more hidden and less well known (as it should be). But security theater might be enough to discourage an attack, or at very least cause our enemies to focus on the bag-check (when our REAL security really lies with other programs). So its a useful distraction IMO. There's a bit of "wink-wink lets not talk about this" going on that you need to understand though.

> I wouldn't discount the entirety of the TSA just because of the failures of the bag-check program.

Bag check programs are focal to these discussions because they cause the most inconvenience to passengers.

> US Air marshals (armed cops who sit on every aircraft secretly with plain-clothes)

Do they really sit on every flight?

No, just on the basic numbers we have available, it would not be possible.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/13264/are-air-m...

No, but I had one sit next to me on a flight to Vegas once. It's a long story, first how we suspected and then when he admitted it as we got off the plane. They do exist though.

Oh, well, if he admitted it, then he must have been a real marshall.

How did you suspect?... (And, who's the other person in the plural?)

Some friends and I were on the way to Vegas. We had a few drinks and I guess hit the limit they serve on a flight. We had been having a conversation with a guy next to us about small talk things, joking, wharever. This guy then looks at the stewardess and says “they’re fine, and there is no need to cut them off”. She then kept bringing drinks until we landed. At that point we started joking he was an air marshall, and he laughed it off.

Once we got in the terminal he kinda flashed his ankle holster and told us to have fun on our vacation. Also mentioned something along the lines that we had made a normally boring 5 hour flight entertaining.

I should add this was 10+ years ago.

The sky-marshal-starter-pack, of course: https://i.redd.it/w67t4ogdmx8y.jpg

Nope, but I've had one sit next to me before on a US bound international flight (in 2005 ish). So they definitely exist.

Interesting ! So they are also on international flights going to the us ! How about outbound international flights where the jet is full of fuel over the US ?

Btw, how did you recognize he was a FAM ?

No. The percentage of flights with air marshals is in the low single digits.

Which makes sense. A JFK to AMS flight is probably a much higher risk for terrorism than say FSD to MOT.

According to the article I read, they're actually less common on flights out of NY and Washington DC- there were pilots complaining that they hadn't seen an air marshal in 6+ months. It sounds like they avoid putting marshals on flights that have other law enforcement officers on them, which is going to be a good chunk of the domestic flights to/from big cities

I have an engraved money clip that happens to have a small 2" maybe pocket knife on it. I would routinely forget to leave it at home, and after the 3rd time of spending $20 to mail it back to myself I finally stopped carrying it.

I'll never forget one TSA agent who accusatorially said he didn't think I was purposely trying to break the law because it was engraved.

Don't even get me started how often my wife gets 'flagged' for extra security.

I've carried a knife blade (approximately an inch), and a screwdriver-type tool onto flights with zero issues many times. I have had to mail back a Leatherman supertool, and since then have never brought it.

Sniffers only detect tagged explosives that are carelessly handled.

I don’t know where or what happened with this machine, as he was the technical lead for his company and they were a sub-contractor on the machine. But it was supposed to be a lot more sensitive accurate and smaller than what they had at the time.

From my understanding they completed their part of the contract and never heard anything else about it.

I think it is an unsolvable problem. There's nothing particular about explosives that makes them easy to discriminate from non-explosives.

I'd love to be proven wrong, though.

The vast majority of explosives can be quickly differentiated from non-explosives by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.

The main practical impediment to detecting concealed explosive material is that some of the explosive substance needs to pass through the GC-MS to be detected. So an explosive with extremely low vapor pressure (e.g. pure PETN) will not be readily detected this way. Plastic explosives made from PETN are more readily detectable, because the plasticizers are more volatile than PETN itself. GC-MS also won't work if the explosive is hermetically sealed so that none of it can reach the detector.

There are also methods based on e.g. terahertz spectroscopy, but AFAIK GC-MS is the most specific and common method of identifying explosive materials.

They actually test for both components of binary explosives in the US TSA. Source: a TSA agent, while he was going through all of my things because I guess I touched a cleaning product with ammonia in it or something.

