In 2009, Phil Mocek didn't like what the TSA was trying to do to him at the Albuquerque airport. He took out his phone and started video recording the incident. The police told him to stop, and he refused. They demanded ID, and he refused. They arrested him.
The jury just acquitted him on all four counts: concealing his identity, refusing to obey a lawful order, trespassing, and disorderly conduct. So just how weak was their case?
It wasn't just that the State lost. And it wasn't that the jury found for the defendant after only an hour of deliberation.
Mr. Mocek did not testify, and the defense rested on Friday without calling any witnesses or presenting any evidence. the jury found that even without rebuttal, the TSA and Albuquerque police had failed to satisfy their burden of proving any of the four charges: concealing his identity, refusing to obey a lawful order (it was never entirely clear whether this was supposed to have been an order to turn off his camera, an order to leave the airport despite having a valid ticket, or an order to show ID, none of which would have been lawful orders), trespassing, and disorderly conduct.
The best evidence in the case was the video from Mr. Mocek’s digital camera that both the TSA and the police had tried to stop Mr. Mocek from filming, and which ended when they seized his camera out of his hands and shut it off. In her closing argument, defense counsel Molly Schmidt-Nowara argued that the police and TSA witnesses were not credible, that their testimony was contradicted by the video and by common sense, that what they really objected to was having Mr. Mocek legally take pictures, and that any disorderly conduct was on the part of the police and TSA.
The DA who brought the case should be brought up on professional misconduct grounds. The Police and TSA officials who hassled Mocek should be prosecuted. If the situation is so blatant that the jury doesn't even have to think about it, even after the Defense doesn't bother to argue the case, then these people are incompetent.
And there's some very interesting information at the link, including this:
Uncontested TSA and police testimony at the trial established, among other things, three important points:
Despite calling themselves “officers”, TSA checkpoint staff are not law enforcement officers and have no police powers — and both TSA and police are fully aware of this. When the TSA calls for the police, they are just like any other civilians who call the police, and the police have no obligation to do what they ask. Police should not and have no right to act, in such a case, unless the police have a reasonable basis for believing that a crime has actually been committed or is being committed.
You have the right, recognized by the TSA, to fly without showing ID. “It happens all the time. We have a procedure for that,” according to the lead TSA “Travel Document Checker” at the Albuquerque airport. Signs and announcements in airports saying that all passengers must present ID are false.
You have the right, recognized by the TSA, to photograph or film anywhere in publicly accessible areas of airports including TSA checkpoints, as long as you don’t violate any local laws, photograph the images on the screening monitors, interfere with the screening process, or slow down the line. (Whether those limitations to your First Amendment rights claimed by the TSA are legal or Constitutional was not decided in this case, since Mr. Mocek wasn’t filming the images on the screening monitors, interfering with the screening process, or slowing down the line.) Signs or statements that photography is prohibited at Federal checkpoints are, in general, false.
You don't normally expect to run across drool-worthy, jaw droopingly idiotic blog posts over at the Volokh Conspiracy, particularly not ones going full frontal in their advocacy of the most useless, wasteful, freedom-infringing, Statist Prick delighting Federal Agency ever devised.
It’s Thanksgiving weekend, when most of us get to spend at least some
time thinking about TSA. I’ve spent mine puzzling over the roots of
TSA-hatred.
There’s no doubt that it’s virulent. As a privacy skeptic and
national security conservative, I’m used to hostile comments. But it’s
only when I defend TSA that the comments go beyond hostile to visceral
and occasionally even spittle-flecked.
Why is that? Notwithstanding the venom of the TSA-haters, polls show that most Americans support TSA, including the decision to use whole body scanners. But for a very vocal minority opposing the agency isn’t political. It’s personal.
I can’t explain the women who hate TSA with a passion, though I’m not sure how many there are.
Wow. The comments to that post are interesting, as are the comments to Jonathan Adler's Wow, didn't Stewart really open a can of worms one. The first comment to that post is interesting:
Baker's post "touched a nerve" because it is insulting and beyond
idiotic. The idea that women are going to be turned on by the
involuntary guy on guy action in the security line, combined with the
idea that men object to the screenings because of some kind of anxiety
over their performance while being groped, is terribly offensive and
litteraly the stupidest thing anybody has ever written on this blog.
The fact that Baker would make this comments as one of the authors of
the TSA policy shows him to be just a sick individual. It is not at all
surprising that this is the TSA mindset.
[emphasis mine] Note that the blog allows readers to rate a comment as positive or negative. As I write this the score is 110 like vs. 2 dislike.
This shows that even a "libertarian" blog can be infested with statist pricks. I had not known that Baker had been the #2 (or #3) man at the Department of Homeland Security. But his view into the American Psyche is telling - the commenter to Adler's post has it precisely correct. Baker wrote TSA policy. The TSA is his baby.
Own it, Baker.
This was quite an insight for me as to the Volokh Conspiracy site. Branding is a simple thing, but people forget that it's a two way street - people you work with can help your brand, but they can also hurt it. I'll never run across that blog without the words "statist pricks" whispering in the back of my head.
And oh yeah, you should read Ken at Popehat on this, where our very own TJIC shows up in the comments with his patented form of snark.
