*Getting felt up, tossing out unopened bottles of water, pulling toddlers aside for selective screening, taking off shoes and artificial limbs, soft-porn full body scanners, and my personal favorites--being asked to drink my own breastmilk and being on the "No-Fly List"--have not improved aviation security.
*These measures have cost $56 billion dollars.
*The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recruits security personnel with ads on gas pumps and pizza boxes.
What's striking is that this much-belated realization that TSA is a bloated, failed bureaucracy comes from two House Republicans--Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga) and House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fl.)--because the agency, its procedures, and its expensive equipment (awarded on no-bid contracts) all were the genius of Republicans.
Yes, I know the TSA is a favorite whipping-boy of mine, and deservedly so. Thankfully, Representatives Broun and Mica have now presented a harsh report on the TSA's "performance"--a double-entendre, in my opinion, because "a performance" (theater of the absurd with mandatory audience participation) is all that many of TSA's measures are.
As Broun said,
TSA has not prevented any attacks . . .It's just very fortunate that we've had no attacks.
This honesty is significant because it completely bursts the
argumentum ad ignorantiam meme of security theater defenders that "we've had no attacks so it must be working." Lack of evidence to the contrary is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false.
We've had no attacks because we've been lucky, and the attempted attacks we've seen (by "shoe bomber" Richard Reid and by "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab) have been thwarted not by airline security measures, but by alert passengers. After Richard Reid hid explosives in his shoes, all passengers now must de-shoe while going through security. We can only be thankful that after the underwear bomber, we didn't have to start going commando.
Why are we not installing the equipment and protocols that are cheaper, more effective, and less intrusive? Explosives-trace-detection machines have been installed at a snail's pace (puffer machines and swabbing technology pose far fewer privacy concerns than whole-body imaging scanners), the TSA does not have enough personnel abroad to ensure that passenger screening and baggage inspections for in-bound flights are up to par, and PDH (public display of humiliation) measures do not work. We need less security theater and more actual security.