It's like having a bank, where the front door is policed by an army, but the backdoor is wide open for employees, and every window in the place is open every day.

Given the amount of theft from airport bags, and hence stolen goods _leaving_ the airport, do you think it's any harder to bring illicit stuff in?

There's a big difference between looking for certain objects that are banned, and looking for objects that are perfectly allowed but might be in the hands of someone other than the owner.

After my incident I went to both of my Senators and my Congressman (in person) and recounted my story. I also followed the TSA procedures for reporting civil abuses, which incidentally was a completely worthless excercise.

Their written response to my Congressman's letter to them was, "We followed procedure".

They also try to identify dangerous people. That is what the TSA "no-fly" list is all about. The fact that it worked so poorly is evidence that trying to identify dangerous people has been even less effective than identifying dangerous things, and has a greater impact on civil liberties.

Furthermore your opinion about what a small group of dangerous people can do is over-inflated. FAA regulations mandate a locked pilot cabin during flight. This lock is strong enough that an unarmed man, no matter how motivated, should be unable to get into the cockpit. This does not make breaching the cockpit impossible, but it makes it harder. Particularly since, following the initial attacks on 9/11, on multiple occasions it has been demonstrated that people on airplanes will take extraordinary risks to subdue attempted terrorists.

They definitely seem to focus on identifying people rather than things. Seems to work ok for them under much harsher conditions than the US has ever or, hopefully, will ever know.

TSA is $8billion, FBI is $9billion, DHS is $55billion.

As the US military uses less air conditioning in Afghanistan, that should free up at least a couple billion.

I imagine if you paid what it really cost to have screeners with that level of training we'd be talking about a pretty hefty increase over the FBI. Mind boggling.

[edit]

Probably to ICE for government provided IP protection and enforcement without due process.

That's two months of traffic for Hartsfield-Jackson.

The Israeli security model will not scale.

Your site serves 20'000 users a month. There are more than a billion potential internet users in the world. Your site will not scale.

Everything scales if you put the effort into it. Ok, maybe some things don't, but saying "The Israeli security model will not scale" just because it hasn't scaled, without providing further arguments, is a bit like saying "Rails doesn't scale" without providing further arguments. Sure, Rails does things differently from how PHP does the same things, and that means the performance trade-offs are different, but that doesn't mean it can't be engineered to scale.

And if it makes the passengers/developers happier, it may be worth looking into, not dismissing without argument.

I'm saying that requiring a face to face interaction with every person about to board an airplane in an American airport would be unreasonably expensive and introduce massive delays.

I won't deny that it works well in a country with a very high risk of terrorist incidents and a low amount of air traffic.

The US, however, flies 633 million people per year, and is at a much lower risk for terrorist attack.

You've got to pick the right solution for the right problem. Israeli security isn't it.

IMO, there have been exactly two positive security advances post-9/11: you can't barge into the cockpit anymore, and everyone in the air knows to resist attempts to hijack the plane.

Adding more air marshals, creating the draconian TSA, forbidding liquids on flights -- it's not worth the time or money.