TSA’s Roadmap for Airport Surveillance Moves in a Dangerous Direction

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/tsas-roadmap-airport-surveillance-moves-dangerous-direction

by ccnafr • 8 years ago

266 125 8 years ago

Zaheer• 8 years ago

Important to note that the TSA has largely been ineffective: "In a 2016 survey by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General (IG), the TSA missed 95 percent of the weapons and assorted contraband carried into commercial aircraft cabins by undercover investigators"

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/366998-the-tsa...

fooker• 8 years ago

It acts as a deterrent, similar to door locks in homes.

Lockpicking is relatively easy, and there is always brute force.

verelo7• 8 years ago

I'd argue a better deterrent is knowing that there /might/ be an air marshal on the plane AND/OR the unknown security screening done on my checked luggage after it leaves my hands. The TSA are a terrible experience for anyone that encounters them, often giving a poor impression of the US to many first timers, and they are bad at their job! Yet we're not looking to take another approach? It's frankly...pathetic.

Zelphyr• 8 years ago

I suspect the better deterrent, and the reason we haven’t seen another attack remotely similar to 9/11, is that the terrorists know we won’t fall for that again. There would be a whole airplane full of people willing to take down a would-be terrorist.

The TSA is just a pacifier for people who buy that they’re effective.

hourislate• 8 years ago

It seems like the Intelligencia is leveraging the TSA to collect as much information as possible on all US Citizens that use an airport while the TSA pretends to keep Americans safe.

You have to admit it does make good "Theater for the Masses" when you see them stripping down an 80 year old in a wheelchair or dragging an 8 year old off to the side for additional screening.

This is what happens when "The People" lose control of the Government.

rootusrootus3• 8 years ago

This is what happens when "The People" lose control of the Government.

That seems doubtful. Nearly everyone agrees that TSA checkpoints are irritating and slow, how many would actually vote to abolish them? Even just returning back to pre-9/11 security?

I think we have exactly the government most of us want. That's the uncomfortable truth. If the majority of voting citizens wanted the TSA gone, it would be.

creato• 8 years ago

It seems like the Intelligencia is leveraging the TSA to collect as much information as possible on all US Citizens that use an airport while the TSA pretends to keep Americans safe.

What information does the TSA collect?

I can't think of anything the airlines don't already collect when you buy your ticket.

craftyguy3• 8 years ago

They've still managed to find 100% of the bottles of water I've forgotten about and 100% of the water bottles with trace amounts of water still in them.

marnett2• 8 years ago

Well Coca Cola doesn’t make any money on Dasani or Smart Water if you slip on by!

8_hours_ago• 8 years ago

I assume that’s because they see them all day long so they are pretty good at spotting them in an X-ray. They don’t see weapons or actually threatening objects very often, or ever except for training.

Scoundreller• 8 years ago

You can bring frozen water through. Just drink the liquid before you actually get screened.

Once you drink half, refill it at a fountain (or lukewarm water from a bathroom sink if you can funnel it in) to have more cold water.

betterunix24• 8 years ago

Ineffective at preventing hijackings of airplanes, but that is assuming that the purpose of the TSA's airport security measures is to prevent hijackings. More likely it was originally intended to reassure the public that flying is safe by presenting conspicuous screening processes, and considering that it remains politically impossible to wind it down, I think it was very successful. Consider this: a few years ago the TSA leadership suggested that it would probably be OK to allow small knives through the checkpoints, and not only was the idea killed by Congress, I even heard my otherwise intelligent aunt express how terrifying the idea sounded to her.

