Similar thing happened to me when visiting a museum in the Vatican. Long queues, metal detectors, etc. After passing through the whole thing with no problem, I realized I had my pocket knife in my pocket throughout the day. I noticed then that the metal detector was beeping all the time, but they were not paying attention, as they probably didn't want to get people to take off belts, etc.
It is possible to deduce that from their track record as well. In 10 years TSA has caught exactly 0 terrorists. Not saying there weren't attempts, but those were caught by FBI, other agencies, and most importantly, regular citizens.
While I agree that the "security theatre" that the TSA provides is largely useless, I don't think this is really an accurate statement. It's entirely possible that TSA screening prevented someone getting on a plane with a weapon of some sort, but that the person in question was never identified as a terrorist, since they had to abandon whatever plans they had.
> It's entirely possible that TSA screening prevented someone getting on a plane with a weapon of some sort
I disagree with that statement. "It could" is hard to measure. We spend 100s of billions of $ on something based on this unproven hypothesis.
Keep in mind, TSA was created to catch terrorists red-handed as they are just about to board a plane. As in "Hey look a bomb in the x-ray machine, arrest this guy!". That is their purpose. They have not yet done that, once, in 10 years!
Govt. intelligence work and regular citizens have prevented and stopped attempts. There is some track record there. TSA doesn't have one.
By your metric one could have just as well re-defined TSA's mission as "Protect the citizens of the United States of America against Evil Pink Elephants from Neptune". Chances are very high that TSA's track record with that task would have been exactly what it is with their current mission. AND you could have still made your argument "See no Pink Elephants from Neptune have attacked us, so they must be doing their job."
Or think about it another way: How many airliners were blown up in US airspace before 9/11? Was it a monthly occurrence? Yearly? Now if was a yearly thing, and then TSA came along and it suddenly stopped, you could have made a correlation based argument saying, that it is probably because of fear of TSA that we didn't have any more attacks.
Yet another way to look at it. As a terrorist you are trying to instill terror and kill as many people as possible. A large gathering of people would maximize your impact. I wonder what places and events consistently create large queues of people waiting in line? What about also a place that would cripple and disrupt the economy and travel? I'll leave that as a rhetorical question.
I agree with you completely that it's entirely unproven whether or not the TSA has been effective for catching terrorists. I also agree that it's a wasteful system that should be seriously reformed into something that is actually effective.
It's precisely because it's unproven that we cannot say that the TSA has never caught a terrorist. That's all I was saying. The TSA may or may not have caught a potential terrorist at some point, it's pretty much impossible to say. You can't have it both ways. Either the TSA's effectiveness is unknown (meaning they may or may not have caught terrorists), or it's known to be 100% useless (meaning 0 terrorists were caught).
In regards to occurrences of terrorists prior to 9/11, you're correct that there weren't many (any?) incidences of using a plane for a terrorist attack, but hijackings were certainly not uncommon prior to 9/11. In fact, come to think of it, incidences of hijackings are almost certainly down since 9/11. I don't think this can be entirely attributed to increased security, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it as a contributing factor.
> we cannot say that the TSA has never caught a terrorist.
But why? I am sure any such catch would have been paraded in front of media for months. Are you saying they caught a terrorist with a bomb red-handed but hid it and instead shipped the guy secretly to a prison in another country? If not, that then I think we can say most definitely that they have not caught a single terrorist. Would you agree?
> but hijackings were certainly not uncommon prior to 9/11
Obviously hijackings were not that bad. That is the reason the first two planes ended up being used as projectiles, because people thought it was a regular hijacking. Within hours everyone in the country including passengers of the plane that went down in PA learned to not think about hijackings anymore in the same way. So the problems basically "fixed" itself immediately.
You are right the # of hijackings is now lower. TSA presence might have a part to play, that's plausible. But because of the previous paragraph it also becomes irrelevant. So the reasons for having the TSA evaporate away again.
The main reasons for the TSA are:
1) politicians seen to be doing something
2) making the public feel safe flying again
3) because someone, somewhere is making a pile of cash from it
4) it's a good way to employ unskilled people
Catching terrorists is likely to be one of the lower priorities.
Personally I think that random thorough screening and randomly distributed flight marshals is a better deterrent than poorly screening everyone. It's always harder to evade a security threat when you don't know what it is or looks like.
Another thing that annoys me is that people push for more railways on the basis that it is safe than flying. Railway in the last 10 years has had more crashes and more terrorist incidents than flying, and a determined terrorist can create massive havoc, fear and deaths from targeting trains, as was tragically displayed several times.
But for some reason, you can still hop on a train with no screening. Go figure.
I accidentally left a pocket knife in my carry on as well, and made it through the first leg. On the second leg, I had to go through security again and they spotted it. I explained that it made it through the first security check, so it must be safe. They allowed me to keep it. I wonder if that would have worked with a gun...
