Most people I know who object to full-body millimeter-wave scanners either do so on pseudoscientific health claims, or “philosophical” anti-scanner objections that are structurally the same genre as sovereign-citizen or First-Amendment-auditor thinking.
You are, right?
Unless you want to!
The first time I visited a different country I was surprised to see my friend accompany me to the check-in counter and even further to drop me off. In India they wouldn't let you enter the airport if your flight doesn't depart soon enough.
Now you can escort someone to the check-in counter and up to the security checkpoint, and meet people at the luggage area to help with bags.
But in practice it seems rare to do so if there isn’t a particular reason, probably because you’d have to pay to park or ride transit and it’s usually a trek beyond that. Honestly if they allowed you to go through security with the passenger and wait at the gate, I’m not sure how many people would even do it here (or how many passengers would want their loved ones to do so).
I could imagine other conditions potentially but pacemakers have been ruled a non issue for mmWave by academic studies (albeit I can understand still exercising caution despite that).
But mmWave really just is not dangerous. Current generation 5G cellular and WiFi standards are mmWave and they are just as harmless.
Molecular damage just starts showing up with THF/terahertz emissions band but mmWave is in the EHF and is has more than 10x the wavelength of THF (i.e. it is far wider/more gentle than THF). In a very real sense mmWave can't even interact with most of the molecules in your body.
mmWave can interact with the water in your body but at the levels it's being used it's only really useful for seeing the water. You'd needs orders of magnitude more powerful emissions than what these scanners use to actually cause damage at that frequency.
i.e. It's the difference between using the flashlight on your phone to see in the dark and using the concentrated light from solar-thermal heliostats to boil water or heat molten salt. No matter how hard you try, your flashlight is never gonna boil water.
Also I kinda like the process better; the pat-down is nothin', and you can a full table to yourself to recombobulate.
> First-Amendment-auditor thinking.
Uhhh, I like that kind of thinking. Is there something wrong with first amendment auditors now?!
It strikes me that the first clause of this sentence and the last one are unambiguously contradictory.
Right now I don't think there are that many First Amendment auditors around, so there's not much point in passing new laws to deal with them. But if they became more common, it might be necessary to draw the line, as we did in the 90s with stalking.
I didn't suggest it was speech; it's press, no?
Again, I don't have enough context to cast judgment about them being assholes or violating some other law (like harassment, etc) - I don't support that _at all_.
However, the basic right to document one's surroundings in public is absolutely essential to liberty, especially now.
You say "harassment", but that's precisely the problem. Many things that any reasonable person would identify as harassment are protected speech under the First Amendment. So these auditors go around harassing people, knowing that they're causing people emotional distress, because they're bullies who want to make people feel bad.
But walking around with cameras maintaining the unequivocal right to record what happens in the commons seems like a very important and thankless task.
You're thinking of being interviewed by a Federal agent. At no point are you being interviewed at a TSA checkpoint. Generally, they have two agents present for that so they can act as witnesses for each other. The FBI specifically uses the 302 for such an interview. Can you cite the relavant US Code here? I can.
Further, you're assuming I'm lying.
As someone who was present (in the room) as DHS was being formed and witnessed the negotiations around the TSA, the "really shitty, anti-social behavior" is sharing misinformation.
You should look around carefully and see who is actively defending government fraud right now.
If you're honest, you may be shocked.
A major win for the people.
Does it make you feel good to participate in a meaningless charade of security theater? Or would you rather spend your time doing some of value?
I think there is a lot of value in being part of a democratic society that has structured dispute-resolution processes. Part of the cost of that is occasionally going along with something pointless (even if some things warrant civil disobedience, not everything does), and that's a vital democratic responsibility. So yes, I do feel good doing that - the same kind of good I feel when I pick up someone else's litter or give up my time for jury service. If anything, going along with a law you disagree with is harder, and more virtuous, than those.
Law in a democracy ALWAYS lags public sentiment because without sentiment to pander to no politician will lift a finger. Overt sentiment always lags behind closed doors sentiment because practically nobody is gonna display overt sentiment until there's some indication from their experience that support for their sentiment is there. There MUST be room for petty noncompliance to let people discover that the noncompliance in some unknown case is perhaps not bad in order to kick start the process.
People like you are actively working to prevent and delay alignment between the people and the government/laws. If everyone subscribed to your ideology nothing would ever get done. If more people subscribed to it then things would change slower than they do.
