Seems like a completely failed program to me. Any organization should be able to quantitatively prove their value on some level. As the article points out, for the DHS to say they do “not have information on [the air marshal program’s] effectiveness” while also averaging a cost of $200 million per arrest is an insane statistic that should immediately require changes in the program.
I haven't checked recently to see if this stat is still true, but at one point the number of people arrested by air marshals was actually lower than the number of air marshals who have been arrested.
The overwhelming majority of the time, "arrests" on airplanes are made by regular passengers and the flight attendants, who beat up the offender then hogtie him with duct tape. Air marshals are completely pointless.
Air marshals may be pointless, but not for this reason.
Air marshals are almost certainly trained not to intervene in minor disturbances. Otherwise a team of hijackers could locate the air marshal by having one person act as an unruly passenger.
> Otherwise a team of hijackers could locate the air marshal by having one person act as an unruly passenger.
For the last twenty years, hijackers (in flights originating from US) are probably always presumed to be suicidal and much less likely to succeed in a hijacking. To the point where I'd assume that they're rarely even attempted.
Perhaps we could end up needing air marshals in the future, a future where many passengers are not old enough to recall or be affected by the terrorist attacks on September 11.
Conversely, as a hijacker, you'd be taking a huge gamble to try and select the one flight where there were no air marshals.
A lot of times, I feel like this whole concept was based on an inherit deterrent and seems to have worked, in conjunction with increased airport screening:
"The number of hijackings has dwindled in recent years. About 50 have been reported since Sept, 11, 2001, and none in the U.S., according to the Aviation Safety Network."
Reinforced cabin doors and knowing that the terrorists want to kill everyone instead of taking hostages has changed the game. I'm not privy to what influences terrorists but it seems like they can no longer commandeer airplanes
If you're going to be hijacking to use the plane as a weapon you aren't going to be worried about the 1 in 10 chance of an air marshall trying to stop you, any more than the near certain attempt of the other 200 people on the plane trying to stop you. There just aren't legions of people out there willing to kill massive amounts of people in this fashion.
The number of bear attacks in Springfield went to zero in 1996 when Homer started Bear Patrol. It's a case of life imitating art.
Before 9/11 you hijacked a plane, flew to Cuba, got some money, and all was well.
Before 9/11 you were a passenger/crewmember on a plane, you flew to Cuba, then got released, and all was well.
9/11 changed that. No longer were passengers and crew safe as long as they complied, no longer were planes allowed to fly around and even be refuelled safe in the knowledge that all it would take is some money to free them.
As such over the course of two hours the calculus changed. Hijacking the first 3 planes worked because nobody expected it. The fourth plane was also hijacked, but the goal (crashing into whatever building) wasn't met because the passengers and crew found out the rules had changed.
If you hvae 5 people willing to kill themselves for your cause, there are better ways to make a political statement now than the risk of hijacking a plane - not because of any potential air marshall, but because of the guarantee of the passengers.
If you heard that more police officers had been arrested than had ever arrested anyone, would it really matter much if those police officers had been arrested as teenagers, or on the job? It's a program that employs people who have caused more incidents of crime than they have intervened to prevent. Not because they're particularly criminal, but because they are particularly useless.
> It's a program that employs people who have caused more incidents of crime than they have intervened to prevent.
Whether that's problematic depends on a lot of things, including whether arresting people is actually the main benefit of them being present.
I have a few dogs. They bark at people walking by on the sidewalk a lot. I've never had someone break into my house. Are the dogs useless as a mechanism to prevent home invasion or burglary, or does knowledge of their presence prevent people from even attempting such? Now consider that I haven't noted whether those crimes are common in my area or not.
Maybe those dogs have growled at guests in my house, making them feel uncomfortable. Should my stance be that they've growled at more guests than intruders they've attacked? Do you feel comfortable making a definitive statement on the value of those dogs and whether the costs outweigh the benefits with the given information, or do you think additional information would be important to discerning that?
At the point at which your dogs have broken into and robbed your neighbor's house more often than they have prevented your house from being broken into; that's the point at which you can compare your dogs to the Air Marshal service.