The basic purpose of the TSA is to prevent a collapse of the air travel market, and now it seems that a few related business interests are also part of that picture. What is or is not allowed through the checkpoints is as much determined by what the public is afraid of as by what will work well for airport businesses and airlines. The shoe rule is slowly but surely going away (it does not apply to anyone who participates in the various pre-screening programs that have been developed; I am guessing it will be gone in general a few years from now), but the equally pointless liquid rule remains in place for everyone. The only difference is that one of those rules boosts sales for airport businesses while the other only makes the lines to get through the checkpoints longer and discourages flying. The proposal to have all laptops go into checked bags was killed almost as soon as it was thought up, even though there was some legitimate concern about attacks strategies involving laptops (it seems to be more realistic than the liquids plot), simply because airlines said it would have too negative an impact on their ticket sales (especially for business class seats, which are the most profitable per square foot of cabin floor space).

justinmk2• 8 years ago

What makes you think the TSA has a net positive effect on the air travel industry? TSA is dehumanizing and makes me hate traveling. It's insulting and humiliating to be forced to wait in line and perform useless rituals.

one of those rules boosts sales for airport businesses

This is pub talk, essentially the broken window fallacy. Making travel unpleasant is unlikely to have helped the airline industry.

0x4454422• 8 years ago

If your premise that the purpose of the TSA is to prevent collapse of the air travel market then why can't this service be handled privately by the airlines?

caseysoftware• 8 years ago

And think of it this way.. they went from zero to over 50k employees in two years.

You don't get that by hiring the best and the brightest but by lowering the bar so far that as long as you're semi-literate and don't have a record of violent crimes, you're hired.

I've flown ~100k miles each of the last few years and they're getting more arbitrary and few can point at the actual rules they're enforcing.

And it's worth noting that they are agents and not officers which places them closer to bureaucrats than law enforcement.

brownbat• 8 years ago

I was pretty alarmed by the culture described by This American Life:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/647/ladonna

Even if we were just erecting pure security theater, it'd be great if we could not build a refuge for pervasive sexual harassment or psychological abuse at the same time.

ironic_ali• 8 years ago

I remember reading not long after the TSA (operationgrabass?) started they were advertising on pizza boxes.

andrewvc• 8 years ago

I saw a guy in front of me at the airport get stopped for a water bottle after the scan. They said "you can't have anything on this list"... at which point he pulled a box cutter out of his carry on and asked "do you need this too"...

barsonme• 8 years ago

I once made it through TSA with a set of screwdrivers and razor blades (painted houses for a while) in my backpack.

Noticed those in the hotel after I landed and they most definitely went in my checked bag on the trip home.

twtw5• 8 years ago

So, this statistic is a little bit incomplete. It's relatively easy for clever operators to sneak contraband past TSA, but the TSA does confiscate a lot of potentially edgy stuff from travelers' carry-ons: thousands of firearms (including loaded), knives hidden in deodorant, many pounds of black powder.

So while it is easy to beat, the TSA screens do succeed at enforcing the most obvious violations to current regulations. Whether the signal (things that seem like they reasonably should be confiscated) to noise (toothpaste, water, nail clippers, pocketknives) is acceptable, I don't know.

graeme2• 8 years ago

....but, the goal isn't catching violations of regulations. It's stopping actors with bad intent.

There was no epidemic of "plane knife fights" or "accidental pistol discharge in planes". Catching incidental weapons that weren't going to be used for harm is basically zero value.

All of the value comes from stopping people with bad intent from having weapons. If 95% of them can get through, then that's a very bad system.

In other words, I don't think you've correctly identified signal vs noise.

thaumasiotes2• 8 years ago

If we fill out the statistic by saying that the TSA has a high success rate in confiscating items from people who aren't trying to hide them, but a 4% success rate in getting them from people who are trying to hide them, that works out to an overall failure rate of 96%.

