This is an open trackbacks post. Link to this post and then track back. If you want to host your own linkfests, check out the Open Trackbacks Alliance.
Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.
UPDATE: I recieved a link to the following TSA/Airport security parody last night. It makes a good (wildly exaggerated, perhaps… perhaps) intro to the rant below:
Some very smart people have observed the “security theater” that is the goon squad disingenuously labeled “TSA”. Martin Roesch of Security Sauce has commented,
What are we to suppose is the duty cycle of a baggage screener in a typical American airport with a rate of data flow of 172 passengers per hour with two shoes and two carry-ons per passenger? The screener gets a whopping 5.2 seconds to pattern match for the entire set of bad things per item per passenger. I’m not taking account of time spent in spool up/spool down periods for starting/stopping the belt either, so we’re probably talking about half that effectively. 2.6 seconds. My laptop bag currently contains a PowerBook, Airport Express, digital camera, airplane power adapter, iPod, EVDO PCMCIA card, cell phone, two laptop batteries, 80GB portable firewire hard drive, laptop power adapter and a bag filled with various wires and other widgetry to make it all plug together. Not to mention books, pens and other business stuff. 2.6 seconds to positively identify all of that as non-dangerous. Let’s be generous and call it 3 seconds. If the set of things that need to be detected (signatures) is constrained to guns, knives and bomb materials, I’d say grudgingly that a motivated screener could maintain alertness through their entire period manning the machine to have a reasonable probability of detection of the things in the set of threats. Once you extend that signature set to, well, pretty much everything that’s not paper or cloth you’re going to have an analysts nightmare…
Well, d’oh. Even assuming the mythic “motivated screener,” remember that these workers aren’t necessarily the sharpest knives in the drawer to begin with
My US Marine Corps son returned from Iraq last week with all ten fingers and ten toes (I counted ’em). When his batallion stopped over in Maine for fuel and customs, they ran them through TSA security for some stupid reason before they got back on their rented 747.
Now imagine this, a USMC Lance Corporal with a M16A4, a M249 and a bayonet in a sheath at his belt, going through TSA security. They ignored the machine guns and the foot long bayonet. However, they took away his tube of toothpaste as it violated their rules ! What is the TSA thinking ? My thought is that we have a bunch of idiots in the TSA.
Dumbasses, indeed.
“When a stupid man does something he knows is wrong, he always says it is his duty.”
Is there anyone out there with enough neurons to make a synapse who can honestly say that the security theater the TSA provides really results in any net increase in airport security? Stupid people doing stupid things, stupidly. But that’s all right. The real purpose of the TSA is to train citizens into subjects, sheeple and it does that very well, indeed.
h.t. Chaos Manor Musings
You want fries with that?
Diane,
C’mon, now! Why insult fast food workers by comparing TSA goons with them? That’s just not right!
😉