One advantage of having been involved in Internet Security for a considerable time is that you see what doesn't (and can't) work. This very often applies to the Real World.
Consider antivirus. "Everybody knows" that they need to have one. "Everybody knows" that they need to keep it updated. The antivirus program works hard - you can see your computer slow down when it fires up to do a scan. The antivirus companies work hard - you get a daily update that contains hundreds or thousands of new signatures, each day, every day.
Signature-based antimalware detection is increasingly ineffective against an explosion in the number of malware variants as well as an increase in the number of financially motivated targeted attacks.
Does this mean we get rid of antivirus technology altogether? Not at all.
What it means is that we can no longer protect endpoints using signature-based mechanisms alone. Endpoints must be protected using a combination of mechanisms – whitelisting, blacklisting and behavioral-based approaches — working together as a system.
What we see is that the Bad Guys have adapted to the prevalence of antivirus by writing so much new malware - and testing it against commercial antivirus, tweaking it until it gets missed - that your antivirus may only have a 25% chance of catching something new, because a whole Black Hat industry has grown up to make avoiding antivirus detection easy:
For the last six months there has been an explosion in malware scanning portals that cater specifically to the demands of professional malware authors and botnet masters. These portals provide guarantees on privacy of submitted samples and include specialized services designed to suit their criminal clientele – for example, the ability to bulk-upload caches of new samples for testing, CSV formatted reports, automatic tweaking of samples to avoid certain antivirus engines, continuous testing of samples (i.e. alerting of when an antivirus update appears that is capable of detecting a submitted sample) and multiple alerting features (e.g. email, SMS text messaging, IRC/Jabber alerts, etc.).
The Internet Security industry is adapting, by adding different techniques (whitelisting, behavioral based stuff, etc) because it needs to remain viable to the market. If it doesn't adapt, the companies will become irrelevant and go out of business. Basically, the industry has to provide results or die.
The TSA doesn't. The TSA is interesting, because it takes what is basically the same approach as antivirus: looking for known bad things. It is extremely intrusive when it does this (just like antivirus), and makes a great show of how busy it is (lots of uniformed TSA folks manning lots of checkpoints).
From a results point of view, it doesn't work. The TSA has caught precisely zero terrorists (although they have caught some run of the mill criminals during their inspections). It's because they're always looking for the old attack that the terrorists don't try anymore. Like with antivirus, it's "security in the rear view mirror", focused on the process, not the end result.
Unlike the Internet Security industry, the TSA is not correcting by adding new techniques that might make it more effective. The reason is captured in a nutshell in this short video by Internet Security guru Bruce Schneier:
Shielded from market forces, the TSA doesn't have to stop new attacks. To keep its budget, all it has to do is stop old attacks. And so it implements increasingly expensive, draconian, and futile searches, chasing after the last attack. It's spent millions of dollars installing expensive X-Ray machines that generate ten times the radiation that we were told:
The results of tests on the radiation levels at x-ray body scanners that have been put in airports acorss America are flawed, the Transportation Security Administration admits.
The tests came back showing ten times more radiation than was expected.
But don't opt out of the scan, or you will be sexually assaulted, like a former Miss USA:
DALLAS, TX (PIX11)—
The latest report of molestation at the hands of TSA agents comes from former Miss USA Susie Castillo, whose tearful account of her experience at the Dallas Fort Worth Intl. Airport already has more than 200,000 views on YouTube.
"I'm crying because, as an American, I have to go through this," she says in the video.
...
Castillo said that an older woman who worked for the airport attempted to comfort her as she sat crying, saying, "Well honey, you know what, I'd rather go through the scanner or get a pat-down than, you know, be blown up." In the video Castillo recalls thinking, "Okay, I guess I'm supposed to find comfort in that, but I didn't."
TSA has since reviewed the incident and a representative reportedly told TMZ, "We have reviewed this passenger's screening experience and found that the officer followed proper procedures."
And it's all futile, just like today's antivirus signatures. Tomorrow's malware is already tested against these signatures before it is unleashed, just like the terrorists don't do the old attacks. They make up new attacks.
As Schneier says, "It's a stupid game, and we shouldn't play."
The only one that wins this game is the TSA, whose budget and headcount continually increases while they sexually assault citizens and entirely fail to catch any terrorists. This is broken, because they aren't responsive to the market.
There is a solution, that I modestly offer here. A bold (read: media whoring) Governor should federalize airport security in his state. He should send in the State Police and arrest any TSA agent that engages in sexual assault. He can have the security outsourced to a company that will actually be responsive to the market.
The TSA, of course, will have a cow. They will threaten legal action. Andrew Jackson's dictum will prove popular: The Supreme Court has made its ruling. Now let it enforce it. It's unlikely that this visible battle royal will make the Governor less popular; on the contrary, the TSA is at best ignored and at worst despised by most of the country. Our Governor will be seen as a hero by many registered voters.
The TSA will threaten to close down air traffic to that State. And here's where we see where the battle will have to be fought. If you shut down flights to, say, Providence, people will simply fly to Boston. Can't fight on those terms. But what about Texas?
You shut down DFW, and you bring America's air travel to a grinding halt. Matter of fact, if you shut down Atlanta Hartsfield, you bring air travel to a halt. Same with Chicago O'Hare, and (maybe) Denver.
I wouldn't expect that the Illinois Governor will want to play this game. But Rick Perry might. And here's the fun part: during what looks like the slide into a double dip recession just as the 2012 election cycle kicks off, the Obama Administration will fold like a house of cards in a tornado.
And so my plea: Help us Obi-Wan Perry, you're our only hope.
UPDATE 3 May 2011 09:38: Welcome visitors from View From The Porch, and as always thanks, Tam. I left out something important, which I'll add here.
Schneier is absolutely correct that the general public doesn't really understand just how little security they're getting, and will look at the TSA as "people protecting me". That assessment is wrong, but is the starting point - we have to get past a knee-jerk "but who will protect me" reaction to keep this popular.
That's why it's so very important to bring in some sort of screening company as a replacement. The Security Kabuki will have to go on, in a less intrusive (and less costly) manner. Pure Libertarian types won't like it (heck, I don't like it), but there will be no traction with Polly Public without this.
And the messaging has to be 100% "sexual assault is a crime, and will not be tolerated". Polly Public is almost certain to line up behind this, by large margins.
As Tam said, this is a Hail Mary sort of plan. As such, it contains all sorts of things I'd really rather not have to put up with. But the best is enemy of a good dang start.
TSA has never, (and I invite them to prove me wrong), foiled a terrorist plot or stopped an attack on an airliner. Ever. They crow about weapons found and insinuate that this means they stopped terrorism. They claim that they can’t comment due to “national security” implications. In fact, if they had foiled a plot, criminal charges would have to be filed. Ever hear of terrorism charges being filed because of something found during a TSA screening? No, because it’s never happened. Trust me, if TSA had ever foiled a terrorist plot, they would buy full-page ads in every newspaper in the United States to prove their importance and increase their budget.
I have a unique position from which to make these statements. For 25 years, as many of readers know, I was an FBI Special Agent, and for many of those years, I was a counter-terrorism specialist. I ran the Los Angeles Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) Al Qaeda squad. I ran the JTTF’s Extra-territorial squad, which responded to terrorism against the United States or its interests throughout the world. I have investigated Al Qaeda cell operations in the United States, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, just to name a few.
...
I have dealt with TSA since its inception and FAA security prior to that. I have witnessed TSA operate since they became a separate organization in 2002 and seen their reaction to intelligence provided them. I have now watched them operate for a decade, and I have respect for their hard-working employees who are doing a thankless job. But I have come to the conclusion that TSA is one of the worst-run, ineffective and most unnecessarily intrusive agencies in the United States government.
Long, but worth it for the straight talk. Brutal straight talk.
TSA Follies, Act The Second
The comments here are particularly interesting. Click on the tab that sorts them in terms of "highest rated" and then start reading. All of the comments supporting the intrusive TSA search are from commenters in Europe. All of them.
Avi Rubin is a big gun in computer security. This is nothing short of horrifying, although putting Pac Man on a voting machine is pretty stylin'. Another reason for my next car to be a '69 GTO. Hack that, bitches ...
You watch us, we watch you
Anonymous released a bunch of U.S. Government diplomatic cables. The ACLU saved one, and then filed a FOIA request for the same cable. The U.S. Government gave them one that was heavily redacted. So now we know what the U.S. Government thinks is secret. Yikes.
Air travelers who don’t have firearms in their checked luggage
probably use a special Transportation Security Administration (TSA)
approved lock. What is a TSA approved lock? I’ll let the TSA’s very own Blogger Bob explain:
TSA has worked with several companies to develop locks
that can be opened by security officers using universal “master” keys so
that the locks may not have to be cut. These locks are available at
most airports and many travel stores nationwide. The packaging on the
locks indicates whether they can be opened by TSA.
In other words TSA approved locks are locks with an included backdoor
that can be used by TSA officers to access your luggage. I will take a
moment to note that the use of TSA approved locks is not lawful when firearms are in your checked luggage so those of us who do fly with them do not, and legally can not, use TSA approved locks.
Guess what happened with the TSA's backdoor key?
Golly gosh, let's all remember to thank the Republicans for this smoking crater of a failed Agency. And let's make sure to vote for some more Republicans so we can get even more!
I believe that there is so much material to be presented showing TSA abuses, and such a small demonstrable payoff by their efforts, that it's inevitable that we will see hostile Congressional hearings soon. Given the mood of the electorate - keep your hands off my money and my freedom - our shyster politicians will be looking for something to throw to the wolves. Good. An aggressive cost/benefit analysis will do some good in focusing scarce security resources on, you now, security problems.
The assignment for the rest of us is to call out Senators and Representatives, asking if they would subject their wives and daughters to the TSA assault, and if the answer is "yes", to demand proof. And then publish their response - and let them know that you intend to do that.
A reporter once asked security guru Bruce Schneier what he would do to make the TSA more effective. Schneier replied that if he had the agency's budget, he'd give it back. He added that only two things have improved airline safety after 9/11: strong cockpit doors and the passenger's realization that they have to fight to live. And yet airport security is worse now than it was then.
