It also varies from airport to airport. I get frustrated when I travel because I always get yelled at by TSA agents for following the directions of the previous airport. Some places want all devices out. Some only want laptops. Some want the bag of travel liquids out in their gallon bag. Some allow you to leave them in. But they all act like I’m supposed to know what their particular rules are.

I mean just let me wear my fucking belt. I can deal with a lot of indignity, but holding my fucking pants up in line is just insult to injury when you're passing me through mothingfucking millimeter wave.

I hate the TSA, and I strongly suspect they are largely a mirage, but I don't agree that this indicates they are admitting it's a mirage. It's almost never the purpose of any kind of inspection to have 100% coverage, just to shift the balance of probabilities as far as necessary until it's a deterrent. They could be shrugging and giving up in the face of a large number of people to process, but they could also just be making a well-informed trade-off.

DON'T SAY BOMB!

The handful of times I have flown in the past two years, all the airports I've been at no longer require you to take out electronics or your toiletries bag.

I'm old enough to remember flying before all that bullshit and we literally just pulled up to the plane on the tarmac and got on. You could arrive like ten minutes before takeoff. RETVRN

I’ve forgotten a combination OC/CN spray (aka peppermace) in the bottom of a bag and been waved through. Complete clown shoes.

I used to work last mile logistics in a big city with an international airport. I lived there until my twenties and flew in and out many times before and after the TSA. I've seen the backend, where they have the robot explosive sniffer, and only witnessed them use it for one package I dropped off. It's all theatre.

A former congressman owned a stake in the company that made the scanners. That's why you go through scanners.

Shortly after the whole high-security thing started there was a UK military officer who had been in charge of counterterrorism somewhere like Belfast, who was an expert in homemade bombs. He said the whole three-ounces of liquid thing was complete bullshit. He knew the specific ingredients they were saying people could potentially mix to make explosives in an airplane restroom, and he said no, these substances would absolutely not blow up a plane or blow a hole in a plane. They had to be combined slowly and carefully, almost drop by drop, in a temperature-controlled vessel, or they would react too fast, creating a violent splash that would merely give the would-be terrorist serious chemical burns.

Damn that must be nice.

Passing through the New Orleans airport last time I went to visit my mom, I showed up 3 hours early to my flight and didn't even exit the security check line until an hour after my flight had already left. I was fucking livid. It took them four hours to pass maybe ~300 people through the check lines.

What did make me feel a little better though was going back to the ticket kiosks to complain about it and try to get a different flight, and like four other ticket takers within earshot of us heard me and all chimed in like "maaaan, FUCK New Orleans TSA" apparently they're demonstrably one of the worst in the continental US.

I mean one can argue that since nobody could foresee that security wouldn't be there for the flight nobody could plan around it.

"If we don't know what we are doing, the enemy certainly can't anticipate our future actions."

The job of the TSA is not to provide security. Their job is to provide the illusion of security. They are basically living tranquilizers for the public.

Years ago I had a short inter-country flight in the EU.

Forgot that I still had my swiss army knife in my jacket. Noticed before the scanners. Thought "fuck. oh well, worst case I'll leave it here".

The people at the scanners didn't say a word.

On the way back, I remembered the knife again. Again on front of the scanners.

This time they noticed.

"is that a pocket knife in the jacket?" "uh, damn. yes"

Guy checks out the knife. Hands it back to me "next time put it in the suitcase".

I put it into my jacket and get on the plane.

When we land, I grab my stuff, including the jacket from the overhead compartment.

Sometime taps me on my shoulder, I turn around and see a steward hand me my knife, grinning. It fell out of my jacket when I grabbed it

I've had this happen a few times. It's such a relief when shit is jammed back to the walls. They did it at O'hare once, shit was crazy in there and they're all like, "just gtfo, don't blow anything up" everyone came stomping through the metal detectors. Not sure if it was related, but they had just sent sniffy dogs through the lines so maybe they planned it? I mean, I don't think the dogs can smell a knife, but I am not a dog, so I don't know for certain.

If 0.01% of people are nefarious, and they check 99.9% of the time, that’s still 1/10,000,000 chance a nefarious person gets through.

As long as they don’t do this often, doing that once probably has near zero impact on security.

(Please don’t pick apart the assumptions that nefarious people always get found by screening, or that the TSA works, that’s not the point I’m making — just trying to say a one off unpredictable dropping of guard doesn’t hugely benefit nefarious actors)

I recently traveled through Europe, the Middle East and Australia. In the bottom of my carry-on bag I forgot about a 1 l plastic water bottle that was about 3/4 full. None of the security scans in Australia, Malaysia, Doha, or Montreal said anything about it. For the first two airports, I also had two 500 mL water bottles in side pockets. Again, no issues.

That's what nearly all the intrusion tests and studies have indicated. A big GOP created "make work" program of security theater.

https://www.vox.com/2016/5/17/11687014/tsa-against-airport-security