> more often than they have prevented your house from being broken into
The whole point is that you can't tell whether that's happened with the data presented, regardless of what you compare it to, and no, once is not too many times given the actual thing we're discussing.
If the existence of Air Marshals prevented one more 9/11 type event from happening, or even a few failed attempts (which would be capitalized on by politicians to push their own agendas), then I would without reservation say they are worth it. We just haven't been presented with that data. In some cases it may not exist. Acting like the answer to that is irrelevant is not the correct way to go about it though, in my opinion.
Context is important, lest you prime your reader to make unsupported conclusions. Imagine if instead of doing this to police officers, we insinuated things about arrestees instead.
No, context can be important. If all context were important, you couldn't talk about one thing without talking about every other thing. If your argument about why context is important in this case rests on if a hypothetical fact that "people arrested by police have collectively prevented more crimes than they have committed" would be uninteresting or even unfair without context, I'd deeply disagree.
> Any organization should be able to quantitatively prove their value on some level.
There is danger there with corrupt and immoral organizations. They might just start generating false incidents and then run to save the day to pad their stats "look how effective we are!".
Luckily, that only happens with deeply corrupt organizations. Like for instance FBI [1], when they were sending their informants to mosques in US looking to recruit terrorists. Up until the the members of the mosque ended up reporting the FBI agents to the FBI.
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Niazi and another mosque member had reported Monteilh to the FBI, claiming that Monteilh was espousing terrorist rhetoric and trying to draw them into a plot to blow up shopping malls
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> Like for instance FBI [1], when they were sending their informants to mosques in US looking to recruit terrorists. Up until the the members of the mosque ended up reporting the FBI agents to the FBI.
I am not saying what FBI does is good, but this reminds me now that the only way to deal with constant threat of phishing is actually to create false fishing attacks all the time, so that people would be aware of the thread. Could be generally a good approach if the methods employed were more public rather than clandestine.
I'm sure this has something to do with that entire re-organization feeling more like an excuse to create some contracts for companies connected to administration insiders than it did anything actually useful that couldn't have been accomplished without the creation of a huge new department (and several smaller ones).
> averaging a cost of $200 million per arrest is an insane statistic
That depends on the deterrence of having air marshals.
The argument sounds like one that gets brought up here regularly, when executives lay off 90% of the sysadmins because "nothing ever goes wrong, so why are we paying for them?", and teams that are constantly running round looking like heroes for fixing broken stuff all the time get more kudos than the teams that keep things quietly humming along without any issues.
This was my thought as well, but I still think we need evidence of this. If air marshals are primarily there to deal with terrorist threats (and not things like unruly/drunk/whatever passengers), then my feeling is that two things post-9/11 are responsible for the low risk of terrorist acts involving planes (or even just run-of-the-mill ransom-type hijackings):
1. Would-be hijackers can no longer get into cockpits. Pilots would much rather a hijacker kill every passenger and crew member on the plane than gain control of the plane.
2. Passengers don't take shit anymore. They know that, if terrorists successfully take control of a plane, the most likely outcome is that they're all dead. So they'll attack -- and hopefully subdue -- the hijackers.
I expect the effects of #2 have lessened somewhat, given that 9/11 was over 20 years ago, and the memory of it is less raw (not to mention many adults who fly now were young children or not even born in 2001).
If air marshals really do act as a deterrence, there must be some evidence to back that up.
I don't think #2 actually goes away. It's a cultural shift. Prior to 9/11, the advice was always to just stay calm and let the authorities negotiate with the terrorist, because that had in the past generally led to passengers and plane surviving the incident. That level of passivity isn't coming back.
> “You’re almost going to have a mutiny of a federal agency, which is unheard of.”
It's not really "unheard of". Air traffic controllers, employed by the FAA, famously went on strike in the early 80s and were subsequently all fired by the Reagan administration.
In this case, honestly I'd be like "fine, go ahead and try insubordination, and then get fired." As this article makes exceedingly clear, it will be much easier to continue air travel without air marshals than without air traffic controllers, and the US govt still managed that situation pretty decently.
I thinks that’s the key though - the argument is that the program should be shutdown, not that they should all be put on border patrol duty… assigning them to a random alternative post is going to make recruiting good new folks really hard.
I mean, it's a win-win for all then? I could certainly understand that, if I were hired to be an air marshal, and then re-assigned to border patrol duties, I'd be like "Peace out, this isn't what I signed up for."
But I'm assuming at least some percentage would be OK with it, and the ones who aren't would have to find new jobs. Very similar to when companies downsize one department, but try to find jobs for existing employees by giving them jobs in other departments. Some will take it, some will reject it, but it's a pretty fair outcome for all.
Crimes that involve politics will always have some individuals stating they did things for political reasons, but without examples or more context to what you are referring to, that statement seems particularly broad stating that FBI is a political organization.
Air Marshals may be (are) useless at best, but I'm sympathetic to resisting an employer's attempt to radically alter one's job. Sign up for one thing, get told to do something very different that upends your life and may not be anything you're interested in or feel comfortable (for a variety of possible reasons) doing, yeah, that's bullshit.
>“The rank and file air marshals are going to refuse to deploy and risk termination,” David Londo, a 16-year DHS employee and president of the Air Marshal National Council, told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. “You’re almost going to have a mutiny of a federal agency, which is unheard of.”
I think the US would be better having a clearer line between civilian and military branches. It feels really weird to me that they are (self) describing this as a mutiny and talking about refusing to "deploy". But they are just employees right? Not soldiers?
Yeah, too many people seem to accept the idea that law enforcement officers are not civilians. In my view, which seems to be the correct legal definition, anyone that is not a member of the military is a civilian.
What's the real difference between the government stationing armed soldiers in your town to maintain the peace, and stationing armed police in your town to maintain the peace? The former became unfashionable so it was replaced with the later. Such soldiers were renamed for "PR" but the situation is functionally equivalent. Officially there are some differences, like police being accountable to civilian courts instead of military courts... but I think it is now generally acknowledged that civilian courts have a double standard for police. So this distinction is more theoretical than practical.
In my view, it's fair to consider anybody who carries a gun for the state as a soldier, in an informal sense.
The difference in US law falls under the Posse Comitatus Act[1] (which has been repeatedly expanded over the last 150 years): the government, by law, cannot use military forces for domestic law enforcement.
I'm no particular fan of the US military (much less the police), but the practical and historical distinctions between the two are substantial: one is the professional military of a country, and the other is a professionalization of antebellum slave catching posses.
I think the comment you are replying to is making a slightly different point: what's the point of Posse Comitatus when heavily armed, trigger happy, indemnified government employees can do the exact same thing by just wearing blue instead of camo?
That limits what the federal government can do with the US military. Governors have more lattiude with using state-level military (i.e. national guard units) in their own states.
> What's the real difference between the government stationing armed soldiers in your town to maintain the peace, and stationing armed police in your town to maintain the peace?
One's subject to military tribunals[1], while the other is subject to regular courts, which from all evidence seem to be incredibly biased in their favour.
Can't forget rules of engagement. I've seen multiple (as-claimed-on-the-internet) soldiers complain about cop-malfeasance with respect to the situations in which gunfire is allowed to occur. They opine that if cops were trained like they were, shootings would look very different, be much rarer, and be much more defensible to the average joe.
> multiple (as-claimed-on-the-internet) soldiers complain about cop-malfeasance with respect to the situations in which gunfire is allowed to occur.
Soldiers tooting their own horns; this self-aggrandizement is not to be taken seriously. There is evidence that police with military backgrounds are more likely to be involved in shootings. Police who are combat veterans are even more likely to be involved in shootings. Soldier training does not make good police.
>>They opine that if cops were trained like they were
>There is evidence that police with military backgrounds are more likely to be involved in shootings.
Ah, but that's not the claim being made. You've quite adroitly shown proof that former soldiers make shooty LEOs. I'm relating that soldiers suggest that if all cops were trained as soldiers were with respect to not firing their weapons until some situational conditions were met, shootings would fall.
I'd imagine that the sort of soldier who comes home and seeks out the experience of being a cop, immersed in "killology" [0] as they are (a philosophy that suggests firing your weapons), would indeed become the sort of cop to wind up being involved in a shooting.
