You say that as a dig, but a perception of safety is a real deterrent. If you can make your adversaries believe something is true, it doesn't matter whether it actually is or not. This is sometimes known as a bluff.
Nobody has replicated 9/11, and to my knowledge, nobody has tried. If it's so easy to do so, then the perception of safety must be working great!
To be effective, safety measures don't have to block people who are smart and wouldn't commit the crime anyway. They only have to block the people dumb enough to do it.
Nobody has replicated 9/11 because as soon as the passengers figured out the new threat model, there was no chance of getting away with it. Flight 93 figured it out before 9/11 was even over. The locked cockpit doors are the suspenders to the “let’s roll” belt. There will be no new 9/11 until 9/11 falls out of living memory.
That idea is also a perception of safety. No team of hijackers has attempted to take over a plane post 9/11.
If TSA is just theater, couldn't an attacker simply bring weapons sufficient enough to hold off the crowd and break the door? The hijackers on 93 only had box cutters.
It is the combined perception of airport security and the perception that passengers will fight that deter bad actors from even trying.
It's the cockpit doors that prevent another 9/11, and those have nothing to do with TSA. Even if you could bring box cutters onto the plane you wouldn't be able to take it over. Plus, like you said, awareness among passengers. That also has nothing to do with TSA.
There are others in the this comment section saying it is easy to take a gun through TSA. If that is true, why would an attacker want to bring another box cutter? If the TSA is ineffective, couldn't someone bring a tool to break the cockpit door?
My point is that none of these things have to be impenetrable. There is a swiss-cheese model to safety. TSA doesn't have to be 100% effective to be effective. Every layer of security adds up. There is no single component responsible for all airline security, not even the cockpit doors.
So there's three problems with the argument for TSA:
1. We did a lot of things in response to 9/11 (e.g. locking cockpit doors, TSA, increasing awareness). It's unclear whether TSA was a component that helped.
2. In the modern world, it's unclear whether hijacking is a severe risk to planes (compared to drones or missiles which are way more acquirable by terrorists and civilians than they were 25 years ago)
3. TSA has a documented and repeated ~80% failure rate at detecting threats. To the extent security theater is effective, you would expect that that effectiveness would disappear once everyone knew that they most likely wouldn't stop the attack.
> TSA has a documented and repeated ~80% failure rate at detecting threats. To the extent security theater is effective, you would expect that that effectiveness would disappear once everyone knew that they most likely wouldn't stop the attack.
Well, if we caught 20% of threats across the 19 hijackers on 9/11, there would have been a 99% chance one was caught. And a 67% chance that someone was caught in each group for each of the first 3 planes with 5 hijackers.
But even if they do miss 80% of the failures in penetration tests, what actually matters is whether or not real world threats are being caught. Threat actors in the real world act with different motivations than penetration testers, and with different skill sets.
What do you mean by that? And how acquainted are you actually with airport security?
I have a family member who works at a (European) airport in an administrative position, and apparently the security culture is quite deep and, I dunno, it sounds reasonable? As in, employees have clearances and passes to enter the more restricted areas (and they go through their own security points), the airport generally knows where the employees are and why they're there, the public areas have guards and many cameras and even the layouts of the stores and booths are subject to many security rules regarding materials and even stuff like camera sightlines.
I wouldn't assume that isn't going to happen. I've heard specifically that someone in the Trump camp wants to just have the airlines figure security out themselves.
One optomistic point is that a lot of stupid things persist because whoever gets rid of them would have to deal with a bad image. TSA is of that style; the other political party would almost be guaranteed to scream in cynical fashion that it is making people less safe.
But it isn't obvious the Trump administration would have to worry about that. They've already saturated the screaming. There isn't anything worse to call them than Nazis and there are a couple of years of the administration left. We can hope someone thinks to tidy the TSA up.
Exactly. I think some of the things in Trump/Musk’s crosshairs are legitimately a waste of money and focus, and if worth having, would be better controlled by the more accountable state level. Some, like CFPB, are obviously much better off not being deleted, but tbh the things anyone can make a convincing case for, can just be reestablished later, without the sprawling cruft they’ve accumulated in 25-90 years of existence.
I do wish it was someone smarter doing this, but only a President already hated by all the elites could do this degree of upheaval and get away with it.
> If DOGE was really about efficiency and cutting waste
...they would've nixed Trump's trip to the Super Bowl, which cost taxpayers 15-20 million all for him to leave early when his team lost.
They wouldn't be killing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which costs taxpayers nothing (it's funded by the big banks, aka The Federal Reserve).
The direction they seem to be going, they'll probably increase the TSA budget, add an extra hour to security lines, and make you take your pants off for some reason.
The other thing that prevents another 9/11 is the first 9/11.
Before 9/11, airplane hijackers were like bank robbers: idiots trying to get some cash. If you just followed their orders, everyone would mostly get out alive.
