TSA: Totally Stupid Agency

Am I being harsh, calling the agency tasked with keeping American travelers safe "stupid?"  I don't believe I am, once you examine the situation.

The TSA was created to keep terrorists off of our airplanes.  And that's fine; it's not the mission that's the problem, it's the idiotic manner they are going about doing it. 

How do you find a needle in a haystack?  By looking for objects that are not hay.

But the TSA is trying to find terrorists by searching.... everyone who flies.  They are trying to find a needle in a haystack by examining the hay.  But the hay isn't what they are supposed to be looking for - if you're looking at hay, you won't see the needle.

The idiots are even making pilots go through scans.  What's wrong with that, you ask?  If a pilot wants to crash a plane, they don't need weapons or bombs to do it.  The pilot is flying the plane.  If they want to wreck it, they have their hands on the controls - literally.  It makes utterly no sense to expose the pilots to xrays several times a day looking for weapons they don't need.

The fact is that millions of people fly on airplanes.  Virtually all of them are NOT terrorists.  Searching everyone is a waste of time, because you spend most of your time looking at people who are not a threat.  That's time spent not looking for terrorists, and therefore it directly violates the TSA's entire raison 'être.

Now, I know that there are some of you that will start howling and spewing inanities like "how can we find the terrorists if we don't look for them?"  And if you'd read what I wrote more carefully, you'd see that I actually am all for looking for terrorists. But you have to do that by looking for terrorists, not wasting time on efforts that won't find terrorists.

Searching everyone is a complete waste of time and money.  Setting up impenetrable check points won't catch terrorists, because no terrorist is going to walk into such an obvious trap.

Besides, terrorist do not need to get onto airplanes to commit acts of terrorism.  They just need someplace with a mass of innocent victims - like the line of people waiting to go through a scanner or get groped by a poorly trained underpaid security guard.  And guess what? Our current system will let them get that far.

Do you know who has a serious problem with terrorist attacks? Israel.  And does Israel use any of ridiculously intrusive measures employed by the TSA?  They do not.

So how does Israel keep terrorists off of their planes?

Simple: they look for terrorists.

Now another group of you will probably start wailing about profiling.  And some kinds of profiling is not useful, like racial profiling. Do the Israelis search everyone who looks like an Arab?  They do not.

Everyone in Israel looks more or less like an Arab, so that's a waste of time.  And even those who are noticeably Muslim are unlikely to be terrorists.

So what does Israel profile, if not race?  They profile behavior.

Here's the thing; if you have a bomb on your person, you're going to act differently than someone who doesn't.  You're going to be dealing with it at some level; you want to make sure no one can see it.  You want to make sure no one is looking at you too closely.  You don't want it to go off early.  You don't want to accidentally disarm it.

So that's what Israeli security looks for; people acting suspiciously.  And they start waaay outside the terminal.  They're watching from the time you enter the airport.  Terrorists are stopped long before they get into the heart of the terminal.

Michael J. Totten said it best in the NY Post:

Israelis don't use security theater to make passengers feel like they're safe. They use real security measures to ensure that travelers actually are safe. Even when suicide bombers exploded themselves almost daily in Israeli cities, not a single one managed to get through that airport.

But here's the chilling question for you?  Why hasn't the TSA caught even a single terrorist to date, given that this is their job?

Didn't know that, did you?

Slate.com came to the following conclusion:

In May, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that SPOT's annual cost is more than $200 million and that as of March 2010 some 3,000 behavior detection officers were deployed at 161 airports but had not apprehended a single terrorist. (Hundreds of illegal aliens and drug smugglers, however, were arrested due to the program between 2004 and 2008.) What's more, the GAO noted that at least 16 individuals later accused of involvement in terrorist plots flew 23 different times through U.S. airports since 2004, but TSA behavior-detection officers didn't sniff out any of them.

What these numbers don't get at is whether the TSA airport screeners prevent terrorist attacks through their very existence—deterring plots by hanging around. This is quite probably the case, but it's not obvious that they prevent any more attacks than the private contractors who handled checkpoints before the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001 went into effect.

But the TSA has been an unqualified success in one regard: they have made millions of US citizens and innocent fliers absolutely miserable.  And as noted above, they have made our airports themselves a richer target because of the throngs of innocent people held up by pointless "security measures."