The post mistermix linked to at The League includes my desire to A) abolish the TSA and B) implement Israeli-style profiling if we are going to focus so much on our security. Personally, I find the focus on airtight security to be more than a little silly. That we should spend so much time and money on an illusion strikes me as rather…unfortunate. But if we’re going to do it, we should do it right. To back me up, here’s mistermix from the other day:
The oldest cliche in the pundit arsenal is to say “let’s do it like the Israelis do it”, and it is true that the Israelis do an excellent job with airport security. They use a combination of profiling and screening implemented by multiple layers of highly-trained security personnel to implement a high-quality, fast security process. That’s because they take it seriously. We don’t.
If we took airport security seriously, the Democrats wouldn’t have used it as an opportunity to hire an army oflow-paid, soon-to-be-unionized federal employees who are more likely to vote Democratic. The Republicans wouldn’t use every terrorist scare as an opportunity for a big contract for some donor that makes screening equipment of dubious value.
If by some miracle we decided to start taking airport security seriously, we’d have to perform an massive unfucking of a decade of bad decisions. We’d have to fire some of the TSA agents we’ve hired, because they can’t be trained to the level of skill required by the Israeli model. We’d also have to throw away a lot of the useless equipment we’ve purchased, and cancel lucrative contracts for upgrades. That kind of change is far too risky, so instead we just have to listen to snotty Israelis telling us how fucking dumb we are.
Now on to the concept of privatization.
Airport security used to be handled by private firms. There is nothing inherently wrong with having private security manage airports. It’s been done, and it’s worked. Security is never going to be 100%, so there’s no way we can say that it was our lack of a naked-scanning, genital-groping TSA that made us so vulnerable on 9/11. Far more likely it was our lack of knowledge about the lengths that the terrorists would go and the lack of a locked cabin that made us easy targets. Now cabins are locked and passengers are fully aware of the horrors these particular terrorists are willing to inflict. The next hijackers will need to get past a much fiercer group of passengers before they make it to a locked cabin where an armed pilot will be waiting for them. No simple task.
I’d rather have a firm that can be fired if they overstep or do a lousy job handle security than the TSA which, so far as I can tell, is accountable to nobody. I’ve said plenty about the limits of privatization in the past. Often as not government contracts to private companies are not actually privatization, but rather the creation of a monopolistic entity, protected from competition and the vote. But demanding that private organizations (the airlines) hire private security is not the same thing as giving a previously government-run operation over to a private company. The TSA is the outlier here, not the other way around.
But I’ll go ahead and take each of mistermix’s points one by one: