| ▲ | AlotOfReading 2 days ago |
| No, the TSA exists because 19 people hijacked 4 flights and succeeded in crashing 3 of them into various important buildings in the US on 9/11/2001. Private planes are just as capable of crashing into buildings as commercial jets. The TSA has picked up some ancillary public safety functions over the years, but their raison d'etre is to prevent hijackings. |
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| ▲ | thfuran 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| No, the TSA exists because politicians felt they needed to be seen doing something after 9/11. If there were actually much political will for it to fulfill actual security purposes, it surely would’ve been reformed after it’s continually abysmal performance on security audits. |
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| ▲ | garciasn 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No; the TSA exists because we needed a government jobs program that was easy to promote under the guise of terrorism. |
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| ▲ | verall 2 days ago | parent [-] | | It's not nearly enough jobs to be a jobs program | | |
| ▲ | caminante 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | By what standard? Federal civilian workforce (ex Postal Service and Military) is only 3 million. TSA has 60k employees. That's a lot of permanent jobs. | | |
| ▲ | verall a day ago | parent | next [-] | | By your own numbers - 60k employees just doesn't touch a jobs program in a country of 350M people. The point of a jobs program is to provide jobs. TSA was created to accomplish a goal - security theater (mostly), preventing another 9/11 (maybe more in theory than in practice), etc. The New Deal WPA, according to wikipedia, supplied about 3M jobs at its peak in 1938, when the population was ~130M. 2.3% of the population vs 0.017%. Also empirically - if it was a jobs program, it would be way better staffed.. | | |
| ▲ | caminante a day ago | parent [-] | | >if it was a jobs program, it would be way better staffed.. You're saying it's not comparable to the size of the New Deal, the biggest jobs program ever in the US. That doesn't disqualify it from consideration as a jobs program as there are many jobs programs much smaller. Adding 60k to ~3 million is significant because it's permanent. These are low skilled workers (and security theater as you astutely say) mostly concentrated in large cities. Whereas the New Deal was temp jobs that disappeared once grants and funding disappeared. |
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| ▲ | AustinDev 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | And they get Federal pensions and healthcare funded by tax dollars. | | |
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| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | schmookeeg 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In terms of menace potential, any private plane will lose to a van full of fertilizer and a baddie intent on causing destruction. It's a matter of scale. Little planes, like this one [1] just don't do damage on the same scale as airliners. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Austin_suicide_attack |
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| ▲ | woodruffw 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Most private planes taking off from commercial airports (the ones where TSA generally operates) are much larger than a Piper Dakota. (But regardless, it’s not clear that the TSA is even performing that kind of calculus.) | | |
| ▲ | schmookeeg 2 days ago | parent [-] | | A G650 still loses to a motivated U-haul. :) No argument though, just saying it's a hard problem, and the scaling issue makes it somewhat awkward to deploy security resources in proportion to the threat. I don't have a solution. I'm not exactly thrilled with the current setup, but I try to stay quiet since I can't think of anything better. |
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| ▲ | AlotOfReading 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Government building codes already anticipate the "van full of fertilizer" attack, as a result of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Federal building security is a separate matter though, with its own agency called FPS that predates DHS and TSA by decades. | |
| ▲ | paradox460 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | What about a private plane full of anfo |
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| ▲ | ratrace 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
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