It seems that if you're willing to do a fair amount of leg work, this sort of silliness actually gets cleared up. So well done to Mr. Brown, and I guess to the TSA for making the skies safe for cuteness.
Mr. Brown makes a good point, that there's nothing to tell you that you're on the list, and need to grovel your way through the TSA's unhelpful web site to find the required form. You could plausibly claim that this is a security feature - if the special someone on the list actually were a terrorist, you wouldn't want to let them know.
Which ignores the issue that it's idiotic to have someone so dangerous that they shouldn't be allowed to fly, but not dangerous enough to arrest. That's a discussion for another day. Today, the issue is false positives, the erroneous report that someone or something matches a particular categorization, when they actually don't.
This is why you get a second opinion when your doctor tells you that you have a serious disease. Any diagnosis will be less than 100% accurate, and you don't want to go on an expensive and invasive regime if you're one of the 2% that don't actually have the disease.
An anonymous commenter left this, over in Brown's comments:
They efficiently shifted the cost of false positives to you.
If we really thought these folks were actually terrorists, we'd investigate them. A reasonable investigation involves a lot of effort - wire taps (first, get a warrant), stakeouts, careful collection of a case by Law Enforcement, prosecution. Probably a million dollars between police, lawyers, courts, etc - probably a lot more, if there's a trial. For each of the 700 [people in our thought experiment]. We're looking at a billion dollars, and this assumes a ridiculously low false positive rate.
There are on the order of a hundred thousand people in TSA's no-fly or watch databases. Not 700. If you investigated them all, you're talking a hundred billionbucks. So they turn the system off.
And that's actually the right answer. The data's lousy, joining lousy data with more lousy data makes the results lousier, and it's too expensive to make it work. How lousy is the data? Sky Marshals are on the No-Fly list. No, really. 5 year olds, too.
Actually, they haven't turned the system off. Rather, they've shifted the cost of the investigation to Mr. Brown and people like him.
From the TSA's perspective, this makes sense. From our perspective, it's annoying. It's double-plus annoying when there's nothing that tells you that you're likely a false positive in their system. There is, of course, a sure-fire way to reduce your chance of triggering a false positive in the TSA's system to zero. Guaranteed to work every time.
I will call a press conference the day after Election Day. In it, I will announce this:
The TSA’s approach to security theater is unjust. It’s ineffective. Groping people without reasonable suspicion, let alone probable cause, ought not be tolerated. We only tolerate it because we have collectively allowed the government to frighten us out of our wits — for the most part, we have yielded to the TSA’s demand for unquestioning compliance. We have created a safe space — not for rights, not for travel, but for people to get paid an hourly wage to poke strangers in the genitals, and to poke harder if they object.
Further, I will announce this: any airport that does not install video monitoring equipment in the screening area, and preserve footage of every minute, and deny all access of such footage to the TSA will, upon my assumption of the duties of office, be shut down.
Further, any TSA agent who subjects any citizen of this Republic to sexual assault as described above will be prosecuted for rape. Because a Free People should not be subject to their Government. On the contrary. Remember: the TSA has never caught a terrorist, in almost ten years.
You ain't never caught a rabbit terrorist and you ain't no friend of mine.
Well, I would. And you need to RTWT, about some TSA loser suing a big time blogger for "injuring her reputation". Man, get the popcorn here - this is going to be good.
The truth is that exactly two things have made air travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing cockpit doors and convincing passengers they need to fight back. The TSA should continue to screen checked luggage. They should start screening airport workers. And then they should return airport security to pre-9/11 levels and let the rest of their budget be used for better purposes. Investigation and intelligence is how we're going to prevent terrorism, on airplanes and elsewhere. It's how we caught the liquid bombers. It's how we found the Yemeni printer-cartridge bombs. And it's our best chance at stopping the next serious plot.
It seems that if you're willing to do a fair amount of leg work, this sort of silliness actually gets cleared up. So well done to Mr. Brown, and I guess to the TSA for making the skies safe for cuteness.
Mr. Brown makes a good point, that there's nothing to tell you that you're on the list, and need to grovel your way through the TSA's unhelpful web site to find the required form. You could plausibly claim that this is a security feature - if the special someone on the list actually were a terrorist, you wouldn't want to let them know.
Which ignores the issue that it's idiotic to have someone so dangerous that they shouldn't be allowed to fly, but not dangerous enough to arrest. That's a discussion for another day. Today, the issue is false positives, the erroneous report that someone or something matches a particular categorization, when they actually don't.
This is why you get a second opinion when your doctor tells you that you have a serious disease. Any diagnosis will be less than 100% accurate, and you don't want to go on an expensive and invasive regime if you're one of the 2% that don't actually have the disease.
An anonymous commenter left this, over in Brown's comments:
They efficiently shifted the cost of false positives to you.
If we really thought these folks were actually terrorists, we'd investigate them. A reasonable investigation involves a lot of effort - wire taps (first, get a warrant), stakeouts, careful collection of a case by Law Enforcement, prosecution. Probably a million dollars between police, lawyers, courts, etc - probably a lot more, if there's a trial. For each of the 700 [people in our thought experiment]. We're looking at a billion dollars, and this assumes a ridiculously low false positive rate.