You can tell yourself whatever you need to sleep at night but this sort of compliance as a virtue ideology you subscribe to is the evil that keeps our democracies from delivering good results promptly. I'm not saying go murder your neighbor because "fuck the law" or whatever, but an ideology that does not permit for deviance when such deviance is tasteful is a bad one.
Not always, just the last few decades.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1431/
Sure (although I don't think there's ever been a law against being gay, only against particular acts).
> There MUST be room for petty noncompliance to let people discover that the noncompliance in some unknown case is perhaps not bad in order to kick start the process.
Petty noncompliance isn't the only source of information, and even if it was, that doesn't negate the cost to society.
> People like you are actively working to prevent and delay alignment between the people and the government/laws. If everyone subscribed to your ideology nothing would ever get done. If more people subscribed to it then things would change slower than they do.
So the wild swings of public opinion will be tempered somewhat, and society's path will be smoothed. Yes, that's the point. Same spirit as having a constitution and a second chamber rather than making everything run on a simple majority.
> I'm not saying go murder your neighbor because "fuck the law" or whatever
But you are. That's where your ideology leads once people start following it in practice.
I was then subjected to full pat down and a shoe chemical test as a cherry on top.
Might need to try convincing them next time to let me do the metal detector instead.
What's the point of this higher fidelity scanner if it can't tell the difference between a fly and a restricted object?
Whenever my backpack has been pulled aside for various reasons (large metal tools, too many loose wires, water bottle), I'll often get the bomb sniffer wipe.
Cute analogy, but.
Handicap parking tags provide value to those who need them. Depriving them of parking makes their lives harder.
On the other hand, TSA is pure theater, as TFA makes clear. Avoiding this needless ritual saves time for the passenger, for the TSA officers, even for the other passengers, and does not increase risk at all. It's pure win-win.
IANAL but I would be very cautious about lying to a federal agent, or anyone acting in a capacity on behalf of a federal agent (this is all of TSA).
From what I see, it's low risk, though the parent's smartass approach might get you some punishment. Not worth skipping the detector via lie.
> Then I realized I could even skip that.
It would make sense that you weren’t injuring yourself prior to realizing this.
Again, implied. But agreed, you didn’t say it.
Either they're joking (and should've added an emoji) or more likely, parent is being childish and phrasing points to finding a "clever hack" (i.e., not injured). There's nothing clever about unethical and criminal pro tips.
In any case, it's legal to opt-out of the scanners, so why would they care what method you use (really what language you use) to indicate you'd rather get a pat-down than go through the scanners? Either way you're complying with the law.
Any chance one gets to regain freedom, by any method, take it.
In this situation proving someone is lying would be news worthy. You will win in this situation if you stand your ground.
> Random selection by our screening technology prevents terrorists from attempting to defeat the security system by learning how it operates. Leaving out any one group, such as senior citizens, persons with disabilities, or children, would remove the random element from the system and undermine security. We simply cannot assume that all terrorists will fit a particular profile.
I don't know the specifics of the process for selection, but I can confidently say that the process is bigoted.
(obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group)
The Rehat Maryada would suggest that is in no way whatsoever an unreasonable suspicion.
Sure, your manager likely didn't carry one on airplanes .. but that still falls short of being an unreasonable check.
> There's no reason to think that Sikhs are explicitly going out of their way to hide something.
... other than a small, curved sword or dagger that initiated (Amritdhari) Sikhs are required to wear at all times as one of the Five Ks (articles of faith) ordained by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699 you mean?
It seems reasonable, and a number of actual Sikh's would actually agree, to guess that a Sikh who holds their faith to be a matter of importance would absolutely hide a symbolic dagger the size of a letter opener and capable of slitting a throat.
The question facing any border agent tasked with checking Sikh's, of course, is this specific Sikh one that will always try to carry a Kiran, or one that doesn't hold with all that articles of faith guff.
Not exactly an ideology though.
and potential incidental dangers from unrest in confined spaces.
It is not that I have a singular focus on one religion nor one political movement, so much as that the evidence suggests that, currently, some movements have more violent offshoots and a more violent profile. There are a handful of political and religious ideologies in the world that lead to more suicide bombings and hijackings per year than, say, the total number done by believers in Zoroastrianism, Sikhs, Confucians, Hindus, Yazidis, Jews, Buddhists, Libertarians, Democratic Socialists, Freemasons and Christians combined.
