Comment by paxys

> A large portion, maybe even the majority, of travelers simply won't feel safe without it. I've had and overheard multiple conversations at the airport where somebody felt uncomfortable boarding a plane because they saw the screening agent asleep at the desk.

I’d hazard that this may be true now, but this feeling was created by the same “security measures” we’re discussing.

Anyway, such major population-wide measures shouldn’t be about stopping people being “uncomfortable” - they should be about minimising risk, or not at all. If you start imposing laws or other practices every time a group of people feel “uncomfortable”, the world will quickly grind to a halt.

The problem with allowing "feels unsafe" to drive policy is that you get this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46866201 ; a lot of Americans (and other nationalities) get that "feels unsafe" feeling when they see a visible minority. Or a Muslim. Or someone who isn't a Muslim but (like a Sikh!) is from the same hemisphere as the Middle East.

You get one set of people's rights compromised to salve the feelings of another set, and this is not right.

The worst thing is that indulging it doesn't lessen the fear either. It just means people reach for something else to be "afraid" of.

It is mostly security, but not to residents of the country. Those can enforce their rights. In my country, I can argue with airport security, and win. Foreigners can’t, so they follow whatever rules. A few times when landing in the US, security was extremely rude, I think just looking for an excuse (things like throwing your laptop a few feet away, while staring at you, etc). You take it bc you’re not home, and the cost of ruining your vacation is not worth it.

What I’m trying to say is that , while a lot of it is theater, TSA may be more effective security against foreigners but you as a resident don’t notice because you can opt out. Try going to the UK and telling them you can’t raise your arms while being a US citizen.

We people are extremely poor judges of our own emotions, particularly in hypotheticals.

Normalize having two lines; one with tsa, one without. See which airplane people actually board after a while. Let us put our time and money on the line and we’ll see what we really think. It’s the only way to tell.

I’m sure in a world with tsa for buses and trains some people would say the same things they do now about our tsa.

> Even Bruce Schneier, who coined the term "security theater" has moderated his stance to acknowledge that it can satisfy a real psychological need, even if it's irrational.

What about the real psychological need of not wanting to be surveilled that also quite a lot of people have?

If you offer the public FDA-inspected cinnamon for a 20% premium over not-inspected-and-may-contain-dangerous-levels-of-lead cinnamon, a lot of people will pay the premium. But a large percentage of people will opt for the cheaper cinnamon.

If you let it be known that the FDA inspection amounts to a high school dropout trying to read a manifest on a shipping container full of imported cinnamon, a lot more people will opt for the cheaper cinnamon. But a significant percentage will still pay the premium.

There is very little about that inspection that protects people, and just because something is not inspected doesn't mean it has lead in it. If you really want to be safe, you should run your cinnamon through your own detection lab.

What we need is an iPhone app that can detect guns, explosives, anthrax, covid, Canadians, and any other airplane hazard. Then let people carry that personal TSA sniffer onto the plane. They can feel safe and secure and the rest of us can save a fortune in taxes.

If it's about satisfying a psychological need, then it should be compared as such to satisfying other psychological needs. Like, say, not getting groped by strangers.

> A large portion, maybe even the majority, of travelers simply won't feel safe without it.

Nonsense. Most of that is just because it’s been normalised - because it exists and the people manning it make such a song and dance about it. Going from that to nothing would freak some people out, but if it were just gradually pared back bit by bit people wouldn’t need it anymore.

Here in Australia there’s no security for a lot of regional routes (think like turboprop (dash-8) kind of routes) starting from small airports, because it’s very expensive to have the equipment and personnel at all these small airports, and on a risk-benefit analysis the risk isn’t high enough. Some people are surprised boarding with no security, but then they’re like, “Oh, well must be OK then I guess or they wouldn’t let us do it”…

We also don’t have any liquid limits at all for domestic flights, and don’t have e to take our shoes off to go through security domestically or internationally, and funnily enough we aren’t all nervous wrecks travelling.

