I mean, I read news articles that say the TSA fail to actually catch prohibited items like weapons or drugs most of the time… so what’s the point? Many people are calling this “Security Theater”… Does this “Security Theater” actually scare away a would-be terrorist?
Basically, we can’t answer this because it’d require measuring how many events didn’t happen. I suspect it only really helps reduce improvised, spur-of-the-moment crimes, but then again, the sort of person who would highjack an airliner is usually pretty stupid.
Passengers will not allow disruptions anymore either. The assumption now is that everyone will die if you don’t do something.
Yea I hope people intervene if dudes with shivs are walking around the plane.
Just suddenly thought about 9/11 for some reason, now I’m just randomly scare of flights. (Just weird OCD things… 😖)
Edit: Didn’t mean to label everything as “OCD”, I meant more like “paranoia”.
But you could test the system by trying to violate the rules and documenting the catch rate. Surely, they are already doing so to measure its effectiveness.
They are, and the TSA failure rate is astronomical.
Failing 95% of tests in 2015
Failing more than half the time back in 2017
I’m having trouble finding anything more recent, which doesn’t seem to suggest that they have i proved significantly or they would be bragging about it. But even a 90% success rate would be preatty terrible due to the volume of travelers they screen. They should be failing either one or zero out of dozens of tests at the most to be considered reliable.
Well, at at least they were able to catch something, rather than nothing. Now terrorists know that you can’t just walk through with an RPG on your shoulder. However, with rates like that, you could probably sneak through just about anything through as long as you try to hide it even a little bit.
You can test the catch rate of illegal or dangerous materials, but this is a measure more of the chance of catching someone once an attack is already prepared and being put into action. Basically, it just measures if its security theatre or not. To know if its effective at preventing attacks, we’d also need to know the number who wanted to attack and decided against it because TSA existed.