If you had, for instance, Jim Jones's cult or the Aum Shinrikyo boarding airplanes and blowing them up on a regular basis, and your response was that a person had to be a single-minded bigot to notice the fact that most airplane bombings originated with this particular ideology, then I'd say you were ignoring facts or willfully making excuses for ideologies which brainwashed people into doing those things. Possibly for reasons related to disliking your own society, which is perfectly fair, but certainly not neutral or scientific.
Notably in India, there have been a few times where Sikhs have been at the head of violent revolts - and a few times where they have been targeted by violent purges/genocides.
They’re generally pretty chill, but they aren’t pacifists.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to say that Sikhs are more or less likely than any other group to be pacifist. I was saying we shouldn't even be having this discussion, and simply scan people for weapons, and use things like actual random screening to help as needed. And that religious reasons for carrying weapons are not a valid excuse.
[edit] To be more specific: An individual with an extreme belief about anything is as dangerous as an extremist member of a group with extreme beliefs. So the smart thing is to look at the beliefs and extramicy of each person. If you find someone trying to board an aircraft who doesn't care if they make it to the end of their flight, that is a security problem.
In contrast, trying to interview and run background checks on every person boarding a plane to figure out if they are an extremist on a mission or not is (a) much more invasive, and (b) much less likely to work out. Especially when you actually don't want to prevent fundamentalists from flying on planes (I don't think preventing some major evangelical church leader or some radical rabbi from flying would even be constitutional, and clearly not a popular move if attempted).
Note that I am not at all advocating for extra security targeting of Sikhs or any other such religious or ethnic targeting. I am just saying that no one should be allowed to carry a weapon on board a commercial airplane, for any reason.
> The bombing of Air India Flight 182 is the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history and was the world's deadliest act of aviation terrorism until the September 11 attacks in 2001. It remains the deadliest aviation incident in the history of Air India, and the deadliest no-survivor hull loss of a single Boeing 747
They always had a pass here in Australia for many years until things tightened up.
Not that I'm a fan, but in general Rules are Rules and making exceptions while fair in some senses will be unfair in others <shrug>.
Circling back to my initial comment- it is the case that there is an actual reason rather than a made up bit of bullshit, to reasonably suspect that a Sikh might be carrying a knife ... if they are they're almost certain to also have a comb .. so that's handy.
I must say, one thing that this reminds me of is what happens if you board an El Al flight. They don't racially profile you, they just ask you some fairly innocuous questions and watch your responses. I assume they have some way of monitoring your blood pressure, heart rate, and pupil dilation at a distance... but this hasn't really changed since the 1980s, when those things had to be read or guessed in realtime by a trained human. They have a phenomenally safe record, for a country under constant terror attacks.
My takeaway from flying El Al is that there is a much better way to deal with security, that analyzes and addresses the potentially bad individual motives of anyone getting on a plane, and mostly lets everyone else pass. Which is to say that security in its best form should be almost transparent to people without malicious intentions. Having good intelligence coupled with treating each person as their own potential bomb threat is far superior to superficially treating everyone as a threat and having no real security, and far better than just creating security theater around certain people because they're of one race or ethnicity. But El Al's methods probably don't scale well to the size of US or European air travel, because you need highly trained people to stand there in the airport make those calls on the fly for every single passenger.
If I were to guess - I'd guess El Al would let a Sikh bring a blade if they looked him in the eye for 10 seconds and decided he was okay.
It's not a great analogy, but the same applies to registered concealed carry gun owners. They're not the people who shoot people.
Still screened and detained 100 percent of the time, sometimes for hours, sometimes having to surrender personal devices, decades later.
The message is very clear.
What were you hoping to achieve by sending that report?
Most people would have just thought "wow, lucky I wasn't caught with that", taken it out of the bag so it didn't happen again and carried on with their lives.
Deviating from that normal response makes it look like you're just trying to cause trouble.
As I wrote in a very different thread, I avoid putting anything in baggage that I might carryon that is even marginally prohibited. I used to do a lot more travel and it's inevitable that knives and the like would inevitable get left in a pocket.
Officer: Look at this knife. You're trying to take this on the plane?
Me: Holy shit I didn't realize that was in my bag.
Officer: Well do you want it back? Or do you want to fly today?
Me: I don't want it.
Officer: Don't mind if I keep it?
Me: It's all yours.