> Either they keep it under wraps or nobody is trying because they perceive the security to be too high. Or they get caught before they try.

Or, no one really is trying to blow up planes, and we're just wasting money trying to prevent something that never happens.

We're not wasting money trying to prevent something that never happens; we're basically paying career insurance for the powers that be (Tm) in case someone actually /did/ blow up a plane.

They'd look awfully bad if they hadn't done anything to counter the threat, no matter how marginal (Oh, and in fairness - there /are/ people who want to blow up planes, though as a first approximation one could do worse than estimating their number at zero...)

The TSA is a make-work program, not a legitimate security solution. Its only reason for inception was to provide employment for a pool of otherwise unskilled workers. Same with the DHS-- terrorism has always been a concern; we didn't need another law enforcement arm.

Despite either's questionable utility, no public official wants to be responsible for putting so many people out of work or jeopardizing the illusion of safety they provide.

Somehow I doubt this is the real reason TSA exists.

If security were the actual reason, we'd see implementations more akin to Ben-Gurion's.

Instead, we get to subject ourselves to the whims of a department of high school graduates with no particular law enforcement, legal, criminal justice or counter-terrorism expertise snooping through your luggage looking for vibrators.

The TSA is security theater. It does not stop determined parties from smuggling dangerous contraband on airplanes.

Security theater and also a massive federal jobs program and corruption funnel (pouring money into the suppliers of all the “security technology”)

Michael Chertoff, former head of homeland security, accepted a quarter million dollars to "consult" for Rapiscan (body scanners), then helped them secure a $118M contract with the TSA. Corrupt as hell.

https://theintercept.com/2015/05/27/tsa-body-scanner-lobbyis...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Chertoff

Or a small group of careless people who "wanted to see if they could".

I obviously have no idea of their intent.

Okay, then why not pay a bunch of people to stand around and wave people through sham "detectors" we are told can detect weapons/explosives/etc. on our persons/in our luggage, but in reality do no such thing? Why do we have to take off our shoes and put our laptops in separate bins by themselves? The added inconvenience is way greater than even the perception of safety.

Because the other consequence of imposing security theater on the traveling polity is getting them used to jumping through arbitrary, imposed hoops like that.

It's conditioning people to accept and submit to idiocy like this from their government.

All these security checks are mostly a show to calm down people who are obsessed with terrorism. I don’t think that in the history of aviation, a single terrorist attack has ever been prevented by an airport passenger security check.

It's hard to tell isn't it? Since it's know, the bad guys would be stupid to plan something that involved dragging weapons or explosives through the security checks.

Some where stupid and tried and succeeded. A limited number then accidentally set their underwear on fire and a few others managed to make a hole in plane.

Well, all those who tried succeeded.

TSA is generally a joke. Do you think anyone who is seriously attempting something would be dumb enough to get caught by TSA. Sure it might catch a few loonies who have voices telling them to blow up their shoes, but the TSA won't stop a real terrorist plan. It's going to be intelligence and surveillance that catches real threats.

The TSA is useless, but to be fair:

> I'm just saying that we shouldn't ignore the stuff that only total idiots would fall for since history has shown that the opposing team is made up of total idiots.

We do in fact have morons trying to blow up their shoes, and it's not like politicians get anything else right.

> I never hear about TSA thwarting terrorist attempts. Either they keep it under wraps or nobody is trying because they perceive the security to be too high. Or they get caught before they try.

One more possibility: the TSA is horribly incompetent and have a low detection rate for true-positives.

A true positive that was not detected would be self-exposing, no?

No, I would venture that the majority of people flying with pocketknives - or even guns - arent' doing so with the intent to use them on the plane.

Or nobody is trying and security isn’t perceived to be that high.

We don’t have a huge domestic terrorism problem in this country, despite what the media might lead us to believe.

And now none of us will be allowed to travel with drones in our carry-on, all because of one bad actor </s>