...and I'm aware that "killology"'s founder and chief proselytizer is a former soldier. Note, however, that he does not advise cops that they must be strictly bound by any RoE before being willing to fire their weapons; he advises quite the opposite.
There is simply no evidence that American military training would produce better police than extant American police. Nothing other than the self-aggrandizing claims of people who claim to be veterans on the internet. Claims that usually go unchallenged, and repeated uncritically (as above), because this country has a culture of soldier worship.
Besides the evidence to the contrary which I have already posted, I think you need to be more skeptical of the claims American soldiers make about their conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan. Talk about rules of engagement is cheap, what matters is the actual execution of those rules. American soldiers were made to behave as police in those countries, and in neither case were they good at it.
American police are bad enough already, the last thing they need is even more military training.
You haven't presented evidence to the contrary, you've presented evidence that former soldiers make shooty LEOs. You should re-read the above comment chain, regarding what's being claimed and why, or admit that you're not here to argue a point but grind an axe. Sure, I have no evidence that training cops like soldiers regarding not firing their weapons until some situational conditions were met would reduce shootings, and I'm neither a cop, a soldier, nor an American. That said, there certainly seems to be evidence that training cops to view civilians as enemy combatants, and to be quick to shoot them, encourages cops to shoot people. I mean, it's called "killology" (I just can't get over that). It seems to me that if cops were trained to not fire their weapons until some situational conditions were met, it might discourage cops from shooting people. Maybe I'm being ridiculous!
"RoE, or specific claims about the implementation and efficacy of RoE, is/are bullshit" is a different point, which I'm totally willing to concede. Again, maybe I'm being ridiculous, but I figure reality of American policing is that it'd be easier to hoodwink cops into something approaching military discipline than, like, de-escalation training, actually barring crazies from the profession rather than allowing them to get jobs a few counties over, and handing back the Pentagon-surplus APCs.
> So-called “signature strikes”, targeting people whose behavior is assessed to be similar enough to those of terrorists to mark them for death, will continue, according to senior US officials.
> Human-rights groups have long denounced the practice – whose criteria can be as vague as killing “military-aged males” in regions where terrorists operate – as anonymous killing.
Looks like your article refers to aerial strikes. How on earth did you read "gunfire" and think "Predator drone"?
Not that the American military doesn't indiscriminately kill people, but you're free to look up RoE for ground troops and discussions thereof yourself.
Not to mention the abject hypocrisy of the federal government just last week crushing a strike by rail workers who wanted 7 days of sick leave (those Socialists!).
I've been on two flights now that have had to divert due to a passenger causing issues and in both cases there was no marshal onboard, just the flight attendants and some good passengers.
To me it seems the air marshals we have now are just in it for the free vacations. If airlines want their own security they should be able to employ their own in flight guards.
And doesn't needing air marshals prove that TSA is a joke?
Presumably most of these people are normal members of society with, ya know, shit the feds can just take. So I presume most people lawyer up, plead down to guilty with ton of fines and the feds go on their merry way happy to have enforced the law in a way that's cashflow positive (i.e. basically the same situation as tax prosecution).
Or, ya know, maybe having to divert planes because of drunk and disorderly passengers is a giant waste of time and resources. That costliness is why it is heavily punished. It isn’t the same as a drunk stumbling in a gutter and passing out.
The fact these people act out on a plane causes me to evaluate them as non-normal. We’re all on this human cattle car together. Shut up and stay quiet for four hours. The videos I have seen (likely not representative) the passengers were given several opportunities to behave before the extreme measures were taken.
From what I understand they can never fly on that airline again and given how few airlines there are now (and probably fewer in the future) that probably sucks. And I’m totally OK with that.
Seems like we could very safely abolish the air marshal program. It may have been useful pre-9/11 but Flight 93 seems to prove that it's not necessary anymore.
Anyone attempting to hijack a flight full of Americans is going to be attacked every single time, and terrorists surely know this, and that's the real deterrent. Hijackers might think they can overpower a single armed officer but they know they can't overpower dozens of passengers that feel forced to fight or die.