It was a $13 knife, but he liked it.
No doubt that was a security violation, but it's all security theatre.
Now, knives could only be used to commit a crime i.e. assaulting another passenger or crew. Banning liquids does more to prevent terrorists than banning knives. I can see banning them for the same reason concerts ban them, that it is a lot of people in a small space, but that is very different than “national security” or “preventing terrorism”.
> Isn’t that what the scanners are for?
Err, not that I know of, I generally use the OED to look up the various recorded uses of words.
> To find large metallic objects?
The OED is for finding words, "scanners" that I've used or made are for mapping background geological structures via seismic waves, gravitational waves, magnetic waves, gamma waves. Medical scanners I've worked with have generally not bee used for finding large metallic objects and some should not be used if a patient has large metal objects attached or within.
> Why do you need additional “random” screenings behind that?
In 40+ years of scanning things there's not been a single time I've needed an additioan "random" scan - a few times scans have been repeated due to various failures to save data.
> Or are you saying the scanners don’t work to find even obvious weapons?
In the comment you responded to I said that it is not unreasonable to think that a Sikh you meet, anywhere, might be carrying a knife, a comb, a bracelet, etc. I did not mention anything about scanners. No, seriously, go and recheck the comment.
> If so, we should get rid of the scanners.
We? All scanners? Okay, well, thanks for sharing that opinion.
I figure various groups of scanner users will want to keep using them, of course. I personally am in favour of scanners for exploration and medical work.
I mean TSA, but it also applies to other groups too.
I haven't so much as gotten a speeding ticket in nearly a decade but law enforcement and border guards break out the microscope every time they see me.
Whenever we travelled to offsite offices Mohammed 100% of the time was picked for bag check, while Kevin was not picked once.
Mohammed was white, and Kevin was black.
It was completely racist, and never random.
I fixed it by filling out a form requesting a review, after which I received a “redress number” which could be entered into my booking information. It reliably stopped after that.
It may be a racist result but there is a pretty reasonable and understandable reason it happens, ignoring the legality and morality of that kind of tracking as well.
You're so far up your own virtue signalling you've lost touch.
I'm the whitest white person you'll find, white bread and turkey sandwich. I get screened all the time. Most of the time the agents are not white, WTF would I blame the color of their skin?
More at 11.
When it comes to customs & border, it's more about being "ethnically terrorist", which is more so Middle Eastern than Black in US at this particular moment in time.
I always say "my penis" and they say "uh.. well.. I'm not going to touch that"
Me: "When you slide your hand up until you meet resistance? That resistance is my penis. You're going to touch my penis and it's a sensitive area."
I fly next week, I will have to decide whether having this conversation is worth not trying to get out of the opt-out procedure. The difficulty will be keeping a straight face.
I did meet a lot of older TSA agents who told me they tried to stand as far away from the scanners as possible all day, and they completely understood my position on not going through em. I'm from LA, and I remember when this happened [0] so my general view on letting anyone shoot any kind of imaging radiation through me is pretty dim, but more so if they can't count to ten or tie their own shoelaces.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-oct-13-me-cedar...
To a great extent, it is security, even if it's mostly security theater, in the sense that it is security theater that people want.
A large portion, maybe even the majority, of travelers simply won't feel safe without it. I've had and overheard multiple conversations at the airport where somebody felt uncomfortable boarding a plane because they saw the screening agent asleep at the desk. Pro-tip, trying to explain security theater to the concerned passenger is not the right solution at this point ;-)
Even Bruce Schneier, who coined the term "security theater" has moderated his stance to acknowledge that it can satisfy a real psychological need, even if it's irrational.
We may be more cynical and look upon such things with disdain, but most people want the illusion of safety, even if deep down they know it's just an illusion.
I’d hazard that this may be true now, but this feeling was created by the same “security measures” we’re discussing.
Anyway, such major population-wide measures shouldn’t be about stopping people being “uncomfortable” - they should be about minimising risk, or not at all. If you start imposing laws or other practices every time a group of people feel “uncomfortable”, the world will quickly grind to a halt.
Slight tangent but I recall travelling within the Schengen Zone for the first time and just walking off the plane and straight into a taxi. When I explained what I did to someone she asked "but what about security? How do they know you've not got a bomb?" I don't think I had the words to explain that, if I did manage to sneak a bomb onto the plane into Madrid, I was probably not going to save it for the airport after I landed...