There are on the order of a hundred thousand people in TSA's no-fly or watch databases. Not 700. If you investigated them all, you're talking a hundred billion bucks. So they turn the system off.
And that's actually the right answer. The data's lousy, joining lousy data with more lousy data makes the results lousier, and it's too expensive to make it work. How lousy is the data? Sky Marshals are on the No-Fly list. No, really. 5 year olds, too.
Actually, they haven't turned the system off. Rather, they've shifted the cost of the investigation to Mr. Brown and people like him.
From the TSA's perspective, this makes sense. From our perspective, it's annoying. It's double-plus annoying when there's nothing that tells you that you're likely a false positive in their system. There is, of course, a sure-fire way to reduce your chance of triggering a false positive in the TSA's system to zero. Guaranteed to work every time.
In “TSA: Taxes Spent Absurdly”, Becky Akers asks “How do you turn an industry that costs $700 million annually into one that eats $6 billion?” The answer turns out to be “Nationalize it, as Congress did airport screening after Sept. 11, 2001.” She goes on to note that “The TSA’s nearly 50,000 screeners have delayed, frustrated and harassed passengers at airport checkpoints from Maine to Hawaii. What they haven’t done after eight years and $48 billion is catch a single terrorist.”
Akers is certainly understating the cost of aviation security imposed after 9/11. At our little airport there is a state trooper employed to fingerprint student pilots. An average Massachusetts State Trooper, including pension, is paid over $200,000 per year. A couple of airport employees help with background checks, security education, and issuing badges. Until a student or renter gets a badge, which takes at least four weeks, the customer must be escorted by a flight school employee at a cost of perhaps $25 per hour. The customer who does a thorough pre-flight inspection of an airplane may take all of the profit out of the rental.
It all reminds me of this:
After World War I, the French were understandably nervous about a rematch. They built a hideously expensive set of fortifications from the Swiss border all the way to Belgium. Called the "Maginot Line", it was state-of-the-art for Trench Warfare. Unfortunately, les Boscheweren't interested in Trench Warfare, and France fell in 6 weeks as the Blitzkreig bypassed it.
The TSA spends truckloads of cash at every airport in the land - including, as Professor Greenspun points out, small, commercial ones. This is what they do. Their product is slowing passengers down. High-visibility security kabuki. Of course they haven't caught any terrorists. The terrorists are targeting other targets.
There are two things that have improved air safety since 9/11: real locks on the cockpit doors, and passengers who know they have to fight back. Nothing else has made any difference (with the possible exception of Air Marshalls, but they haven't stopped anyone so far). You may not have noticed, but baggage screening still isn't what it should be, and that problem would be solved if the TSA weren't allocating all their resources elsewhere.
Sort of like the French building forts instead of armored divisions.
None of this poor prioritization should come as a surprise. In other news, we hear that the California government is introducing new TV energy standards:
Energy regulators on Friday moved forward with a plan that could ban the sale of the most power-hungry televisions from California retail stores.The California Energy Commission released what it hopes will be the nation's first energy-efficiency requirements for the flat-screen TVs. A final vote on the regulation is expected in November.
What's wrong with this picture? California is broke. But they still have enough money to issue new regulations that will make things more expensive. And this isn't the first time.
My budget at work periodically gets cut, as business gets better or worse. These cuts force me to prioritize. If you're clever, you can do anything - you just can't do everything. Cut government 10% across the board, and you'd make a good down payment on health care, you know? Plus you'd do 10% less damage to the economy, with higher employment and tax levels that result.
AUSTIN, Tex (Reuters) – The Texas House of Representatives late on Thursday approved a bill that would make invasive pat-downs at Texas airports a crime, after a former Miss USA said she felt "molested" at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport last month.
Transportation Security Administration agents could be charged with a misdemeanor crime, face a $4,000 fine and one year in jail under the measure.
I'm told by someone who would know (he's a lawyer) that this is an open and shut case: Federal Preemption prohibits this sort of thing. Me, I don't think this is a legal issue so much as a political one. First of all, this hasn't become law (yet):
The bill needs a final vote from the House before it would go to the Senate.
So this is like the rattlesnake, shaking its tail. In a very real and literal sense, it's saying "do not touch".
But if the TSA wants to fight this one, good damn luck to them:
The proposal would classify any airport inspection that "touches the anus, sexual organ, buttocks, or breast of another person including through the clothing, or touches the other person in a manner that would be offensive to a reasonable person" as an offense of sexual harassment under official oppression.
The history of this Republic is filled with examples of laws that juries refused to respect. The preemption law here looks to be very likely in line with that sentiment. A quick Youtube search for "tsa gropes toddler" returns an astonishing number of videos. Th ecourt of public opinion has already ruled, and it's ruled against the TSA.
We know that the ruling is in, because we see the political game playing out. The Texas Legislature is moving towards passing a law criminalizing TSA standard procedure. The politicians are weighing public sentiment, and it's running against the TSA.