It might even be a good idea for pre-flight training videos to explicitly tell passengers to immediately attack anyone attempting to hijack the plane. Though this is probably unnecessary, it could act as a strong additional deterrent and help coordinate people in the event.
> It might even be a good idea for pre-flight training videos to explicitly tell passengers to immediately attack anyone attempting to hijack the plane.
You'll have a lot of passengers attacking each other for no reason.
This is a remarkably bad idea.
Fact is: plane hijackings isn't really a problem anywhere. Low-tech solutions like locking the cockpit goes very far.
Stopping those really determined is probably hard/impossible, the best tools is probably old school humint.
But it's probably best to accept that attacks are not impossible.
Spend the money on something else.
> You'll have a lot of passengers attacking each other for no reason. This is a remarkably bad idea.
Why are people going to attack each other for no reason? Hijackers typically do very obvious things, like try to break into the cockpit and make announcements/threats to the passengers.
The training video could tell passengers to attack anyone trying to break into the cockpit or to wait to attack until the pilot instructs them to, etc. It would take a bit of thought for sure.
> Fact is: plane hijackings isn't really a problem anywhere. Low-tech solutions like locking the cockpit goes very far.
They're not a problem since 9/11 when passengers attacked the hijackers and then cockpit doors were reinforced. I believe the deterrent is the combination of these two changes.
> Why are people going to attack each other for no reason? Hijackers typically do very obvious things,
Given that passengers have suspected terrorism from such things as speaking Arabic [1] and doing math [2] I wouldn't recommend gambling on the smarts of the dumbest person on a given flight.
You're not gambling on the dumbest person. You're gambling on the collective intelligence of dozens or hundreds of people, in coordination with a trained flight crew with access to cameras, radios, etc.
Tens of millions of people have flown without incident and you can point to two people panicking over stupid things? That seems like strong evidence against what you're claiming. People are simply not as stupid as you seem to think.
You cut off half of the sentence to quote it out of context...
And if you're right, why aren't mobs of Americans attacking suspected hijackers already? Why didn't passengers attack the guy speaking Arabic or doing math? The evidence, based on millions of successful flights, seems conclusive: people are just not this stupid.
> I believe the deterrent is the combination of these two changes.
Yep. Pre-9/11, if your plane was hijacked, odds were that you would get out alive. Once 9/11 introduced the world to the suicide hijacker, that basically stopped hijackings. Passengers will simply overwhelm anyone trying to take over the plane because everyone assumes it's a suicide mission.
Unless they were somehow able to keep the pilots completely unaware of what's going on, that wouldn't work. It's a pretty extreme response, and would risk passengers (assuming they're still alive), but depressurizing the cabin would pretty quickly stop any attempts to break into the cockpit.
Even if attackers could get to supplemental oxygen in time, those little bottles don't last forever, and there'd be an opportunity for crew and passengers to regain control.
I think there are other last-resort actions pilots could take to thwart a takeover, like engaging in extreme attitude/altitude changes in order to knock out the attackers.
Remember, we're operating under the assumption that if the hijackers win, everyone on the plane is likely dead anyway, so putting passengers at risk to stop them should be considered acceptable. The only way attackers can realistically win is if a pilot is duped into letting them into the cockpit. Not impossible, but that reduces the possibilities quite a lot.
Smuggled tools, some kind of creative solution using onboard materials, a weakness they've discovered, etc.
In order words, its not safe to assume a team of intelligent and motivated hijackers couldn't break into a cockpit given sufficient time. But it is safe to assume that the reinforced cockpit door will slow hijackers enough that passengers have time to stop them.
Unless over the middle of the ocean, most flights are probably close enough to an emergency diversion landing that "sufficient time" would be unlikely.
Hopefully, yes, but we can't just ignore the tens of thousands of flights flying 2-3-4 hours from the nearest airport every year. Particularly because these are the biggest airplanes with the most passengers.
The lesson about consequences of letting your plane be hijacked was learned and applied in less than two hours.
Nobody on that flight made it to their intended destination, including the hijackers. Now that it is known that passengers will attack would be hijackers and that cockpit doors will be locked, making it hard to get control of the plane, the risk/reward for hijacking looks poor. That shooting down hijacked flights was authorized may also be a deterent, altough realistic response time is long, so maybe not a big factor. Terrorists are better off doing something else.