Hopefully they haven't changed. It's nice to see a place still left without the paranoia.
I mean, yes, quite an apt description of our reality. This has basically been the modus operandi of the whole of American society for the last 3 decades.
Can't have your kids riding bikes in the neighborhood. Can't build something on your own property yourself without 3 rounds of permitting and environmental review. Can't have roads that are too narrow for a 1100 horsepower ladder truck. Can't get onto a plane without going through a jobs program. Can't cut hair without a certificate. Can't teach 6 year olds without 3 years of post grad schooling + debt. Can't have plants in a waiting room because they might catch on fire. Can't have a comfortable bench because someone who looks like shit might sleep on it.
Can't can't can't can't ...
I lived in Switzerland for a time and there are many notorious rules (e.g. don't shower or flush your toilet after 10pm; don't recycle glass out of working hours) governing day-to-day behaviour which initially seem ridiculous and intrusive. However, what you quickly realise is that many of these are rooted in a simple cultural approach of "live your life as you wish, just don't make other people's life worse" - an approach I came to appreciate.
What I’m trying to say is that , while a lot of it is theater, TSA may be more effective security against foreigners but you as a resident don’t notice because you can opt out. Try going to the UK and telling them you can’t raise your arms while being a US citizen.
This was the only time I've gone through the machine since they were introduced.
Meanwhile, I haven’t even had a western airports metal detector even fire on the same belt in years.
And airport security in Israel makes Indian airport security feel like a breeze and I found Turkish airport security to be similar to India's (I remember landing in IST a couple years ago post-COVID and how the news monitors all blared about the 3-6 Turkish soldiers who died in Turkish controlled Syria the day previously).
All three are in very tenuous neighborhoods where the risks of mass casualty terror attacks remains a very real possibility and no on-duty officer wants to be the one who's name comes up in an inquiry into a terror attack should they happen.
Also, from what I remember you are either a Chinese national or someone who has travelled significantly to China. It's the equivalent of a Russian national or Russian-origin person traveling to Poland or Estonia post-2022. Anyone with that profile falls under stricter scrutiny in India due to reciprocal treatment of Indian-nationals and Indian-origin people from Arunachal [6][7] and Ladakh [8] as well as the multiple recent India-China standoffs.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Delhi_car_explosion
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Nowgam_explosion
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Bengaluru_cafe_bombing
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Reasi_attack
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Pahalgam_attack
[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_India%E2%80%93Pakistan_co...
[6] - https://indianexpress.com/article/world/who-is-prema-thongdo...
[7] - https://idsa.in/publisher/comments/china-ups-the-ante-in-aru...
[8] - https://www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/why-china-is-e...
The needless repetition and duplication of tasks achieves little actual "security" and is more a jobs program for a population that is desperately underskilled, underemployed and borderline unemployable. Never mind the fact that airports like Bombay are literally meters away from slums, which are a far greater security risk than actual passengers.
Your list of citations is entirely meaningless because Indian airports are no more or less secure than the average airport in the west. What India manages to do extremely well is annoy the daylights out of travellers for mindless bureaucratic reasons.
Please can you explain how security stamping the back of your boarding pass meaningfully adds to "security" and how fifteen checks of your passport could have avoided a single one of the incidents you list?
Not just in Israel, but even at other airports for flights to Israel! I was surprised to find that flights to Israel from JFK and EWR actually have a secondary security screening at the gate. In fact, the entire waiting area is walled off with only 1 or 2 controlled entries and exits. If you have to leave the area to go to the bathroom, well, you're just going to get screened again when you come back.
And they are very thorough. They WILL rummage through your carry on and purse and shoes.
(I wasn't even traveling to Israel, I was at an adjacent gate but got in the wrong line by mistake, haha!)
Brit here.
That's simply the British way of "calling you out" on your bullshit. Had you given a legitimate reason not to be scanned (and I can't think of one offhand), then I assure you, they would have been quite nice and helpful; certainly so in comparison to American standards of airport security staff!
The point where you present your ticket+ID is before and separate from the physical screening. It could be anywhere from a few meters to dozens of meters separating them.
At the screening stage, the agents do not know who you are or your nationality.
> when you are asked to be patted down, having the courage to lie "I can't raise my arms over my head"
You only get a pat down if you trigger additional screening or opt out. Not being able to raise my arms is NOT opting out. Therefore, no pat down.