We only care about trying to take these things from people who are hiding them. Inconveniencing innocent travelers is a cost of the TSA, not a benefit.

goodcanadian• 8 years ago

There was airport security before September 11, 2001. The planes were hijacked with relatively mundane items. The reason the hijacks succeeded was not because of the weapons that got past security. It was because up until that point, the standard operating procedure was to cooperate with hijackers. By the time anybody realised that they were not "normal" hijackings, it was too late.

iramiller• 8 years ago

The one change that actually made this problem go away was adding a secure door to the flight deck. A box cutter isn’t going to be a threat to pilots behind that door.

jstanley• 8 years ago

What is going on in the world? Why are governments bringing in authoritarian measures all the time? I don't get it. It can't always have been this way.

saagarjha2• 8 years ago

It’s always been this way. It’s always easier for governments to do x, y, z if they have more control over their citizens; it’s our job to make sure that there is a balance between losses of certain freedoms and the benefits that we can get by losing those liberties.

diydsp• 8 years ago

Increased airport security allows nation states to defend themselves better from situations they create.

e.g. the u.s. impinges on countries around the globe. we could never survive the blowback without strong border security.

as partwise beneficiaries of the booty, we Americans are expected to endure the dangers of releasing our biometry.

to answer your question, the u.s. used to be the oppressed... england left us well-enough alone when we rose up, and we were growing internally, not bombing six countries at once, like we are now. so no one hated us enough and we had little hate for immigrants- we wanted them to help us grow. but then WW2 happened and we sold our souls to Saudi Arabia for oil the grow. And simultaneously, the military industrial complex happened. thats how its been for three generations now and hardly anyone wants to pull out.

yes there were many other terror operations between 1800 and 1940, but their side effects, without widespread media, couldn't be leveraged to stymy the citizenry.

tumahimikka• 8 years ago

we had little hate for immigrants- we wanted them to help us grow.

This is hilariously wrong. Almost every single immigrant group to the US has faced discrimination and backlash before being assimilated (if ever). Just because immigration has a net positive doesn't mean people liked it

newnewpdro• 8 years ago

On a micro level, it could always be little better or worse than it is, more or less authoritarian, we can debate the details of the moment ad nauseum.

On a macro level, the global population keeps growing ~exponentially on a finite planet. This inevitably results in loss of freedoms/liberty. You can see symptoms of this everywhere.

wool_gather2• 8 years ago

Not enough attention is given to this point, IMO. It is the root of all our problems. Energy consumption, and thus climate change, would have been much more manageable issues without the world population doubling in less than two generations at the end of the 20th century.

rincebrain• 8 years ago

One fundamental struggle between a government and its citizens is that it is believed the more control of/visibility into citizens' lives it has, the more effective it can be at its goals. (I'm not going into whether I think this is actually true.)

Given that, there's the continual struggle between people not wanting government interference in their lives, but wanting the government to be able to accomplish some goals - people ~universally dislike taxation, but many of us think the government should be permitted to levy taxes to fund itself and programs we would like to see.

When people are uncertain or afraid, they will often make more emotional rather than purely rational decisions about clinging to solutions which purport to offer a way back to safety, even if they don't see or understand how their plan provides that.

And once people have gotten themselves into a belief system which they did not reason their way into, they are far more likely to double down if you attempt to reason them out of it.

Authoritarian measures are the political equivalent of "if you sign here, I promise to do whatever it takes to make [bad thing] stop bothering you", nevermind that "whatever it takes" is something you would never have agreed to otherwise, and probably wouldn't have agreed to before your first emotionally-fraught decision. Government agencies have incentives to favor them, because they believe the authority to do X (especially if they're given a blank check and can fill in Y,Z, and W as additional things) will let them accomplish something more readily.

cronix• 8 years ago

Because the people have become pacified and complacent and allow it to happen. They're "protecting" us, after all, so it's all good, man. There is a relatively small percentage of people who understand and care, and most are on places like HN. To the rest, it's just more noise in the ether to filter out. "Nothing I can do. Hey look, a cute cat pic."

The name of the game is distraction, and to pump so much contrary and competing information at everyone that no one can discern the truth from fiction. It's happening. Now.

