a criticism of “you’re not strict enough to actually find all the things” is not an argument against attempting to find all the things.
'The methods you are using cannot possible product the outcomes that need to have happen if your purpose was real, but it is not' is, indeed, a pretty good argument against funding a part of the government that is incredibly invasive.
2) the things the TSA actually does effectively filter for – articles hidden in shoes, liquids in quantity – actually could substantially affect an aircraft in a term short enough to be relevant.
The TSA is not 'effectively filtering liquids in quantity' at all, mostly because of the incredibly obvious fact that multiple people can just carry liquids through and put them together on the other side. You don't even have to cheat!
Meanwhile, cheating is trivial. You can get much larger amounts of liquids (Which you can then combine to make even more) just by signing a doctor's note that they are medically required, which is trivial. I recommend insulin so they won't check it...
...granted, I have no idea what you're even trying to smuggle past security because liquid is merely 'a state of matter' and thus is not inherently dangerous.
As for shoes, firstly, we do not screen quite a lot of people's shoes to start with. Secondly, there are quite a few ways to alter things to hide 10 ounces of plastic explosives such that they would be undetected by x-ray machines. If we actually wish to stop that, we need to do better nitrate detection, including airborne.
That actually _would_ be something useful for airport security, but we don't do useful things, we do stupid things that assume that attackers are going to use literally, word-for-word, the same attack as last time.
I have no idea what point you think you are making.
TSA repeatedly fails _accidental_ penetration testing, in that they allow people to fly with prohibited things all the time. By accident, not hidden.
They also notable do not punish people for attempting to fly with prohibited things, which is...very stupid if the goal is to stop getting prohibited things on planes. The TSA also does not bother to keep track of how many times people 'accidentally' tried to take box cutters through.
Put that together with their absysmal track record of actually detecting things, and literally any idiot with a few thousand dollars can get a box cutter on a plane...all they have to do is _keep trying_ via cheap flights. Oh, let me just constantly book a bunch for cheap-last minute flights and I'll try to walk a box cutter on 'by accident' each time, and I'll manage it, statistically, by flight 10 or so. (If someone needs it on a specific flight, they just have to do this in advance and find a hiding place at the airport where they can keep it until then.)
And you may notice that 'Just use multiple flights and hide stuff' is, uh, pretty obvious a way to get large amounts of liquids through, although that restriction is so inherently stupid no one even pretends it matters.
This discussion topic is about parts of the government that are failures, and the TSA is, as set up, is about as objectively a failure as it is possible for a government agency to be...they have literally one job, a job stopping a thing from happening, and any idiot who wishes to make that happen _could trivially do so_.
It's just, no one really wants to.
(This is on top of the fact it's probably impossible to stop razor blades but allow electronic devices, since people could just, ya know, hide them pretty easily in electronic devices. But no one has to!)
As for knives and poky-tools, maybe the reason they don’t care as much about those is just what was pointed out earlier–that locking the cockpit door leaves you completely protected from such items, at least for the time it would take to call in an emergency.
Pointing out that what the TSA is trying to do is utterly pointless is a very strange way to defend the fact they are a complete failure at doing what they are trying to do.
Like, sure, the entire premise of their existence is moronic to start with, which is good, because they are not actually fulfilling it.
Which I also recall was met with a lot of cries of, “That’s your job, Mr. President!”
I don't remember that at all.
That's a pretty stupid objection. Yes, that is part of the president's job, but the president only functions because he has literally dozens of advisors doing a first-pass over things to bring certain things to his attention and let him ignore other things.
Having someone whose job is 'weird interactions and redundancies in policy' seems entirely reasonable. Honestly, I feel like that should actually be a white house office, where every department has representatives in it who can say to other department's representatives 'Hey, have you noticed that our two Departments have nearly identical definitions of X, and it probably would make sense to make them _actually_ word-for-word identical?' and things like that.
Which left me asking, “Well, isn’t that the President’s job? Don’t we have a National Security Advisor and a National Security Council to help him with that?”
You think the _president_ should be handed a bunch of information about individual threats from the FBI and CIA and somehow integrate that? And coordinate the two? What?
The National Security Advisor and National Security Council are intended to talk to the _president_, they are not any sort of inter-agency communications.
Teachers are managed and licensed by the State, not the feds. All the educational forms I’ve ever gotten about my kids have also been State. You need the State’s permission to start a school, not the feds.
I didn't say they managed them, I said they had _information_ about them.
If I were drafted to run for president, my first policy position would — and this sounds odd, but I’m looking for votes — eliminate TSA and we’d go back to meeting Grandma at her gate when her plane arrived.