And if that continues, and the law passes, it simply doesn't matter what the settled case law is. If the Legislature passes what turns out to be a popular law, and an Imperial Federal Government tries to get the court system to over turn it during an election year, there's a non-trivial chance that Governor Perry will take the Andrew Jackson stance:
The Supreme Court has issued its ruling. Now let it enforce it.
It is said that we are a nation of laws, not men. The real danger of this Administration's regulatory overreach is that it will cause precisely this sort of popular vs. legal fracture. If Supreme Court precedent means that 6 year old girls are going to have their panties groped by Federal Agents, then the public will start to view Supreme Court precedent in the same light as they currently view the TSA.
Me, I don't think that it will get to that. First of all, the Obama Administration has no guts, and will get rolled by any real, spirited opposition. In other words, this is a good bet for the Texas Legislature to make.
Secondly, if it does get to the Supreme Court, there's considerable precedent on how this sort of thing plays out. It's been said - truthfully - that the Supreme Court reads the Election Returns.
Me, I'm getting the popcorn. This is fixin' to be fun.
It seems that if you're willing to do a fair amount of leg work, this sort of silliness actually gets cleared up. So well done to Mr. Brown, and I guess to the TSA for making the skies safe for cuteness.
Mr. Brown makes a good point, that there's nothing to tell you that you're on the list, and need to grovel your way through the TSA's unhelpful web site to find the required form. You could plausibly claim that this is a security feature - if the special someone on the list actually were a terrorist, you wouldn't want to let them know.
Which ignores the issue that it's idiotic to have someone so dangerous that they shouldn't be allowed to fly, but not dangerous enough to arrest. That's a discussion for another day. Today, the issue is false positives, the erroneous report that someone or something matches a particular categorization, when they actually don't.
This is why you get a second opinion when your doctor tells you that you have a serious disease. Any diagnosis will be less than 100% accurate, and you don't want to go on an expensive and invasive regime if you're one of the 2% that don't actually have the disease.
An anonymous commenter left this, over in Brown's comments:
They efficiently shifted the cost of false positives to you.
If we really thought these folks were actually terrorists, we'd investigate them. A reasonable investigation involves a lot of effort - wire taps (first, get a warrant), stakeouts, careful collection of a case by Law Enforcement, prosecution. Probably a million dollars between police, lawyers, courts, etc - probably a lot more, if there's a trial. For each of the 700 [people in our thought experiment]. We're looking at a billion dollars, and this assumes a ridiculously low false positive rate.
There are on the order of a hundred thousand people in TSA's no-fly or watch databases. Not 700. If you investigated them all, you're talking a hundred billionbucks. So they turn the system off.
And that's actually the right answer. The data's lousy, joining lousy data with more lousy data makes the results lousier, and it's too expensive to make it work. How lousy is the data? Sky Marshals are on the No-Fly list. No, really. 5 year olds, too.
Actually, they haven't turned the system off. Rather, they've shifted the cost of the investigation to Mr. Brown and people like him.
From the TSA's perspective, this makes sense. From our perspective, it's annoying. It's double-plus annoying when there's nothing that tells you that you're likely a false positive in their system. There is, of course, a sure-fire way to reduce your chance of triggering a false positive in the TSA's system to zero. Guaranteed to work every time.
Well, the TSA doesn't, but Blogger Bob at the TSA does, and it looks like he's doing a proper job of it. Bob noticed the post about the little girl on the TSA watch list, and posted a response that's probably worth your time.
Many have been misidentified as a match or possible match for the Selectee Watch List and the only thing they could do is work with the Redress Office to correct the problem.
But who is that I see? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, It’s Secure Flight! Airlines are beginning to ask for name, date of birth, and gender as it appears on the government ID you plan to use when traveling. This is a part of the Secure Flight program. The program will be in full effect for domestic airlines by the first quarter of 2010 and the rest of the airlines will be on board by the end of 2010. It will reduce mismatched names by 99.9%.
He also stopped by here and left a comment in my post. Like I said, it looks like he's doing a proper job, following trackbacks and links.
I have to admit that ty first reaction to his post on Secure Flight was a little grumpy - more information being collected - bah, humbug. On reflection, the engineer in me thinks this is a pragmatic approach to take. I'd still like to see TSA focus more on matching bags to passengers, and I'd like to see them take more of the approach that El Al takes for screening terrorists, but this does look like a positive step forward that will reduce hassles for flyers.
If it's true that there are 100,000 people on the watch lists, then this will get that down to a few hundred, if Bob gets his 99.9%. That's a high bar to set, but kudos for trying.
Filed under the tag Security Kabuki only because people reading through these posts should read this one, for a more positive story.
BOSTON -- A TSA employee at Logan International Airport is facing statutory rape charges Tuesday. Sean Shanahan was arrested by police in Winthrop. Officials say he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl at his home during school vacation week. Shanahan allegedly sent her sexually explicit text messages. TSA officials said Shanahan is no longer working at the airport.
He is said to have sent a text message to his wife, asking her to get rid of his computer.
I am sympathetic to the TSA, who appear to have done their due diligence (two background checks). There's a post up on their blog about how they deal with serious criminal allegations against one of their employees. It's pretty reasonable.
But.
