TSA

lawtig02

lawtig02

Legend of ZZL
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Lost in the Iran news is the crisis developing with domestic air travel as TSA employees, who have not been paid since February, are starting to resign or stay home. The political causes of this are so "inside baseball" that I don't find them worth discussing. It's extremely likely that annoyed travelers will blame, in this order, (1) both parties equally, and (2) Republicans because they control every branch of government.

Here are the more interesting questions to me --

1. Why, 25 years after 9/11, do we not have better scanning technology? It's incredible to me that we still require non-PreCheck travelers to take off their shoes, and that TSA can't know immediately what's in every bag that passes through the scanner.

2. How is it possible the government has not already utilized AI to develop technology that can identify threats to air travel that don't require extensive screening? This is the prototypical AI proof-of-case in my view.

3. If we do eliminate the need for complex TSA screening, what's the impact on the airports that have invested billions of dollars to reconfigure their security areas to meet the current expectations?

I may be more sensitive to this because I travel a lot, but our current travel protocols bug me every time I encounter them. How are we not doing better than this by now?
 
I don't travel much-but when i do , I flunk the initial body screen every time And they never find a thing
I guess my old man bones reflect weirdness
 
mpaer said:
I don't travel much-but when i do , I flunk the initial body screen every time And they never find a thing
I guess my old man bones reflect weirdness
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This is a great example. How does TSA not have the ability to recognize you from prior trips through the security line, know what triggered an alert last time, ignore that alert, and look for new alerts? This should not be hard. It's literally what AI was designed to do.
 
lawtig02 said:
How are we not doing better than this by now?
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One (quite important) metric of sucess here is "# of planes blown out of the sky". We're batting a thousand on that one, so there's that.

Sure, some individual agents are assholes, but honestly no more than in the general US population. By and large, these guys have a hard job to do and do it well.

I have a lot of sympathy for them being jerked around again so soon after the last shutdown.
 
Ddseddse said:
One (quite important) metric of sucess here is "# of planes blown out of the sky". We're batting a thousand on that one, so there's that.

Sure, some individual agents are assholes, but honestly no more than in the general US population. By and large, these guys have a hard job to do and do it well.

I have a lot of sympathy for them being jerked around again so soon after the last shutdown.
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I do too. The failure here is not with the agents. I've rarely encountered one who was not professional, competent, and effective. I just don't understand why technology hasn't obviated the need for much of the security screening in this area. We're about to spend $200 billion more to build bombs that can hit a target in Iran with 100% precision. How much would it take to design a security screening system that would identify threats with the same precision?
 
We can't have it that government shutdowns (whole or partial) are/become a "normal" part of governance. Shutdowns used to occur once a decade or so. We've now had 3 in the last six months. TSA officials are not highly paid government workers like the ones in N. Virginia. They need to be paid.

The solution is to immediately pass legislation to provide that during any future government shutdown, all legislators (and their staff) will not receive their pay during any shutdown and it will be illegal to reimburse them for back pay. That will solve this problem. Give Congress some skin in this game.
 
Ramrouser said:
We can't have it that government shutdowns (whole or partial) are/become a "normal" part of governance. Shutdowns used to occur once a decade or so. We've now had 3 in the last six months. TSA officials are not highly paid government workers like the ones in N. Virginia. They need to be paid.

The solution is to immediately pass legislation to provide that during any future government shutdown, all legislators (and their staff) will not receive their pay during any shutdown and it will be illegal to reimburse them for back pay. That will solve this problem. Give Congress some skin in this game.
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While not the point of this thread, I agree with this. Then again, statutory pay is irrelevant to most members of Congress. The real move would be to lock their net wealth at the beginning of their term. If they lose wealth while serving, we make it up from the Treasury on an inflation-adjusted basis. If they gain, they can either pay taxes on it at 95%, or they can donate the gain to a nonpartisan charity on a tax-free basis. That does a huge strike against both corruption and lifetime terms in one fell swoop.
 
Ramrouser said:
We can't have it that government shutdowns (whole or partial) are/become a "normal" part of governance. Shutdowns used to occur once a decade or so. We've now had 3 in the last six months. TSA officials are not highly paid government workers like the ones in N. Virginia. They need to be paid.

The solution is to immediately pass legislation to provide that during any future government shutdown, all legislators (and their staff) will not receive their pay during any shutdown and it will be illegal to reimburse them for back pay. That will solve this problem. Give Congress some skin in this game.
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I'd add that the same should be true at the state level.

 
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