The situation re: psychological safety becomes very apparent when you mention to foreigners how often guns accidentally make it through TSA in peoples bags - and get discovered on screening on the return flight.

Saucers for eyes, saucers! Hah

The reality is that screening raises the bar enough that most casuals won’t risk it unless they’re crazy, which is worth something, and makes most people feel comfy, which is also worth something.

It’s like using a master lock on your shed, or a cheap kwikset on your front door.

Security Theater Blanket

I've been applying this principle of behavior to... ahem... current events. I feel like this helps contextualize the behavior of the majority during the current economic and political turmoil. People can't help but pretend this wasn't coming for years, and they certainly can't admit to having a part in it.

Taxpayers haven’t agreed to fund theater they agreed to fund safer travel. The failed audits of TSA are totally unacceptable

Yeah security people (computer or otherwise), are mostly crypto fascists with hardons for humiliating people and telling them what to do.

It's been proven from time to time that the strength of a security system is mostly determined by its strongest element, and defense in depth, and making people jump through hoops contributes comparatively little.

That's why you can go reasonably anywhere on the web, and have your computer publically reachable from any point in the world, yet be reasonably safe, provided you don't do anything particularly dumb, like installing something from an unsafe source.

That's why these weird security mitigation strategies like password rotation every two weeks with super complex passwords, and scary click-through screens about how youll go straight to jail if you misuse the company computer are laughable.

A growing part of me doesn't care, and doesn't want to coddle fascist mental illness.

If it was "Glass Iraq or make people take off their shoes", then I'll take the shoes...

But honestly? Fuck these people. We have extended them unlimited credit to make social change, and they always want more and worse changes. Their insecurities are inexhaustible. We need to declare them bankrupt of political capital. We need to bully them and make it clear their views aren't welcome, frankly.

We are 25 years deep into "Letting the terrorists win", and I'm fucking sick of it.

I used to have a Sikh manager who wore a turban. Whenever we traveled together, he would get "randomly" stopped. While they were patting him down, he would inevitably chuckle and say something like "So what are the odds of being 'randomly' selected 27 times in a row?"

I don't know the specifics of the process for selection, but I can confidently say that the process is bigoted.

I used to work with a Kevin and a Mohammed.

Whenever we travelled to offsite offices Mohammed 100% of the time was picked for bag check, while Kevin was not picked once.

Mohammed was white, and Kevin was black.

It was completely racist, and never random.

I'm brown, very brown. A Native American, in fact.

I am a white male and have TSA pre-check and after walking through the metal detector, maybe one out of several times I get randomly selected for the body scanner. I've never gotten the dreaded SSSS though. I've very rarely traveled alone not on a work trip and never alone on a one way ticket so maybe that helps.

It's screwed up that skin color is a marker that would lead an ignorant provincial quasi-cop to assume someone is of a particular ethnicity, and even more so that that ethnicity would lead them to believe an individual adheres to a belief system that might lead them to blow up an aircraft. Very poor set of assumptions and flawed tooling, to say the least.

I would never get randomly selected despite being brown. Then I grew out my beard. Now random selection loves to pick me.

I once found myself in the "random extra screening" waiting room in LHR before boarding an El Al flight to Tel Aviv, everyone else in the room was Muslim. Random indeed...

I had like a +7 random screening hit streak once. Old and comfortable and that melts away as you become the system.

When all you see is color, everything different is racism.

I'm the whitest white person you'll find, white bread and turkey sandwich. I get screened all the time. Most of the time the agents are not white, WTF would I blame the color of their skin?

I was so confused last time I traveled as I watched this brown skinned family getting shaken down for ID by TSA and they literally just waived me past and said didn't need ID. Mind you I've never not been asked to show ID to TSA before this.

This podcast episode might be of interest. https://www.searchengine.show/a-perfectly-average-anomaly/

Derek Smalls?

Almost always my back sweat from wearing a backpack shows up on the body scanner. Then a TSA agent has to put their gloved hand on my sweaty back. What a shit job lol.