While it's true to say that pedophiles can work anywhere, the TSA is not your typical place. Now that there are the see-you-nekkid scanner machines that do in fact allow images to be stored and transmitted over the network, the TSA is "an attractive nuisance". It can be expected to attract pedophiles, more than (say) McDonalds.
I'd be 100% in agreement with the TSA's "it could happen anywhere" position if they weren't running those scanners.
No, this isn't about how their "security" measures are doomed to fail - I've discussed this at some length here. This is about how their new PervScan™ and "Aggressive Pat Down" policy was guaranteed to fail, from its very inception. Indeed, all we need to do is sit back and watch the wheels come off. Monkeybrains explains it all.
Aretae has offered a theory of how human social interaction works, based on our (evolutionary-speaking) not so very long separation from monkeys. Our brains are wired from millions of years of evolution, hammering simian thought patterns into the very fiber of our beings. At a basic level, we think with Monkeybrains:
I claim that there's a simple, easy grand synthesis that explains human behavior in 3 words:
Status Matters Most.
For 80%+ of human behaviors, when asking why did they do that...trace the status effects. Trace the status effects in-family, in-group, on the opposite gender, in the neighborhood/community/polis.
It's hard to argue that humans are not status seeking beings, and this is precisely what the TSA policymakers should have realized. Their new policies could not have been designed to more offend Monkeybrains if they'd tried.
Consider a parent flying with a child. The child will be groped. The parent will be restrained from interfering, forceably if necessary. How much of the parent's self image - and image to others - is based on keeping their child safe? How does their Monkeybrains portion of their grey matter interpret the TSA's "love pat"?
Or consider a husband flying with his wife. He too will be prevented from interfering with a sexual assault on his wife. How will his Monkeybrains interpret the TSA? Protecting the family is one of the basic instincts with which we're wired. Failure to protect the family risks major status loss in the tribe.
The TSA is triggering a reaction that is primal, not cerebral. Because it is primal, it can't be reasoned with. Because it is primal, the story has "legs" - people are sitting up and paying attention. Monkeybrains are becoming engaged, from sea to shining sea.
What is astonishing about this whole situation is that the TSA (and DHS) top leadership are politicians. Good politicians understand Monkeybrains. Clinton, Reagan, (Jack) Kennedy, all worked on that primal level. So what's up with Janet Napolitano?
Pat-downs have long been one of the many security measures used by the U.S. and countries across the world to make air travel as secure as possible. They're conducted by same-gender officers, and all passengers have the right to request private screening and have a traveling companion present during the screening process.
Napolitano is a politician. Doesn't she realize that when it's someone kid being groped that this is what Monkeybrains hears?
Blah blah blah blah you loser little man, you.
The fact that the Administration seems to be surprised by all this says that they're not just incompetent as administrators (there's no security benefit to all this), but incompetent as politicians.
And this won't go away. Every day sees new stories - some well documented with video proof, some hearsay and potentially fabricated. Is this story true or made up?
En route home through Charlotte, our 6 year old son was subjected to an aggressive pat down by a female TSA employee. He was pleading for me to help him and I was admonished for trying to comfort him. His genitals area was groped. He walked down to the plane in tears. When the stewardess asked why he was crying, I explained my frustration and I was further admonished for not being more compliant.
The answer is that it doesn't matter. Everyone's Monkeybrains has already seen credible examples of abuse, has heard incompetent government flunkies spout nonsense that further offends their Monkeybrains, and so is in a mood to believe everything.
It was inevitable, as if Napolitano had driven off with all the lug nuts removed from the wheels of her car. The question was not whether the wheels would come off, but when they would come off.
The best argument against larger government is that government does nothing well, other than exercise force. The reason is that the metrics are all wrong, and foster an institutional culture that guarantees not just a bad result, but the worst possible result.
Case in point, the TSA. Consider their metrics. How would you measure success? Quite frankly, there's no plausible metric here - to my knowledge, TSA has never caught a terrorist in the act. Sure, terrorists have been caught in the act (the shoe bomber, the Christmas bomber), but none of these were caught by TSA. The Christmas bomber was caught by an alert airline checkin employee; the show bomber was caught by passengers on the plane.
But consider the metric for TSA failure - a plane goes down. Not hard to understand that one.
The combination of these positive and negative metrics means that the TSA will inevitably gravitate to maximum visible intrusiveness. This way they can justify their budget (lack of positive metrics) and deflect blame if something goes wrong (risk of negative metric). The dialectic is inevitable.
Via US Citizen, we find video of the logical result of this process, where a TSA goon* terrorizes a 3 year old girl.
What's disturbing about this video is the "well, sacrifices must be made" explanations from the TV talking head. It's doubly disturbing that the talking head is the little girl's father.
Security Guru Bruce Schneier was entirely correct when asked what he'd do with the TSA's budget were he its director. He said he'd give it back.
I was then questioned by TSA about the significance and meaning of the
shirt. I politely explained that it was “mocking the security theater
charade and over-reactions to terrorism by the general public — both of
which we're seeing right now, ironically.” The agents inquired as to the
meaning of the term “ZOMG” and who it was that I thought was “gonna
kill us all.” As best I could tell, they seemed to find my explanation
that I didn’t think anyone would be killing us all and that I was poking
fun at overwrought, irrational fears exhibited by certain members of
the flying public to be satisfactory. And moreover, they clearly deemed
my shirt to be no legitimate threat.