There have been multiple cases of "suicide by jet airliner" where the pilot waits until they are alone in the cockpit, then locks the door, and kills everyone on board by crashing the plane. They were overseas, with overseas airlines.
To my knowledge, there is no panacea for human security on airlines, or anywhere ever. My point is locking the door would have likely stopped all 9/11 hijackings and maybe others where the hijacker took over the cockpit.
I've been especially interested in aviation recently, but I think I will pick up the hijacking dangers portion down the road.
This is not a very good article. What does "go to the border" even mean? If it means "act as border control" they are right to refuse, as it's not their job.
It plays with numbers in a sketchy way, as well. "5,000 incidents" out of how many flights? 148 arrested out of how many employed? "Between 2002 and 2012" but what about since then? "$200 million per arrest" but "deterrent effect is unknown".
That's really it for data. The rest are anecdotes. The "not trained" link was to a NY Post interview with a former air marshal expressing an opinion.
Maybe there is a serious problem with the program, but this article does not do much more than try to get its readers upset.
Isn't the existance of Air Marshalls providing a 'chilling effect' on potential troublemakers? How would we show the dimensions of that effect?
Until that's done, it's disingenuous to claim that Air Marshalls have prevented only thus-and-such incidents. That's not counting what didn't happen just because they are there (or might be there).
E.g. a reasonable argument is to diminish the Air Marshall service because they are individually problematic, while keeping the rumor that they may be on any flight. That doesn't fly in the face of statistics but uses it to reinforce an argument.
Is a single air Marshall more effective than an entire plane of passengers?
Post 9/11 a plane full of people is not going to let a guy with a knife take control of the plane. It is pretty unlikely that one Marshall is going to notice a suspicious person versus the 12 people sitting within 6 feet of them.
You can't just go around running expensive government programs on the basis of there being no proof that they don't help, that would lead to an infinite number of programs and a huge disincentive to run those studies.
It’s flying bus that a) can be rather easily converted to a missile, and b) is sealed until it touches down so any craziness is locked in for hours possibly.
I’m more comfortable as a flyer and as someone who’d like to do business in the US if I know that there are air marshals. Surely this pays for itself this way, especially given the ever increasing accessibility of air travel. I say this an American who knows how crazy our population can be.
The impression I get is that in-flight crimes (or general disturbances) have increased roughly proportionately (and sometimes beyond pace) with the flying population. If the object of the Air Marshals is to provide a "chilling effect," that effect has not been demonstrated.
Air Marshals and the TSA are both pointless jobs programs and security theater. The problem of hijackers was solved in the morning of 2001/9/11 when the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 fought back against the hijackers. Since then, there have been numerous cases of passengers beating the shit out of any jackass trying to start trouble on a flight.
Locked cabin doors are also good. Metal detectors at airports would be fine, if they were staffed by private security contractors rather than the unaccountable TSA. Also their xray backscatter machines are pointless, their paranoia about shoes is pointless, and their insane paranoia about water-bottles is pointless. Other countries don't have these things, and things are fine for them. By all means have people walk through a metal detector to stop carryon handguns, but the rest of this crap is completely pointless.
In my experience, when a flight is international then the checks end up being pretty similar to what you see with the TSA in an American airport. When they are regional then there's nothing happening.
(granted, that was dealing with a UK->US and US->UK flights)
First, regional and international flights always been in the same terminal and therefor the same check for me.
International...depends on a country:
Vietnam spent more time looking at my passport then looking at my luggage (actually didn't look at all, was talking to someone and not looking at the monitor).
Korea - leave everything in a bag, leave your shoes, easy-breezy.
Japan - the same as Korea.
Germany/Spain - was more worried that: I have place to say and plane ticket back and that I will be let into the US on my way back that what was in my bags.
Mexico - again, more time spent on documents than my bags, but I was subject to random search at the gate once...unpleasant.
In fact, even in the US TSA checks aren't the same: some airports let you leave everything in a bag, others will bitch about tiny wireless headphones left in a bag. Anyway, I'd say TSA will have the most ridiculous checks and number of people who have no idea how to go through TSA.
