The Pointless "Security" At Airports Stops Everyone But The Criminals
As I've said for years, anybody who can make it in this blog's comments section without bursting into tears is smart enough to get something smuggled onto an airplane.
And so we see from a story in the Daily Mail by Jennifer Smith:
Ten American Airlines workers have been arrested for putting 66kgs of fake drugs onto flights out of Dallas's Fort Worth airport as part of an undercover FBI sting.According to prosecutors in Texas, the men transported the drugs in suitcases and backpacks from August 2016 to February this year.
...To get past security, the men arranged to have the drugs put on planes and bypassed security measures for mules, their indictment claims.
The drugs were sent on planes to North Carolina, New Jersey and Arizona where they were picked up by FBI agents at the other end of the route.
...The men also agreed to ship C-4 explosives along with drugs, but they were never sent.
Okay, so this was a sting and the drugs were fake, but it could just as well be real explosives somebody smuggles onto a plane.
However, we're searching every 6-year-old going to see grandma as if he were Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and we're using people who'd otherwise be supervising cleanup at a mall food court to do it.
This is the antithesis of security and means that we are actually more insecure than if we put all those TSA dollars into probable cause-based policing. No showy show show at the airport out of that, but it would actually keep us safer.
RELATED: A defense contractor boards a plane with a live bomb-loaded drone in his checked baggage. (Of course, the TSA were too busy pawing your sister's underpants for explosives to find the actual bombstuff!)
OH, AND THIS: Do we really think her canasta group at the home is secretly Al Qaeda?
May 16 at #DullesAirport, #Washington.
— Ashraf Sherjan (@ASJBaloch) May 20, 2018
Passenger: Jeanne LaBrier Clarkson gets angry on airport security staff.
I'm so angry. I could spit nails!!!! Look what they did to Mother! 96 years old and subjected to this! pic.twitter.com/6OZ0F44l3A
Part two of the video.
Unfortunately in today's America things seem to be based on feelings rather that facts. Untrained and incompetent TSA agents in police like uniforms are there to make most travelers "feel" that security is being provided; despite the "fact" that what they see is just Security Theatre.
Sure feels good though.
Jay at May 21, 2018 5:37 AM
As I said to someone on Twitter:
I remain deeply disturbed by (the TSA and its abuses of our bodies and rights) and by so many Americans' apparently lackadaisical attitude toward the erosion of civil liberties.
Amy Alkon at May 21, 2018 6:31 AM
Americans' apparently lackadaisical attitude toward the erosion of civil liberties
There always comes a time when the sound of fuzzy slippers going down the stairs is followed by the sound of jack boots going up the stairs.
I R A Darth Aggie at May 21, 2018 8:38 AM
I saw someone on brace crutches, like he had polio. Withered legs. They make him put his crutches through the machine and then without them claw his way through the x ray machine. It was humiliating and he could have fallen and gotten hurt.
cc at May 21, 2018 9:14 AM
You mean, gasp, profiling!
Yeah, that'll work. Stop too many Arab-Americans and wait for the inevitable backlash and lawsuits. You'll have people going through the airport deliberately wearing keffiyehs and shouting "allahu akbar" just to trigger a search and generate a lawsuit.
That's the reason the TSA now has to search grandma's wheelchair, so the agency can't be accused of profiling.
Our legal environment and the sheer size of our air travel industry do not facilitate the kind of profiling done by Israeli airport security.
Foreign Policy broke down airport security between the US and Israel in a 2008 article (there's a limit to the number of free views each month):
Are you ready and willing to pay that much more for tickets, just to fly to a convention in Chicago or Cleveland; or just to pop up to San Francisco for the weekend? Geographic mobility is a major feature of American life and the sheer cost of Israeli-level security at US airports would curtail such mobility, not to mention generate accusations of racial profiling.
While I agree with you that the money spent on the "repurposed mall foodcourt workers" screening Grandma is wasted, we're not going to get Israeli-type security without a cost, both in civil liberties and money.
Conan the Grammarian at May 21, 2018 9:57 AM
I'm curious: Does anyone have strong feelings one way or another about PreCheck/Global Entry — either as a strategem to escape the most invasive elements of airport screening, or as an even bigger invasion of personal rights?
Kevin at May 21, 2018 10:21 AM
The go after easy targets. Anyone else that could potentially harm them will let go unscathed.
The Zucker brothers predicted that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAuooUf5G6I
Sixclaws at May 21, 2018 1:23 PM
Leave a comment