TSA/Airport Security: Killing Us On Christmas
from the well,-indirectly,-but-still... dept
It's typical to preface a Techdirt article, for me at least, by backtracking to a bunch of articles on related subject matter. I'm not going to do that with another piece on the TSA. Not because there isn't enough material to choose from. Oh no, there's simply too much of it, so if you want to see insanity in its most naked form (this statement assumes you don't live next to Gary Busey), just click here and you won't be disappointed. That said, even those outraged by the pure idiocy of the TSA's post 9/11 production of security theater will normally decry it as a massive waste of money or a gross encroachment on civil liberty. And they're right on both counts. Still, the more striking fact should be that the TSA, an agency with the mission of keeping us alive, is causing death.Compare the dangers of air travel to those of driving. To make flying as dangerous as using a car, a four-plane disaster on the scale of 9/11 would have to occur every month, according to analysis published in the American Scientist. Researchers at Cornell University suggest that people switching from air to road transportation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks led to an increase of 242 driving fatalities per month—which means that a lot more people died on the roads as an indirect result of 9/11 than died from being on the planes that terrible day. They also suggest that enhanced domestic baggage screening alone reduced passenger volume by about 5 percent in the five years after 9/11, and the substitution of driving for flying by those seeking to avoid security hassles over that period resulted in more than 100 road fatalities.Yup, you read that correctly. The TSA, in an attempt to keep us safe through the wonders of naked scanners and light petting, has pushed people away from air travel and out onto the road...where they're dying. I suggest we all stop thinking of the TSA as just a waste of money and add "death-causer" to the list. The absurdity of this fact is striking, to say the least. This is a government agency that has failed on every measurable level, from cost effectiveness, to its terrorist-catching-batting-average, to the blatant offense it causes to American ideals... and now we know people are dying as a result of all this nonsense.
This is just another symptom of our overreaction to the constant drumbeat of the Islamic-extremism threat. While death of American citizens is chief amongst my concerns, the economics are flat out insane.
According to one estimate of direct and indirect costs borne by the U.S. as a result of 9/11, the New York Times suggested the attacks themselves caused $55 billion in "toll and physical damage," while the economic impact was $123 billion. But costs related to increased homeland security and counterterrorism spending, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, totaled $3,105 billion. Mueller and Stewart estimate that government spending on homeland security over the 2002-11 period accounted for around $580 billion of that total.Three Trillion dollars in response to a single, albeit terrifying, event. I'll excuse us all, myself included, for the first year or so after 9/11, a time that I remember quite well in that I was scared. Much in the same way I'm legitimately frightened at a horror movie when the masked weirdo with the knife rips open the shower curtain to stab some barely memorable woman. But then, a couple minutes later, my heartbeat returns to normal and I remember that it's all just a movie. This holiday season, as all of us endure the uptick in our travel schedules, remember that. It's time for the TSA budget to reflect ongoing reality, not the single terrifying moment.
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Meanwhile, 9/11 first responders are still waiting for compensation.
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Worse yet, they are dying.
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Also, the Cornell data is from 2005. People weren't avoiding air travel because of the TSA's incompetence, they were avoiding air travel because 9/11 was fresh in their heads and they honestly thought that airline hijackings could become more common.
It's BusinessWeek's mistake, not Techdirt's, but I'm really not sure why you're directing our attention to it and highlighting the scary headline, which is only one paragraph of the article that uses data from 2003 and 2005.
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Re: @AC: Timmy is mainly complaining that he's affected.
By the way, this story also gets a boost because a certain stripe of "conservative-libertarians" always want to do cost-benefit analysis to generally rail at gov't waste. But again, the same types love to see bombs going off to "shock and awe" people who've done them no harm.
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Re: Re: @AC: Timmy is mainly complaining that he's affected.
I never thought you'd up your dumbass level of crazy to actually attack the operation that finally got Osama bin Laden, but congratulations, you got there. Go piss on heroes somewhere else, delusional moron...
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Re: Re: Re: @AC: Timmy is mainly complaining that he's affected.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: @AC: Timmy is mainly complaining that he's affected.
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Re: Re: Re: @AC: Timmy is mainly complaining that he's affected.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: @AC: Timmy is mainly complaining that he's affected.
Riiiight. Keep drinking the Kool-Aid...
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Re: Re: @AC: Timmy is mainly complaining that he's affected.
if the article said "OOTB is the smartest person ever!" i bet you'd come in and say "howdy howdy howdy ima total MORON!"
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Re: Re: Re: @AC: Timmy is mainly complaining that he's affected.
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It's a big part of it, but another huge part is the constant rise in airfares and baggage fees, overcrowded planes, no more meals (unless you pay far out the ass), and aging uncomfortable airplanes.
