Fortunately and unfortunately, I nearly always travel with one or more young kids, which means I can't realistically do stuff like this that'll delay things (they have small bladders, little patience, and are curious). However, they usually have me go through the metal detector instead of the backscatter machine, so I tend to avoid that part of it.
Before our last trip, I read about the facial ID thing, and I was worried because my passport was expired (we were traveling domestic). Fortunately, it seems neither of the airports we went through were implementing it yet, so I'll have time to renew before it's a thing.
I just wish we can all come to our senses and realize that the TSA doesn't really make us safer and that it just makes everyone mad. Unfortunately, people just seem to put up with it.
> I just wish we can all come to our senses and realize that the TSA doesn't really make us safer and that it just makes everyone mad. Unfortunately, people just seem to put up with it.
Because people don't feel like they can make any real impact, and for those who can (our representatives), it's political suicide. The TSA is a giant waste of money but turning the front line of security back to airports would extremely easy to attack as weak on crime, inviting in terrorists, etc. (But who knows, maybe the sight of the TSA line makes terrorists give up in frustration because they're too busy to wait an hour or more just to hijack a plane.)
The TSA was implemented during the Bush era "economic stimulus" drama.
It was never about security, it was only ever about job creation. 9/11 was a convenient excuse to put lots of underqualified/underskilled people to work overnight.
For a politician to go against that now, they get doubly fucked on both the "made America less safe" and "got rid of thousands of jobs" fronts.
Are there regular studies examining broader public opinion on this? I have to assume that at some point it is going to shift, and suddenly scaling back (or privatizing) airport screening will be a no-brainer.
The problem is that it only takes some passive support to establish the system initially, but removing it takes the majority of people actively complaining.
> Because people don't feel like they can make any real impact
I'd say this generalization applies to a lot of topics that we're having with democracy. That people don't feel that it's democratic. I think there's this weird feeling where most believe we're both in a democracy and autocracy (which may not be untrue, but the less we try to fix it with democracy the harder we'll leave to autocracy)
> I just wish we can all come to our senses and realize that the TSA doesn't really make us safer and that it just makes everyone mad. Unfortunately, people just seem to put up with it.
Indeed. What makes us safer are 2 things:
1. Secured cockpit doors
2. Passengers
Now, if someone tried doing something bad/unsafe/terrorist, everybody would jump them, and stop them from doing the thing. That's how shoe-guy was stopped. The passengers about killed him.
It used to be the chokepoint was departure. Now the TSA shoves a chokepoint to "terrorize" at the lines in front the scanners. And wherever you move the scanners creates yet another chokepoint. I'm surprised someone of ill intent hasn't done something at the lines of people.
But in the end, there's little we can do. Ideally our politicians should reconsider their roles, but thats 'reducing security yadda yadda', and political suicide.
On #2, I think people may forget that prior to 9/11, the idea was to let the hijacker go where they wanted, as the passengers usually ended up safe due to cooperation. Even on the day of 9/11 itself, once passengers realized cooperating was going to get them killed, then fighting back gave them a higher chance of survival.
The 2016 Brussels bombing did involve explosives in the check-in area of the airport.
Before our last trip, I read about the facial ID thing, and I was worried because my passport was expired (we were traveling domestic). Fortunately, it seems neither of the airports we went through were implementing it yet, so I'll have time to renew before it's a thing.
I just wish we can all come to our senses and realize that the TSA doesn't really make us safer and that it just makes everyone mad. Unfortunately, people just seem to put up with it.