If enough people actually cared about the failed audits, we’d invest in making sure they didn’t fail.
As it is, it’s settled in this funky middle ground that seems to maximize cost/incompetence/hassle which is generally the picture of America overall.
Saucers for eyes, saucers! Hah
The reality is that screening raises the bar enough that most casuals won’t risk it unless they’re crazy, which is worth something, and makes most people feel comfy, which is also worth something.
It’s like using a master lock on your shed, or a cheap kwikset on your front door.
Repeated examples on HN
- TSA effectiveness
- AI Writing code free bug
- Self driving cars get into accidents
Maybe you are willing to pay 15% for AI that saves you 20%. Even if it isn't very effective, you come out slightly ahead. Or maybe you pay 85% for something you deem to be 90% effective
With TSA you pay 300% for something you might judge to be 2% effective and you don't have a choice.
- Self driving cars have measurably fewer accidents.
If you're confusing the two, I suggest you look into the data.
*Not sure on AI code yet.
Or... you could slip the TSA person a $50 and say "keep the change". Legally.
There is no risk in submitting false documents. They reject valid documents all the time. They don't report you to authorities when they reject your documents.
So neither avenue is like even a cheap lock. They are more like door knobs that keep the door closed until you twist the knob that is designed to be easy to twist.
Except the risk you'll miss your flight, which in most cases is the screw that is turned.
My wife and I both have RealID driver's licenses. She had to get a replacement, and apparently the machines used to print them for mailing out later (as opposed to going down to their office and getting a replacement in person) are just ever so slightly off - so her license won't scan. She was given a surprising amount of harassment on a flight not long ago over this matter. She got me to take a photograph of her passport and send it to her so she could show it on the return trip - where her license again failed to scan. This is a fairly well-documented problem. Reports from all over the country have it, and it always seems to be certain license printers that just fail.
So now she carries her Global Entry card, which is otherwise only used for access to the expedited line for land and sea border crossings but is a valid RealID in itself, for domestic flights. It scans correctly.
You get one set of people's rights compromised to salve the feelings of another set, and this is not right.
The worst thing is that indulging it doesn't lessen the fear either. It just means people reach for something else to be "afraid" of.
You can do the wokeness and treat everyone the same but that's not how policing works.
The problem with profiling is that it sucks both ways. People who are regular degular get fucked for the sake of fake policing, and then real threats are more likely to slip through.
What I’m hearing is that if I want to get something past your security policy, I need to route it through the Netherlands, possibly via a travel agency.
What a weird and random thing to say. There's literally no data that can support for or against and neither have a history of terrorism.
Ironically KLM ('dutch') has had more terrorism per flight than any Bolivian airline. Both minimal (Bolivia 1954, KLM 1973,1994). There's literally no other piece of data between these countries that I could find to support this "lower risk".
Further, the travel advisory for Denmark and Netherlands cite terror risk while Bolivia cites civil unrest.
While being woke is not helpful, neither is 'winging it' based on 'what feels white, ahem, right'. At least do a Google search.
My dad, with similar features, had the additional (mis)fortune of several work trips to the Middle East and China on his passport. He was "randomly" selected pretty much every time on his US trips, until about ~10 years ago.
Hmmm, now I wonder. Like most other people I had suspected that the "random" screenings of people fitting a certain profile were just biases of the agents creeping in. But could it be, given that the whole process is rather public in view of the rest of the people in line, this is also part of that security theater... i.e. maybe the agents are sometimes pandering to the biases of the travellers?
Normalize having two lines; one with tsa, one without. See which airplane people actually board after a while. Let us put our time and money on the line and we’ll see what we really think. It’s the only way to tell.
I’m sure in a world with tsa for buses and trains some people would say the same things they do now about our tsa.
But I personally do not care that much, because I think most terrorists are dumb or crazy, and you can't fix all dumb or crazy. Some of the dumb and crazy become terrorists, some become CEO-s, some do maintenance of something critical. If something really bad happens I would not feel much better if it was a "dumb CEO" that caused it or it was a "dumb terrorist".
What about the real psychological need of not wanting to be surveilled that also quite a lot of people have?
In particular concerning Facebook:
The very radical stances that people have concerning Facebooks (i.e. both the success of Facebook, and the existence of people who are radically opposed to social media sites) rather shows that both stances are very present in society and the trenches between these stances run deep.