Whenever my backpack has been pulled aside for various reasons (large metal tools, too many loose wires, water bottle), I'll often get the bomb sniffer wipe.

Are you sure it was the zipper?

If he was doing that to get faster treatment at a hospital or even just a restaurant or something then I'd agree. But by doing it to get faster treatment at the TSA check he's literally doing everyone else a favour.

I did that for a long time. My favorite part is when they say "Do you have any sore or sensitive areas?"

I always say "my penis" and they say "uh.. well.. I'm not going to touch that"

Me: "When you slide your hand up until you meet resistance? That resistance is my penis. You're going to touch my penis and it's a sensitive area."

Yep. It's asking for FAFO with civil $$ or even criminal penalties.

From what I see, it's low risk, though the parent's smartass approach might get you some punishment. Not worth skipping the detector via lie.

Who said I'm lying?

1) its okay to the lie to the TSA and troll them. the TSA is just low skilled jobs program.

2) those scanning machines have leaked their images before to the public so its okay not to want to go through them and have your.png on there forever.

Well, their job is literally to harass people, and they knew that getting hired.

Another pro tip is to not pay at restaurants. If you can leave the restaurant fast enough before they give you the bill, they must have forgotten to charge you and sucks for them! The trick is not to bring bags so you can fake a trip to the toilet!

"Obeying the law, no matter how pointless, wasteful, or destructive, is a virtue."

Does it make you feel good to participate in a meaningless charade of security theater? Or would you rather spend your time doing some of value?

What if the police department has Teslas?

Quite a modest proposal.

The Republicans say you should dress up better, then it’s glamorous.

I should not need to show an anonymous TSA agent my genitals, even if they are in black and white on some monitor theyre viewing in some back room, to get on a plane.

I could ask the same serious question, why should I have to? There is zero reason to suspect me of being a suicidal maniac. Should we have such scanners to walk into a busy store or bus or subway system? Why don't private pilots and passengers have such screenings?

There are legit health reasons to opt out of the scanner. I know because I have one of those conditions and have never been through the scanner.

Then why do they routinely send kids through the (non-invasive) metal detectors, while adults get sent through the millimeter-wave scanners?

To me it's just a vote against the profiteers who make those machines.

Also I kinda like the process better; the pat-down is nothin', and you can a full table to yourself to recombobulate.

> First-Amendment-auditor thinking.

Uhhh, I like that kind of thinking. Is there something wrong with first amendment auditors now?!

> I, too, dislike walking far. Here’s how I faked my way into a handicap parking tag.

Cute analogy, but.

Handicap parking tags provide value to those who need them. Depriving them of parking makes their lives harder.

On the other hand, TSA is pure theater, as TFA makes clear. Avoiding this needless ritual saves time for the passenger, for the TSA officers, even for the other passengers, and does not increase risk at all. It's pure win-win.

The TSA is literally doing all this extra work though, whether or not you think it's required by law. They're not just pocketing the $45 and then blindly waving you ahead.

Like someone who would deliberately show up to work in a speedo because "show me where in the employee handbook it says I must wear pants"

It's not millions of people, most people get Real ID. In the context of airport security budgets, it's not that much. And it's used for hiring the additional staff required and putting together the identity verification systems they use.

Assuming 100M "classic" ID checks (being generous): congrats, you just paid for two days of running the military!

But everyone would have to take advantage of that benefit not having ID have with themselves.

The roughly 7.6 million CLEAR members paying $209/yr grosses them north of $1 billion/year. It's not hard to see why TSA wants to get in on it.

That's because many Americans are against national ID at all cost for some reason. The very same Americans think that immigrants need to have their "I'm legal" folder with them at all times.

You're not going to believe it, but if you already have a passport - you don't need Real ID (in ideal world). I only got Real ID because I want to have zero questions about my immigration status.

Absolutely. With Real ID, the biggest pain for a lot of people is proof of residency.

Rich people just print out some combination of a bank statement, a pay stub, and a copy of their mortgage or lease or the electric bill, but poor people may not have much of that. Think of someone staying with family and getting paid by a gig economy job to a Cash App card or just working under the table/doing odd jobs.