I fly because I "have" to. I live in Alaska. If I want to go anywhere, driving there isn't really an option for me. If I lived in the 48 states, my first travel choice would be train.
The TSA is a big part of why airline travel has become such an exercise in indignity, but it's not the only part.
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As much as I dislike TSA procedures, let's not confuse correlation with causation. There are too many factors at play to make the claim that the TSA has an impact of more deaths on the road. Correlation does not necessarily equal causation.
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Statistically, most fatal accidents involve alcohol/drugs, bad weather, and maybe cell phones. If you're driving with your family on vacation to Disney World instead of flying there, your trip is not necessarily in the category where most fatal accidents occur. Sure, you could get hit by a drunk driver, but you're not in the conditions this scenario is assuming as the "average". So just mashing together the increased number of people not flying since 9/11 with the accident risk numbers of automobiles is misleading.
But hey, let's look at the bright side of this. Driving saves you money on airline tickets and rental cars at the cost of gasoline and a fraction of your car's lifetime, which isn't as much. You save anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars when you drive. You can use that money to buy hundreds of mosquito nets for children in impoverished nations, protecting them from insect-borne illnesses. Therefore, the TSA isn't killing people, it's saving thousands of children's lives! Yay for misusing statistics!
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Response to: Anonymous Coward on Nov 21st, 2012 @ 10:48am
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the other part is the US monoculture; i don't need to travel by plane to visit the same goddamn walmarts, best buys, applebys, hard rock cafes, etc.. that are in every damn town in the US
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If that's what you visit when you travel, you're doing it wrong.
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Your buttons were pushed to paralyze you with fear, Timmy.
It's now irrelevant who staged 9/11, but it's obvious that "the terrorists have won" by achieving nearly all goals, completely wrecked American freedom. $3.1T is just the start: wars and surveillance have no visible end. Enjoy the shock-bracelets that are next on the TSA agenda.
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Re: Your buttons were pushed to paralyze you with fear, Timmy.
Holy Shit! You managed to say something intelligent and made it through a whole post with only a mild attack (by your normal standards) on the author. I have to agree 100% with your quoted statement. The state that our country is currently in and the path it continues to move down each day validates the terrorists victory in almost every conceivable way. $3.1T spent and what do we have to show for it? Invasion of privacy and loss of civil liberties without a single instance of thwarted terrorism.
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Re: Re: Your buttons were pushed to paralyze you with fear, Timmy.
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If i were going to hijack a plane, it would have happened BEFORE i touched down on US soil...
Probably get tossed in jail for posting this though, as obviously no terrorist would have ever thought of this before i posted it...
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You might also ask yourself why tourism is down in the US. Between the economy and the BS about you no longer have any right to privacy, many in Europe are choosing other destinations rather than go through all the crap to all them into the US to spend money. Nothing but the dislike of what big brother wants to put you through.
In all the money wasted on this security theater the TSA has yet to show you bonifide terrorists caught because they were on the job. Rather there seems to monthly reports of people bringing guns through the inspections while the TSA is busy flagging mothers with empty baby bottles for breast milk.
It's just another example of waste and corruption that has become so rampant in today's government.
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1. Drive and risk my life
2. Bow to those who want to take my liberties away
Hmmm. What would our Founding Fathers do?
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Debate how a bill, law, regulation, does'nt affect individual rights negatively, and if so, amend or throw it out the window
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Risk
As a whole, we are broken machines when it comes to figuring out what we should really be worrying about. I like what Peter Sandman, an expert in risk communications has done, he has redefined risk to make it match the human reality. He says Risk = Hazard + Outrage.
I wrote a blog post about it. People will always worry about the least likely thing to happen while ignoring what is actually happening *all the time*.
As out_of_the_blue points out: While the masses worry about a terrorist attack that will never come, they ignore US government restrictions on constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. That is like worrying about dying in an airplane crash while driving on an interstate during Thanksgiving weekend.
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On Risk
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I agree (to a point)
I agree that things get through; I agree that the TSA totally disregards our rights, and I agree that we should not give up our liberties for safety. But to claim that the TSA's security theatre hasn't stopped a single attack is just plain unsupportable. I think the TSA should be shut down. I think that even if we had a major terrorist attack every month, the safety lost would be worth not losing my liberty. But to support this opinion with numbers that are pure fantasy is absolutely ridiculous.
Correlation is not causation. Ice Cream does not cause boating accidents, yet every year in Michigan when Ice Cream sales skyrocket, so do the number of boating accidents. To claim that the TSA is responsible for every one of those deaths (or any of them) is just as ridiculous.