If it was "Glass Iraq or make people take off their shoes", then I'll take the shoes...
But honestly? Fuck these people. We have extended them unlimited credit to make social change, and they always want more and worse changes. Their insecurities are inexhaustible. We need to declare them bankrupt of political capital. We need to bully them and make it clear their views aren't welcome, frankly.
We are 25 years deep into "Letting the terrorists win", and I'm fucking sick of it.
If you let it be known that the FDA inspection amounts to a high school dropout trying to read a manifest on a shipping container full of imported cinnamon, a lot more people will opt for the cheaper cinnamon. But a significant percentage will still pay the premium.
There is very little about that inspection that protects people, and just because something is not inspected doesn't mean it has lead in it. If you really want to be safe, you should run your cinnamon through your own detection lab.
What we need is an iPhone app that can detect guns, explosives, anthrax, covid, Canadians, and any other airplane hazard. Then let people carry that personal TSA sniffer onto the plane. They can feel safe and secure and the rest of us can save a fortune in taxes.
No doubt! Then strap it to our arms and call it a Pip Boy.
If you fly intrastate in Alaska there is no screening on commercial flights (it seems TSA must not be required on non-interstate flights). Technically it's still illegal to bring a gun but no one would know one way or the other. It really didn't bother me that there was no security, in fact, it felt great, and at least I could be sure if a bear met us on the tarmac someone would probably be ready.
I know of one other story I heard secondhand from someone experiencing it, of a small regional airline in the South, where if you checked a gun, the pilot just gives it back to the passenger...
If the passenger is white. They would call the cops on anyone else. The state dept of terrorism would get involved if they were 1/1000 middle eastern.
Nonsense. Most of that is just because it’s been normalised - because it exists and the people manning it make such a song and dance about it. Going from that to nothing would freak some people out, but if it were just gradually pared back bit by bit people wouldn’t need it anymore.
Here in Australia there’s no security for a lot of regional routes (think like turboprop (dash-8) kind of routes) starting from small airports, because it’s very expensive to have the equipment and personnel at all these small airports, and on a risk-benefit analysis the risk isn’t high enough. Some people are surprised boarding with no security, but then they’re like, “Oh, well must be OK then I guess or they wouldn’t let us do it”…
We also don’t have any liquid limits at all for domestic flights, and don’t have e to take our shoes off to go through security domestically or internationally, and funnily enough we aren’t all nervous wrecks travelling.
It's been proven from time to time that the strength of a security system is mostly determined by its strongest element, and defense in depth, and making people jump through hoops contributes comparatively little.
That's why you can go reasonably anywhere on the web, and have your computer publically reachable from any point in the world, yet be reasonably safe, provided you don't do anything particularly dumb, like installing something from an unsafe source.
That's why these weird security mitigation strategies like password rotation every two weeks with super complex passwords, and scary click-through screens about how youll go straight to jail if you misuse the company computer are laughable.
I used to "punish" the rude or particularly slow ones by insisting on a private screening (since that involves two officers, and Is A Whole Thing) but I haven't gotten a rude one in a few years. But that also just makes it take even longer.
Just because you can get around TSA checkpoints doesn't mean it's not "about" security. There's only so much that can be done when we have to balance safety and convenience.
2) those scanning machines have leaked their images before to the public so its okay not to want to go through them and have your.png on there forever.
Are we saying that if they stopped doing that there would not be an increase in incidents?
Or is it that they are overly performative? I’ve never been all that annoyed with raising my hands above my head, but it seems like, in your case, if a passenger can’t do that, they would make an exception for you anyways. Which seems fair?
Never was.
I flew every other week prior to covid and haven't once been through the scanners. For the first ~6 years, I opted out and got pat down over and over again.
Then I realized I could even skip that.
Now at the checkpoint, I stand at the metal detector. When they wave me to the scanner, I say "I can't raise my arms over my head." They wave me through the metal detector, swab my hands, and I'm done. I usually make it through before my bags.
Sometimes, a TSA moron asks "why not?" and I simply say "are you asking me to share my personal healthcare information out loud in front of a bunch of strangers? Are you a medical professional?" and they back down.
Other times, they've asked "can you raise them at least this high?" and kind of motion. I ask "are you asking me to potentially injure myself for your curiosity? are you going to pay for any injuries or pain I suffer?"
The TSA was NEVER about security. It was designed as a jobs program and make it look like we were doing something for security.