AFAIK, depending on the destination, the airline and other parameters, there will be air marshals. Contrary to the US, these are „normal“ special police, and they won’t do this on a regularly basis.
I recently went from North America -> Africa via Europe. I do have global entry, but i found the CDG experience to be more onerous than the one I have domestically in the US.
I firmly believe that there was not another 9/11-style attack because 9/11 didn't do shit of what the bad guys wanted. Simply, it is not cost-effective. I find it very hard to believe that the security theater of the TSA would have any chance of denying well-financed and trained attackers.
Yeah, it probably works against the stupid kind of kidnappers from the '70s ("I want 1 million dollars in non-marked notes, refuel and want to go to Havana, and while we're at it, I want my girlfriend who is in jail because of drug charges, to be released and brought to this plane"), but at what cost?
That’s the way I see it. Give the people the means and expectation to protect themselves in a dangerous situation and the rest of the problem solves itself.
United Airlines Flight 93 crashed and everyone on board died. That does not seem like a problem solved type of situation to me.
The TSA is far more accountable than private security contractors. In fact I really like the TSA, those security checks became far more civil and professional and pleasant after the TSA came in.
As far as private security contractors -- this is what usually happens when they hire them for airport security. Because airport security is sinecure ... there is no competition or option, it is treated as a way to extract the most money by a well connected businessman. A well connected businessman will get the contract, and then attempt to extract as much value from it by spending the minimum amount possible on salaries. So all the "private security contractors" will be minimum wage jobs.
But the airport is a terrible place to work for a minimum wage worker. Travel to and from the airport is usually difficult and expensive, and parking is very expensive. In fact parking is usually more expensive per hour than the minimum wage. So most minimum wage workers avoid airport jobs.
So who takes these jobs? Minimum wage workers that cannot find any other minimum wage jobs. These end up being mostly ex-cons. So you get the situation that ex-cons provide security for one of the most vulnerable parts of our transportation infrastructure. This was the case pre 9/11 and it is one of the reasons why none of the hijackers had any trouble smuggling knives on their flights.
The hijackers were going to crash the plane and kill everyone on board and anybody at the target crash site. The calculus for using a plane as a missile has changed. Passengers simply won't allow it to happen and there is a locked cockpit door. A similar event isn't impossible but nothing TSA or air marshals do is preventing a hijacking.
A private contractor would not have sovereign immunity, so you can sue them without the government's assent. They would not receive special legal protections, like the signs the TSA put up threatening you with steep fines if you "verbally abuse" the TSA workers (even police in America don't receive such protection against verbal abuse, but apparently TSA workers do.) If they consistently understaff their security checkpoint, as the TSA routinely does during periods of anticipated heavy travel, the airport could fire them and hire another contractor who can do the job properly.
Airport security in America used to be done by private contractors. The TSA didn't exist before 2001. And before 2001, airport security checkpoints generally ran much smoother and faster than the TSA.
Actually airport security in America was much much worse before 9/11. I remember it well. It was mostly done by ex-cons in minimum wage jobs (see my other post in this thread), it was far more understaffed.
The only "positive" thing about security before 9/11 is that those private contractors were paid to let as many people through as possible for the least amount of labor possible so they were not very serious with the security. So thats why some people remember things running "smoother". But it was definitely not safer. Remember, there were 19 9/11 hijackers, and not one of them had any problems bringing a knife on board.
Point me to one case where anyone has successfully sued a private airport screening contractor for damages resulting from terrorism? That does not happen. It would be an interesting economic experiment if airport screening companies were made liable for the acts of people they erroneously let in, and were forced to buy insurance to cover for these liabilities. I would expect airport screenings by private contractors to get much more aggressive than the TSA then. But currently this is not the case.
They didn't bring knives, they brought box cutters, because those private security groups were actually okay at screening things like knives.
Meanwhile, the modern TSA fails something like 90% of their own tests, in terms of letting stuff through. Many people who every-day carry stuff like knives talk about forgetting to remove their pocket knife, and getting it through TSA accidentally.