Once you start with less common documents, there seem to be more arcane rules, and the documents poor people do have often don’t quite fit the rules that were basically written around what people middle class and up are likely to have.

> Precheck by itself does not

Now! But, when it started it definitely required.

It's a database lookup that takes 5-15 minutes once you get to an available officer, but then depending on what it returns you may need additional screening, which will also need to wait for someone available.

That's why if you don't have an ID, you should get to the airport at least an hour earlier than otherwise (already accounting for long security lines), and more during peak travel times. If you get slowed down, you're going to miss your flight. They're not going to speed it up for you.

This happened to me once, they just brought out someone (supervisor?) who asked questions about what addresses I've lived at, other similar questions I'd probably only know the answer to.

It does take longer than regular screening (most of the time was just spent waiting for the supervisor -- I'm not sure they were spending time collecting some data first), if that causes you to miss your flight you miss your flight.

It seems plausible to me that $45 could be about a TSA employee's wage times how much longer this takes. In aggregate, this (in theory) lets them hire additional staff to make sure normal screening doesn't take longer due to existing staff being tied up in extra verifications.

Data brokers already know everything about every American so the TSA is just buying existing information from them. Then they can quickly quiz you on the information to verify that you are you. https://network.id.me/article/what-is-knowledge-based-verifi...

There are more criteria to get through security than "not carrying prohibited items". Several of those are dependent on identity, which is why they verify identity.

It's not that they'd pay individual employees more, it's that they'd hire more workers to account for the fact that their existing workers are tied up doing extra verification.

Though they might not do that either.

Do you not see how an organization discouraging the use of something inefficient benefits as a whole?

Thats why cashless businesses exist, why you pay more for things that involve human attention instead of automated online solutions etc.

I think the comparison to the propiska system is incorrect. This Soviet system heavily controlled internal migration and was what ultimately dictated where someone was permitted to live. You couldn't relocate without one, and having this permission was tied to all sorts of local services. This system anchored people to where they were, and usually barred them from moving unless they had a good reason to.

The US currently has freedom of movement. You don't need the government's permission to live somewhere or to move somewhere else. An ID with your address listed isn't propiska. At best, you could compare it to the 'internal passport' that the USSR and most post-Soviet countries had, which acted as a comprehensive identity document and was the ancestor to modern national ID cards that are used in many countries.

>RealID is unrelated to citizenship.

Except that it appears one of the primary reasons this has become a thing is that the Feds are angry at states like Washington that don't verify citizenship when issuing driver's licenses. The whole point was that Washington (as an example) wanted to make sure people were able to get an identification and driving with a license (IE: some degree of documentation, had achieved some degree of driver's education and testing somewhere along the line...) regardless of their immigration status - and that pissed off the Feds. So it shouldn't be related to citizenship but that's part of how we got here.

My passport card is RealID compliant and doesn’t have my address anywhere on it.

Real ID/Drivers License being a proof of address is laughable. In my state (NY) they accept the following as proof of address for getting a new Real ID:

- Bank statement

- Pay stub

- Utility bill

- Any other state ID with the same last name, which I can claim is my parent or spouse.

I can change my mailing address on any of them with a few clicks online, no actual verification needed.

What they do NOT accept as proof of address:

- My passport

How does that make any sense?

Citizenship or lawful status, sorry! And you’re right.

But it’s totemic when you dig into conspiracy theories about undocumented immigrants voting. RealID comes up a lot.

It's hardly proof of address. At best, I'd say it's proof of state residency.

I've moved several times since getting my Colorado driver's license (a REAL ID). Technically, you are supposed to submit a change-of-address form to the DMV online within 30 days of moving. They don't send you a new card when you do that; the official procedure is to stick a piece of paper with your new address written on it to your existing ID yourself, and then just wait until your next renewal to actually get a card with the new address on it. The change of address form does not require utility bills or any other proof of the new address-- that's only required when you initially get the driver's license.