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Re: I agree (to a point)
That's a good point, it's possible there are would-be terrorists who haven't even tried. But considering how stupid and ineffective the security theater is, and that even the failed post-9/11 attacks haven't been stopped by the TSA, the number could very well be zero.
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Don't forget about the 2.5 trillion or so which magically disappeared from the Pentagon's records.
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tourism losses
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It's not the TSA
TSA has nothing to do with choosing to drive. It's cost and the inconvenience and discomfort of flying itself. Anything less than a day away by car makes more sense to drive than fly. By the time you factor in fees, parking and ground transportation, driving make a lot more sense than flying. If flying was like it was in 1970 (before that blessed deregulation) we'd fly a lot more, but then again, air travel is too crowded already.
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Re: It's not the TSA
The tightest security I've been through anywhere at any time was Belfast airport in Northern Ireland there there was an armed checkpoint to enter the airport grounds, pre-screening of baggage to get into the airport including random but business-like effective and non-intimate pat-downs and then the usual (at the time) security checks done very carefully. They at least had a credible threat of an attack at the time and still that level of security did not feel invasive and gave the impression of buisness-like efficiency. It also took little longer to get through than any other airport back then.
Now, prompted and led by the US/TSA paranioa, we have massive invasions or privacy with the wide sharing of personal information, the inconvenience of having to provide it way before you travel, the frustration of trying to make all the various bits of information match up when the fields to enter them aren't long enough or if you are travelling together as a party that don't live together. We have overly intimate pat-downs that one would usually expect dinner or at least drinks beforehand that are given at the slightest provocation, often due to metal detectors turned up so sensitive that the tiny metal tassle on drawstring trousers will set them off. We have passports and travel documents being checked so frequently at airportts that every time you walk through a door it feels like you are at checkpoint charlie in a bad WWII film. We have vastly overpriced water being sold in airports because you can't take it with you. We have the hassle of carefully planning what toiletries you take on a weekend break to still be able to take your bag on as handluggage instead of having to wait at reclaim the other end. We have the inabilty to cut the bad food on the plane because they are no longer allowed to give you a metal knife.
And on and on and on.... and not one bit of it has improved security in any noticeable degree over that which existed before in Europe and together has managed to increase the time taken to get through an airport by 2-3 times, roughly double the time it takes to prepare to travel and increase the intrusiveness of the "security" by a factor of 3.
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TSA Perv Song
everyone was crying (even our pet mouse).
Passengers were molested by the blue-gloved pervs,
I wanted to say no, but I lacked the nerve.
The children were probed, it's etched in their minds,
because the pedoscreeners massaged their behinds.
They searched mamma, not once but twice,
they squeezed my sack, it didn't feel nice.
Outside the gate, there arose such a clatter,
I pulled up my pants, and went to see what was the matter.
Out of the aquarium, I flew like a flash,
and removed the blue glove they had left, half-shoved up my ass.
There a screener had her hand on grandma's breast,
I thought such depravity, must be followed by arrest.
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
perversion most foul - way worse than plain queer.
An agent molesting an old man, who screamed it was sick,
I knew at that moment, the TSA guy had just grabbed his dick.
They molested us all, we were treated the same,
then, of course, they thanked us by name.
Now, traveler, take off your shoe,
we claim to protect you from terrorists, but you know it's not true.
With security theater, and an ex-Stasi consultant, too,
it's to pointlessly compel obedience, that we do what we do.
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Then again
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My primary motivation was that I didn't want to interact with the TSA more than I had to. Standing in the security lines freaks me out, because all I can think is how ... target rich that environment is, and how trapped I am there. Frankly, there will not be another plane hijacking of that nature occur. Anyone who has tried has been dogpiled. That security line, though ... [shudder]. The security theatre is dangerous, haphazard, and frankly unconstitutional.
Flying to Indiana two weeks ago was a case of "no choice" -- it's either fly or drive, and 14 hours (without stopping) one way was too much, 16-18 isn't feasible. The only passenger train this area gets comes through 3x a week from New Orleans going to the West Coast.
I'm discussing moving closer to the people I travel to see rather than deal with the TSA four to six times a year. As soon as one of the job interviews up in the more central location for "safe" driving distance lands me something, I'm moving. I hate the cold, I really do. But I'd rather be discomforted due to the weather and get to see my friends without being molested than to continue with the current status quo.
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Totally off topic, but what about Atlanta? People seem to like it there, it's warm, and it's a lot closer to Tennesse, Indiana, and the midwest generally.
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"click here"
I just thought this was funny. I wonder how many more are like that?
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Furthermore once you make it past security minus razor blades or nail clippers. Look at what is on an airplane. Pop-cans that can be opened up to create razorblade like weapons or hundreds of other objects
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