I always thought my proposal would be funnier and stop anyone from trying to implement that sort of moronic thing again, because the TSA is _so_ bad at their job:
Me, as president: *holds up a bright orange piece of metal* "This is a pentest box cutter. It is the same size and shape as box cutters, but cannot be used as a weapon. You can buy them from the government for $100. We also have a gun-shape piece of metal for $500, and just a razor-blade-shape for $20. They are for you to attempt to smuggle them onto planes. If you get caught, it will be confiscated and you will be out the purchase price. If you hand one of these to a flight attendant while in the air, you will get a voucher for the price of what you smuggled in x10, written out of the budget of the TSA. You cannot be punished by the TSA for this."
Sounds reasonable for a penetration test until you remember a) how hilariously bad the TSA is at their job, and b) how impossible and stupid their entire job is to start with. They'd start bleeding red. I just wish I could come up with some plausible method of judging liquid smuggling.
…which raises the immediate question of “why is this something the Department of Education is expected to do instead of FEMA?”
Well, the Department of Education has facts about every child educated in that area and every teacher, it knows what schools exist where, it knows how schools have to function and what is needed to make a school, etc, etc.
On top of that, when it doesn't know something factual, it's the authority to figure it out. For example, how much school can students miss, what special things need to be done when students are trying to cope with the possible loss of their home and being shoved into a new environment, etc.
If you want all that in FEMA, you're basically building a smaller Department of Education inside of FEMA that does _nothing at all_ and just sits there idle a good chuck of time.
Or you can have a dedicated department full of people who are experts in education who can put any long-term work aside in an emergency and deal with that, and then go back to doing other things.
2 weeks ago
It's worth reminding people that Departments are actually ways to _organize_ government programs, and we might be better off thinking of them like that, instead of 'a thing'.
Like, the Department of Education has emergency funds to allocate to education in disaster areas, for doing things like renting buildings and flying in teachers if schools are destroyed, along with longer-term grants to actually fix schools as part of national disasters. It's called the Disaster Recovery Unit, it actually was just formed in 2018, but that's because it was sorta distributed across the entire Department of Education before that.
Presumably, if we think we should care the Federal government responding to national disasters, someone probably needs to be thinking about education in all that. And if we are going to have anything else in the government doing education, it should probably be those people we ask. And having a Department for something like that seems to make sense.
But even if you think we shouldn't have a Department for Education, we still need to, uh, do that.
Another thing the Department of Education does: Education for Native American Tribes. Not only do they not have the tax base to do it themselves, we often have an obligation to fund education for them _under treaty_. (Let's try not to break even more treaties with them, shall we?)
Other departments make less sense and have weirder grouping. But even the ones that do not make sense and seem completely arbitrary, that doesn't mean anything.
Because that is thinking at the wrong level, it's like looking at a giant office building and decided to abolish the office building instead of offices or jobs. A Department is just a big collection of things we put next to each other. If we have too many things, or they aren't working well, the thing to do is to look at those things.
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'The methods you are using cannot possible product the outcomes that need to have happen if your purpose was real, but it is not' is, indeed, a pretty good argument against funding a part of the government that is incredibly invasive.
The TSA is not 'effectively filtering liquids in quantity' at all, mostly because of the incredibly obvious fact that multiple people can just carry liquids through and put them together on the other side. You don't even have to cheat!
Meanwhile, cheating is trivial. You can get much larger amounts of liquids (Which you can then combine to make even more) just by signing a doctor's note that they are medically required, which is trivial. I recommend insulin so they won't check it...
...granted, I have no idea what you're even trying to smuggle past security because liquid is merely 'a state of matter' and thus is not inherently dangerous.
As for shoes, firstly, we do not screen quite a lot of people's shoes to start with. Secondly, there are quite a few ways to alter things to hide 10 ounces of plastic explosives such that they would be undetected by x-ray machines. If we actually wish to stop that, we need to do better nitrate detection, including airborne.
That actually _would_ be something useful for airport security, but we don't do useful things, we do stupid things that assume that attackers are going to use literally, word-for-word, the same attack as last time.
I have no idea what point you think you are making.
TSA repeatedly fails _accidental_ penetration testing, in that they allow people to fly with prohibited things all the time. By accident, not hidden.
They also notable do not punish people for attempting to fly with prohibited things, which is...very stupid if the goal is to stop getting prohibited things on planes. The TSA also does not bother to keep track of how many times people 'accidentally' tried to take box cutters through.
Put that together with their absysmal track record of actually detecting things, and literally any idiot with a few thousand dollars can get a box cutter on a plane...all they have to do is _keep trying_ via cheap flights. Oh, let me just constantly book a bunch for cheap-last minute flights and I'll try to walk a box cutter on 'by accident' each time, and I'll manage it, statistically, by flight 10 or so. (If someone needs it on a specific flight, they just have to do this in advance and find a hiding place at the airport where they can keep it until then.)
And you may notice that 'Just use multiple flights and hide stuff' is, uh, pretty obvious a way to get large amounts of liquids through, although that restriction is so inherently stupid no one even pretends it matters.
