It's because they're not focused on the problem, but rather following a rote checklist of acts designed by a faceless bureaucrat in some windowless office a thousand miles away.
The TSA checks your ID and makes you go through a scanner (usually metal detector, but maybe PervScan®) to detect weapons. This is the source of the fail.
The goal isn't keeping weapons off airplanes, it's protecting little Janie's life. So what does the TSA do?
They make little Janie wait in line in an unsecured lobby with literally 400 other travelers. If you were a terrorist and wanted to terrorize the traveling public, what would you do?
You'd book a hotel room overlooking the lobby (thanks, Orlando International Airport!), you'd wait until the lobby was full of travelers impatiently waiting in the TSA line, and you'd shoot them.
The worst part of this? It's already happened.. Rome and LAX, not to mention the non-airport (but definitely hotel) scenario of Mumbai.
Little Janie's only chance is incompetent terrorists. She's in danger, placed there by incompetent bureaucrats.
The TSA should be made to fix this tomorrow, or it should be disbanded. The public would be safer with no airport security than this.
Do it for teh children™
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Location:Orlando International Airport
11 comments:
Ooooh. Thinking like a terrorist now, are we?
Armoring the cabin doors and changing the "do whatever the hijacker says" rule are the only things that have improved air travel security.
We'd be much better off taking down the metal detectors and handing out guns to anyone that wanted one for the flight.
Probably be cheaper too.
Yeah, were I a terrorist, I'd strap on my ball bearing covered DuPont underoos and go all 'splodey in the long serpentine lines BEFORE the checkpoint......Thereby enuring Maximum Casualties and Most Thorough News Coverage....and subsequent terror.
The lines make for a LOT of soft targets all close together.
It's all about the children, you know.
It's a damned good thing neither of us are terrorists.
ASM826, someone other than the terrorists had better be thinking like terrorists. Sadly, it's not happening at the TSA.
Well, if I was thinking like a terrorist, I'd give up on airports and airplanes altogether. There's a whole big country out there full of elementary schools and shopping malls. As long as we try to just play defense, they get to score.
In the weeks after 9/11 there were all sorts of pundits on TV, re-creating the theme behind the title of Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" while suggesting targets:
there were schools (what was the school in Russia that had an attack? Beslan?)
there were interstate bridges in key choke points
there were attractions like Disney, the Mall of the Americas or Niagara Falls
there were football games; any place people gathered
there were attacks on the food supply to contaminate it (instead, we pay the Chinese for contaminated food)
The unabomber and the anthrax attacks showed us things sent through the mail are essentially untraceable.
I know the post office has some powerful irradiation going on; there have been reports of gemstones being mailed around changing color from the radiation, which is a LOT.
But what else have we really done?
The TSA should be shut down. Any screening based on things they've used and not on behaviors will miss the next new thing, by definition.
I've been telling everyone who will listen for years that the place to do the killing is in the unsecured part of the airport. The requirement for a sterile area just forces more people to congregate outside security.
How do the Israelis do it? They seem to it figured out.
How do the Israelis do it? They seem to it figured out.
Intellectually honestly, which happens to look politically incorrect.
Jim
And that's why, if you travel a lot from Orlando, it's totally worth it to do the Clear program. Much less time hanging with the other marks.
"The TSA should be made to fix this tomorrow, AND it should be disbanded. The public would be safer with no airport security than this.
TFIFY
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