More TSA Follies

I have long maintained that the TSA is a massive scam to get unqualified people jobs in the federal government. And the fact is that TSA has managed a complete and epic FAIL at it's core mission. Consider the following:

• TSA has not caught a single would-be terrorist such as the crotch bomber since its institution. All of the serious attempts have been stopped by passengers on the lookout for suspicious activity. TSA has not stopped a single one. But they 're sure good at strip-searching kids, women and disabled people!


• TSA screeners routinely miss at least 70 percent of bombs and weapons in tests. But they are really good at putting kids on no-fly lists. And then insulting the family of said kids on the official TSA blog.

This is pretty good evidence that TSA, at least as currently constituted, is a useless waste of everyone's time and money. The so-called screeners are inefficient, ignorant (they cannot seem to differentiate musical instruments from bombs), arrogant when questioned, arbitrary, fond of cruel jokes that would get a passenger arrested and completely inconsistent in their methodology not only between different airports but even between different screeners AT THE SAME AIRPORT!!!

However, it seems that TSA screeners also are busy engaging in pre-adolescent humor as to their colleagues private parts. Humor that resulted in violence. For our far-left Obama propagandists at MSNBC, the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC, that would be real, physical violence - the kind caused by leftist protests like those against Arizona's attempt to actually enforce existing immigration law - as opposed to the entirely nonexistent violence the media keeps breathlessly claiming the Tea Partiers MIGHT cause. some day. As (unexpectedly) reported by the NBCMiami.com website,

A TSA worker in Miami was arrested for aggravated battery after police say he attacked a colleague who'd made fun of his small genitalia after he walked through one of the new high-tech security scanners during a recent training session.

So, to recap. TSA employees are perfectly fine mocking, insulting and thoroughly inconveniencing travelers while managing to miss ever serious threat to this country's security. Oh, and they also apparently enjoy child porn - the TSA is pushing to electronically strip search your child (and your spouse, of course). But when their own personal body parts are mocked (with admittedly juvenile and exceedingly crude humor), they immediately think it is OK to resort to violence.

Hmmm. So, what does this tell us about the TSA? Well, for this writer it confirms that this is an agency that never should have existed in the first place and ought to be disbanded as soon as possible. Return all these incompetents to the depths from which they came (probably welfare for most of them based on their demonstrated lack of intelligence). And the bloviating members of Congress who thought this was an excellent idea should be forced to fly coach class (especially including Speaker Pelosi) without access to any VIP treatment at all domestic airports. Perhaps a dose of what the little people have to endure might cause an outbreak of common sense. Oh, wait. These are politicians we're talking about. With very rare exceptions they don't HAVE any common sense. Or much intelligence, seemingly, if their comments on CSPAN are any indication!

Airport Screeners: Private Contractors Perform Better

I have argued for a long time that creating the vast bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security is a bad idea as it has been executed. The original idea was good- to centralise intelligence operations and remove Jamie Gorelick's wall between intelligence and law enforcement. However, as put into practice, the DHS has been a huge boondoggle that simply exacerbates the public's patience.

In a story today, USA Today highlights the fact that the government, while its intentions may be good, simply cannot match private enterprise in either competence or in efficiency. A new TSA survey of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Chicago O'Hare International Airport and San Francisco International Airport (SFO) found that the TSA-employed screeners at Chicago and Los Angeles missed over 60 percent of the guns, bombs and other weapons that TSA testers carried in tests. LAX's screeners in particular performed abysmally, missing over 75 percent of the test weapons. However, the privately-employed screeners at SFo missed only about 20 percent of the testers' weapons. According to USA Today,

A report on covert tests in 2002 found screeners failed to find fake bombs, dynamite and guns 24% of the time. The TSA ran those tests shortly after it took over checkpoint screening from security companies.

Tests earlier in 2002 showed screeners missing 60% of fake bombs. In the late 1990s, tests showed that screeners missed about 40% of fake bombs, according to a separate report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

These tests should put to rest the idea that government can be trusted to perfom any task better than private enterprise. While the business of national defense (maintaining armed forces and providing the equipment necessary) and representing Americans abroad can be perfromed only by government, the component pieces of defense, such as security screening, can best be carried out by companies that are accountable. Government, especially the beaureaucracy, has virtually no accountability, which is why such programs as Social Security or the DHS are such disastrous failures.