This discussion topic is about parts of the government that are failures, and the TSA is, as set up, is about as objectively a failure as it is possible for a government agency to be...they have literally one job, a job stopping a thing from happening, and any idiot who wishes to make that happen _could trivially do so_.
It's just, no one really wants to.
(This is on top of the fact it's probably impossible to stop razor blades but allow electronic devices, since people could just, ya know, hide them pretty easily in electronic devices. But no one has to!)
As for knives and poky-tools, maybe the reason they don’t care as much about those is just what was pointed out earlier–that locking the cockpit door leaves you completely protected from such items, at least for the time it would take to call in an emergency.
Pointing out that what the TSA is trying to do is utterly pointless is a very strange way to defend the fact they are a complete failure at doing what they are trying to do.
Like, sure, the entire premise of their existence is moronic to start with, which is good, because they are not actually fulfilling it.
I don't remember that at all.
That's a pretty stupid objection. Yes, that is part of the president's job, but the president only functions because he has literally dozens of advisors doing a first-pass over things to bring certain things to his attention and let him ignore other things.
Having someone whose job is 'weird interactions and redundancies in policy' seems entirely reasonable. Honestly, I feel like that should actually be a white house office, where every department has representatives in it who can say to other department's representatives 'Hey, have you noticed that our two Departments have nearly identical definitions of X, and it probably would make sense to make them _actually_ word-for-word identical?' and things like that.
You think the _president_ should be handed a bunch of information about individual threats from the FBI and CIA and somehow integrate that? And coordinate the two? What?
The National Security Advisor and National Security Council are intended to talk to the _president_, they are not any sort of inter-agency communications.
I didn't say they managed them, I said they had _information_ about them.
FEMA does not.
If I were drafted to run for president, my first policy position would — and this sounds odd, but I’m looking for votes — eliminate TSA and we’d go back to meeting Grandma at her gate when her plane arrived.
I always thought my proposal would be funnier and stop anyone from trying to implement that sort of moronic thing again, because the TSA is _so_ bad at their job:
Me, as president: *holds up a bright orange piece of metal* "This is a pentest box cutter. It is the same size and shape as box cutters, but cannot be used as a weapon. You can buy them from the government for $100. We also have a gun-shape piece of metal for $500, and just a razor-blade-shape for $20. They are for you to attempt to smuggle them onto planes. If you get caught, it will be confiscated and you will be out the purchase price. If you hand one of these to a flight attendant while in the air, you will get a voucher for the price of what you smuggled in x10, written out of the budget of the TSA. You cannot be punished by the TSA for this."
Sounds reasonable for a penetration test until you remember a) how hilariously bad the TSA is at their job, and b) how impossible and stupid their entire job is to start with. They'd start bleeding red. I just wish I could come up with some plausible method of judging liquid smuggling.
Well, the Department of Education has facts about every child educated in that area and every teacher, it knows what schools exist where, it knows how schools have to function and what is needed to make a school, etc, etc.
On top of that, when it doesn't know something factual, it's the authority to figure it out. For example, how much school can students miss, what special things need to be done when students are trying to cope with the possible loss of their home and being shoved into a new environment, etc.
If you want all that in FEMA, you're basically building a smaller Department of Education inside of FEMA that does _nothing at all_ and just sits there idle a good chuck of time.
Or you can have a dedicated department full of people who are experts in education who can put any long-term work aside in an emergency and deal with that, and then go back to doing other things.
It's worth reminding people that Departments are actually ways to _organize_ government programs, and we might be better off thinking of them like that, instead of 'a thing'.
Like, the Department of Education has emergency funds to allocate to education in disaster areas, for doing things like renting buildings and flying in teachers if schools are destroyed, along with longer-term grants to actually fix schools as part of national disasters. It's called the Disaster Recovery Unit, it actually was just formed in 2018, but that's because it was sorta distributed across the entire Department of Education before that.
Presumably, if we think we should care the Federal government responding to national disasters, someone probably needs to be thinking about education in all that. And if we are going to have anything else in the government doing education, it should probably be those people we ask. And having a Department for something like that seems to make sense.
But even if you think we shouldn't have a Department for Education, we still need to, uh, do that.
Another thing the Department of Education does: Education for Native American Tribes. Not only do they not have the tax base to do it themselves, we often have an obligation to fund education for them _under treaty_. (Let's try not to break even more treaties with them, shall we?)
Other departments make less sense and have weirder grouping. But even the ones that do not make sense and seem completely arbitrary, that doesn't mean anything.
Because that is thinking at the wrong level, it's like looking at a giant office building and decided to abolish the office building instead of offices or jobs. A Department is just a big collection of things we put next to each other. If we have too many things, or they aren't working well, the thing to do is to look at those things.