From another great HN discussion today, watch this (HyperNormalization by Adam Curtis): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh2cDKyFdyU

We get what we deserve.

sys_64738• 8 years ago

Follow the money. Somebody in power is getting backhanders or has a cushy job lined up at one of the tech suppliers. The US government is one of the most corrupt in the western world.

cgearhart• 8 years ago

Ding ding ding! I don't agree regarding the corruption claim (I don't think we're any worse than elsewhere, tbh) but we are seemingly infinitely willing to allow "gray-area" corruption as long as it's just for money.

Starting in 2009, the TSA deployed Rapiscan Secure 1000 full-body scanners at many airports, phasing them out in 2013. The acquisition of the machines, training for workers, and associated personnel costs (each requires a team of five workers) has exceeded $1 billion. [1]
...former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff has given dozens of media interviews touting the need for the federal government to buy more full-body scanners for airports. ... What he has made little mention of is that the Chertoff Group, his security consulting agency, includes a client that manufactures the machines. [2]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2014/10/09/tsa-boond...

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12...

Nasrudith2• 8 years ago

Because they can get away with it and it gives them more power to exploit. They are maintaining damned wish lists of bills for 'convenient events'. The only reason they stop is fear that they'll be lynched metaphorically or otherwise for their actions.

casual_slacker• 8 years ago

Another angle is where the initial push for these new programs is coming from.

betterunix24• 8 years ago

Authoritarianism is the historical norm in every human civilization. In fact America is one of the only examples of an empire that has been democratically governed since its inception. America is also a rare example of a revolution being followed by a lasting, multi-generational democracy (and that was a close call -- remember that our first president was the commander of the army that fought for revolution); the typical pattern is for some military leader to refuse to give up power after a successful revolution, or if a democracy is established it will usually end quickly after it is challenged by some crisis. Examples are plentiful and can be found in the histories of every region of human habitation on this planet, and it is a fantastic example of a phenomenon that seems to transcend things like technological development, culture, religion, and so forth.

Remember that for a democracy to work people have to be active participants, and most people have other things to worry about in their lives. Democracies tend to erode over time; every crisis will lead to a bit of erosion of a democracy, and if the democracy is not reinforced following the crisis, it will be eroded even further during the next crisis. The decline of the Republican system of Rome is an interesting case study -- crisis after crisis weakened the democratic institutions until Caesar struck the final blow.

abecedarius• 8 years ago

Right, but this doesn't explain the speed of recent change.

Maybe Steven Pinker jinxed civilization the same way that guy did who wrote a book a few years before WW1 about how globalization made war between modern states unthinkable.

white-flame2• 8 years ago

They have nothing better to do. I mean that seriously.

We're generally safe, but all the security organizations need to do something to justify themselves, and have ways of thinking that always pursues "greater security" as a direction even if it overshoots what is reasonable for free people.

When security begins to impede freedom, the mandate of security must be placed below the mandate for freedom. Security is there to protect freedom as its ideological basis, so this is an obvious prioritization.

kodablah• 8 years ago

Why are governments bringing in authoritarian measures all the time?

Because we collectively ask them to. You can't ask them to do a bunch of things you might not consider authoritarian (though others might) and then be surprised when they finally reach your definition of authoritarian. That differing levels of "authoritarian" exists is important to remember when you cheer on extreme government oversight/invasiveness just because you agree with the cause at that time. It's hard to know you've given them a mandate until it's too late. You should disagree with unnecessary government intervention even if you agree w/ the intent, and only accept it as a measure of last resort instead of the increasingly default solution many look towards these days.

Shivetya• 8 years ago

people are afraid of any risk in their life and the mobility and ability of those who can harm people either singularly or in groups has never been greater. however the sheer number of people there are means your individual chances are pretty low but it only takes a few high profile cases to scare people.

plus politicians gain power this way by making you fear the other guy. when they cannot find a way to make you not like or trust your neighbor then they drop back to people "over there".

still most would trade a lot of freedom if they don't have to think about their own safety and that is only going to get worse as schools ensure children look to their government for that protection

sverige• 8 years ago

The idea of airport surveillance is itself dangerous, since "profiling" is prohibited. Either do it the way El Al does it (obsessively complete inspection of all persons boarding an aircraft) or forget it. Half measures don't accomplish the stated purpose and are only a means to population control, not for "security."

edoo2• 8 years ago

If security was private the companies involved could do it however they wanted, including using AI to profile. The TSA was created not for security but to shield the airlines from liability, and also a bit as a jobs program. In those regards it is a success.

dawnerd5• 8 years ago

And now the airlines and airports want private security. Go figure.