I don't think an ordinary pocket knife was prohibited pre 9/11 anyway. I used to carry a little "Swiss Army Knife" everywhere and never recall issues at airport security (though I didn't then and still don't fly much).
In the mid-00s I had a Leatherman multitool with a knife. I was constantly forgetting to take it out of my pocket before going to the airport, and never once did the (then-fairly-new TSA) even mention it, let alone do anything about it.
I finally lost it in 2008 or so when a bouncer at a club wouldn't let me in with it (and I had parked quite a ways away and waited in line for too long for me to consider going back to put it in the car). So... nightclub bouncers are more effective at screening weapons than the TSA.
These have 150 confirmed kills [1], and another 239 suspected kills [2]. They also weigh a lot, so a lot of excessive fuel is burnt because of them every day. They also sometimes break, causing delayed and cancelled flights.
The problem on 9/11 wasn't the crashing of the plane, people accept risk in transport -- the deadliest means of transport in the US in 2001 was an automobile -- 10 times deadlier than being a passenger on a plane. The problem was the using the plane as a weapon.
car - 4600 billion pax miles, 42,000 deaths, 1 per 100 million miles
plane - 500 billion pax miles, 246 deaths of airline travellers on 9/11, 265 from Queens, about 1 per 1 billion miles
This article very clearly articulates at length that there is a problem hiring (and one can assume, retaining) good Air Marshals. Seems to me that randomly reassigning them to border duty is highly unlikely to fix that problem. The premises here don’t reach the stated conclusion.
We shouldn't be spending billions of dollars on a 60-year experiment for possible benefits that we can't quantify.
Certainly there are ways to measure if the air marshal program works as a deterrent. Even if there isn't, I'd argue we still need to axe the program, given the cost, abuse, risks, and lack of clear benefits.
Yes, reasonable measures must be adopted, and if none justifies the program, it makes sense not to continue it. I'm talking about the argument alone, it doesn't add anything
"May" is the keyword there. Also there may not be elephants in a city, while there may be terrorists on planes (I think some incident happened in the past, but I'm unsure). The conclusion is that it's unknown, and calls for a proper evaluation of the matter. The argument by itself is useless. Why are you using a seat belt to prevent mortal incidents, when there aren't mortal incidents with seat belts?
While I completely agree, this would just shift the problem to the terminal, where people would gulp down as much as they can at airport bars, and become unruly when denied boarding at the gate due to inebriation.
Even if it ended up being true, and it caused more trouble at terminals, that's still better. Airports already have security, and security in an airport is already able to easily move around the airport. It would take fewer security officers per-flight to secure unruly travelers at the gate than in the air.
Would it not be possible to limit the number of drinks people could have in the terminal?
I guess that might make people drink before they go to the airport, but public intoxication is already an offense, which could be identified at security screening.
They would also sneak it on in flasks... So presumably they'd be compelled by police for a breathalyzer or comparable blood test at the destination terminal if they consume all of the drink.
That's still risky. All airlines (in the US at least, possible legally mandated) have a policy of not allowing people to drink their own liquor they've brought on board. Get caught, and you're in for a bad time. If alcohol were banned on flights entirely, I imagine the consequences for sneaking a drink would get worse.
> because boarding is the worst time to be inebriated.
The drunk people who wind up causing the plane to be diverted in the air seem 100x worse than someone needing to be escorted away from the plane at the gate.
OK, fine, ban drinking/alcohol at airports. Or if you’re intoxicated on a flight you get banned from flying with that airline again. There are so many options here.
Can just drink in your car, people would do it. I'd probably do it. Why? Because drinking makes the flight go fast and it's fun, especially if you're flying to go on vacation.
I don't drink a lot, but like going to a baseball game - drinking and flying is fun. Goes well together.
Why don’t we just ban drinking altogether then? And while we’re at it, if you’re irritated about something perhaps just keep it to yourself. Society doesn’t have time for discontent or deviation from the norm.
I realize that but I was following that author’s other posts and they just seem into restricting the rights of everyone to prevent disorderly conduct. So where does it stop??
It was a “throwaway” so I suppose I shouldn’t expect actual discourse.
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