Even mid-9/11, when it became clear that the hijackers were using the planes to attack civilians (at the necessary cost of the lives of the passengers), people stopped cooperating and stopped the final plane from reaching its target.
Even if someone walked into the cockpit with a gun they'd get nothing for their trouble but an immediate nosedive as the pilot sacrificed the plane to protect whatever the intended target was.
For the situation where the hijacker can actually control the plane, I'd imagine the US military now has a more proper response and will be able to scramble jet in time to shoot down the plane (they didn't have such plan for domestic situation in 2001).
also, before 9/11 many airplane hijackers were also political protests (PLO, Cuba, etc.) where the goal was _not_ to kill anyone, not terrorists intent on killing as many people as possible
The nosedive would also throw the hijacker up to the ceiling and/or backwards with a good chance of knocking him out or at least giving him a nasty concussion.
Cockpit doors and the fact that just letting hijackers do what they want is no longer acceptable to Americans. We solved the hijacking problem about 60 minutes after the first plane hit the twin towers. Flight 93 is proof of that.
It’s a good question. If you filled a flight with as many attackers as you could get tickets for, would the remaining seats have enough people willing and able to fight back? I’ll admit I’m glad they lock the cockpit doors.
This is exactly right. Before 9/11, hijackings weren't unheard of, but they were almost universally political stunts with some "hostage situation" to taste [1]. As a passenger, if you just played along, your odds of getting hurt were quite low.
Nowadays, any would-be hijacker is going to get immediately dogpiled and beat within an inch of their lives before they ever reach first class.
>Before 9/11, hijackings weren't unheard of, but they were almost universally political stunts with some "hostage situation" to taste [1]. As a passenger, if you just played along, your odds of getting hurt were quite low.
Yeah. So much that, on the morning of 9/11, when a student in my college class was announcing there was a hijacking, I remember wanting to shout “Who cares? Those happen all the time and it gets resolved![1] Why is this a priority?”
… until he got to the part about it crashing into the WTC.
[1] Which, of course, still would have been out of line to say, but I was unusually cranky and didn’t get why that would be something to stop everything over.
With the newer scanners, you don’t have to take laptops out even without TSA pre check from what I have read. We have TSA Precheck so I can’t verify it.
I do know flying from Los Cabos Mexico where TSA doesn’t matter, I didn’t have to remove my laptop a couple of years ago
the shoes, the tooth paste, the water… are all necessary security theatre. the real work is happening behind the scenes. but the theatre is also necessary (albeit not as dramatic as we have it now :) )
Security theater guarantees a giant line of people right in the front where that crowd is most easily accessible instead of at the back if those people could go straight to their gates. I would rather see news media stop making every one of those people infamous so it ceases to be a way to get a bunch of attention.
The school shooters do that because it's shocking and gets in the news. We have so many crowded situations throughout the world where an equal splash could be made.
We need about as much security around the airport as we need around a subway or a concert.
After the dark knight shooting, we didn't find the need to put up xray scanners in every movie theater. It's dumb to do that with airports.
Were I to guess, the reason we focus so heavily on airports is because our lawmakers fly more than most of the population. The theater is likely their safety blanket.
NYC is an island... doing shit on the NYC subway disrupts bunch of people living on a (largely populated) island. doing shit on airplanes causes country-wide (and beyond) issues.
> doing shit on airplanes causes country-wide (and beyond) issues.
Like what?
In the absolute worst case it grounds flights nation wide and 100 people die. In the grand scheme of things that's a minor hiccup and not a likely outcome. We saw a bigger impact from the polar vortex.
The security simply doesn't match the value.
I'll remind you that 70 people died from an airplane accident. Tragic, but we were hardly impacted by it. When you talk about 2.7 million flyers, the impact of a few hundred dying a year still makes it one of the safest forms of travel.
Airplanes aren't special and shouldn't have the annoying special security treatment they do today.
That's like imagining school shooters won't get an AR-15 and do a school shooting because you put an otherwise unarmed guy with a baton by the front gate.
Lots in the 70s but by the 90s it was very infrequent in the US. And most hijackings did not result in casualties (or very few casualties). People didn’t hijack with intent to kill the selves and everyone on board. Probably more people died from the shooting down of planes by militaries than by hijackings.
The summer of 9/11 I brought on a full suit of hoplite armor with shield and spear on board a regional plane. The stewardess told me I can't have it in the passenger compartment so I should just give it to the pilot before takeoff.
I'm not saying that we should let people board in full armor again, but surely there is a happy medium?
I have vivid memories from childhood hugging my grandma before flying right at the gate. Unfortunately people have a short memory. Kids these days will have no memory of how free of a country we lived in even 25 years ago.
If DOGE was really about efficiency and cutting waste, TSA would be the first place they would be looking.