...
Soon afterwards, once the boarding process had commenced, the Delta
supervisor pulled me aside again — this time accompanied by not only
three TSA agents, but also multiple Niagara Frontier Transportation
Authority transit police. I was questioned some more and my wife was
also pulled out of line for additional questioning and screening. Our
bags were searched, my shirt was photographed, we were asked multiple
questions about the cause of our visit, how often we make it to western
NY, and our drivers’ license numbers were taken and radioed in for what
seemed to be a quick background check.
At this point, the TSA agents appeared satisfied we had nothing
suspicious in our luggage and that we posed no threat. However, the
Delta supervisor informed us the pilot had decided, regardless of the
outcome of the multiple TSA screenings and my willingness to change
shirts, that due to the discomfort my shirt has caused, my wife and I
would not be allowed to board the aircraft. Passengers on the plane
supposedly felt uncomfortable with my very presence on the flight. And
the Delta manager went out of his way to point out that he
wholeheartedly agreed with the pilot’s decision.
So how bad is Delta's overreaction? They make the TSA look reasonable. Yowzer.
In “TSA: Taxes Spent Absurdly”, Becky Akers asks “How do you turn an industry that costs $700 million annually into one that eats $6 billion?” The answer turns out to be “Nationalize it, as Congress did airport screening after Sept. 11, 2001.” She goes on to note that “The TSA’s nearly 50,000 screeners have delayed, frustrated and harassed passengers at airport checkpoints from Maine to Hawaii. What they haven’t done after eight years and $48 billion is catch a single terrorist.”
Akers is certainly understating the cost of aviation security imposed after 9/11. At our little airport there is a state trooper employed to fingerprint student pilots. An average Massachusetts State Trooper, including pension, is paid over $200,000 per year. A couple of airport employees help with background checks, security education, and issuing badges. Until a student or renter gets a badge, which takes at least four weeks, the customer must be escorted by a flight school employee at a cost of perhaps $25 per hour. The customer who does a thorough pre-flight inspection of an airplane may take all of the profit out of the rental.
It all reminds me of this:
After World War I, the French were understandably nervous about a rematch. They built a hideously expensive set of fortifications from the Swiss border all the way to Belgium. Called the "Maginot Line", it was state-of-the-art for Trench Warfare. Unfortunately, les Bosche weren't interested in Trench Warfare, and France fell in 6 weeks as the Blitzkreig bypassed it.
The TSA spends truckloads of cash at every airport in the land - including, as Professor Greenspun points out, small, commercial ones. This is what they do. Their product is slowing passengers down. High-visibility security kabuki. Of course they haven't caught any terrorists. The terrorists are targeting other targets.
There are two things that have improved air safety since 9/11: real locks on the cockpit doors, and passengers who know they have to fight back. Nothing else has made any difference (with the possible exception of Air Marshalls, but they haven't stopped anyone so far). You may not have noticed, but baggage screening still isn't what it should be, and that problem would be solved if the TSA weren't allocating all their resources elsewhere.
Sort of like the French building forts instead of armored divisions.
None of this poor prioritization should come as a surprise. In other news, we hear that the California government is introducing new TV energy standards:
Energy regulators on Friday moved forward with a plan that could ban the sale of the most power-hungry televisions from California retail stores.
The California Energy Commission released what it hopes will be the nation's first energy-efficiency requirements for the flat-screen TVs. A final vote on the regulation is expected in November.
What's wrong with this picture? California is broke. But they still have enough money to issue new regulations that will make things more expensive. And this isn't the first time.
My budget at work periodically gets cut, as business gets better or worse. These cuts force me to prioritize. If you're clever, you can do anything - you just can't do everything. Cut government 10% across the board, and you'd make a good down payment on health care, you know? Plus you'd do 10% less damage to the economy, with higher employment and tax levels that result.
The entire justification for the Security Kabuki that is the TSA is to protect the traveling public. Sure, some of us are nasty and suspicious enough to think that the real raison d'être is to build a huge staff of unionized public employees, but the stated justification is keeping little Janie safe when she's flying back from her trip to Sleeping Beauty's castle. The TSA has utterly failed at this, and in fact is putting little Janie and her family at increased risk.
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.
Notice all those headlines about how Opt-Out Day had fizzled? How nobody was opting out, and lines were moving normally? It seems the unreported side of the story is that the TSA turned the PervScanners off and said ix-nay on the ope-grae:
According to tweeting travelers, many backscatter and millimeter-wave AIT scanning machines at airports are not in use at all, making opting out impossible. We've asked DHS/TSA for comment, but you can help us confirm.
The TSA PR Flak has denied this, but of course he would. There's a lot of chatter that the scanners were roped off, and in a credibility competition between unknown Tweeters and the TSA PR department, there's a clear winner (hint: not the TSA).
In fact, in a credibility competition between unknown Tweeters and the MSM, it's not at all clear that the MSM comes out on top.