Nasrudith2• 8 years ago

Profiling doesn't make it better - it just limits the inconvenience to a minority population. I mean that isn't new at all - there was already a 'terrorist attack swap' done between Japanese communists and Palestinian nationalist terrorist groups to dodge profiling. In 1972, the Lod Airport massacre. Not looking at the Japanese men's luggage in Israel wouldn't have helped them at all since they didn't fit the profile at all.

The truth is the airport security is worse than useless because anyone who wants to kill a lot of people can just use guns, bombs, or vehicles through walls while people are in a dense area.

solatic• 8 years ago

Which is why one of the conclusions that Israeli airport security had after the Lod Airport Massacre was for the need to profile people for anxiety and other psychological signs of attempting to evade security, plus other risk factors like young adult males traveling alone. Israeli airport security profiling policy hasn't taught racial profiling in decades.

edoo2• 8 years ago

One thing to consider is anything that the government is allowed to do will eventually be maximized by technology. The slightest allowed oppressions will be amplified exponentially. Since tech is going to serious amplify anything we do that makes the root principles all that more important.

nimbius• 8 years ago

if you think TSA is getting hard to handle with unreasonable surveillance, you havent taken a road trip lately.

Riding my motorcycle from the east coast to the southwest I was stopped by "border patrol" at least 100 miles from any border I could see. After refusing to answer any questions, I was detained for an hour near the AZ border until agents could photograph my sugar skull patch and empty all my bags on the side of the road.

swozey2• 8 years ago

I'm not sure if there are more than usual now but those of us in TX have dealt with interior checkpoints traveling anywhere near MX I'd say most of our lives. We go out of our way to take paths that avoid them. If you didn't know they existed it makes sense that they'd surprise you. I didn't know until moving to TX and going on aimless roadtrips in my Jeep, quite the surprise. And yeah, they'll harass the hell out of you. Everyone has some friend who was detained for something or other then released. That's why we avoid them if we're not actually going to MX. Specifically I remember a friend getting detained for an expired drivers license when he was just a passenger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Border_Patrol_in...

edit: Evidently there are some near Canada as well, didn't know that.

blattimwind• 8 years ago

Border checkpoints inside the country?

int_19h4• 8 years ago

Near Canada, there's also ferries to consider. CBP has been using some rather flimsy rationale to justify customs & border inspections on domestic ferries from San Juan islands to Anacortes on the mainland, for example. Basically, you are a US citizen, living on US soil, and travelling to another place in US without crossing any borders by the only means available at your location - and that translates to "papers, please".

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/border-patrol-spot...

wongarsu• 8 years ago

at least 100 miles from any border I could see.

Most of the population of the US lives within 100 miles of a border because airports count as a border.

anticensor2• 8 years ago

Only land and sea borders count. If you include airports, all of the US becomes border zone, which defeats the purpose of the regulation.

cbkeller• 8 years ago

The article mentions that this push to collect biometric information is happening at the same time as biometric information is being used more frequently in device security.

While I don't know if it's reasonable to think DHS is sufficiently organized and competent to actually put these two parts together w/r/t their "going dark problem", this is probably as good time as any to reiterate that as a best practice biometrics should only be used as username information, not password information.

jwally• 8 years ago

Given that 9/11 style attacks have been mitigated with cockpit locks and guns are kept out with metal detectors what exactly are they trying to prevent?

TSA’s Roadmap for Airport Surveillance Moves in a Dangerous Direction

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