Seems like an honest set of questions; I'll see if can but together an honest set of answers as applied to me.


Agreed wholeheartedly on the ironing out, but the only way to facilitate the ironing out is to point out problems (i.e., complain) to each other, screeners, supervisors, congressmen, etc.



A perfect security system would catch all terrorists while affecting/delaying no one else. That can obviously never be achieved, but we should always be striving to get closer to that goal using whatever information is available.

Actually, what upset me the most was not me being screened but watching others. Even as a US citizen, I'm still a mid-20s male, traveling alone 99% of the time, no checked luggage. I've been secondary screened only once since 9/11. Maybe if it happened more, it would have made me mad, but what upset me was seeing elderly people and attractive women travelling alone obviously being disproportionally singled out for extra security.

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You know how many people I hear tell us (TSA) to stop screening americans and concentrate on the middle-eastern people. If that's not racism...what is?

It is obviously racial/ethnic/national/religious discrimination. Polls show most Americans supported it immediately post 9/11 (including blacks, which was an interesting sign of the times considering all that group has suffered through with racial profiling on traffic stops. But it goes along with the "it doesn't matter if it's not me" mentality that you mentioned.).

Personally I have mixed feelings about it, mainly because common sense says that some form of this profiling would be extremely effective at weeding out the specific threat of islamic-extremists from foreign countries. But it wouldn't weed out all threats, and it is easily defeated by using US-citizen sympathizers/converts with a western-sounding name. But then again, there aren't that many Johnny-Taliban-Walkers and Jose' Padillas. But it seems the govt. (and many people) won't even go through that thought process of analyzing the pros and cons because they're so trained to automatically say "nationality/racial/religious profiling is bad" without even thinking.

But what really makes me mad is rumors that TSA is told to specifically NOT screen people from these groups out of "sensitivity" or fear of "looking bad." So they were screening 85-year-old WWII vets while the person statistically more likely to be a terrorist (sorry, it's true) is given a pass out of political correcness. My blood boils just typing that.

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Because all the terrorists have to do is run trial people thru the system to see who is flagged and who is not. Then they have beaten the system.

Yup.

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So instead of wasting money on a program to pick people...

Big databases like that legitimately scare people too, because they tend to be misused, which is already being shown with this CAPPSII revision to include "criminal-screening." Technically, I have nothing to hide. But if I have an unpaid parking ticket in Arizona, I don't want some screener at O'Hare harassing me about it.

(This is the same reason I oppose "amber alerts," which seem like a great program on the surface. We were originally promised they would only be used for stranger abductions, not custody or marriage disputes. But just last week in Indiana, they issue an amber alert because a father, living in a house with his children and his wife, got up at 2 in the morning and drove his kids to TN. Now he's being charged with all kinds of stuff, but from what I can tell, he didn't actually do anything wrong. Weird, yes, but illegal, no.)

I honestly don't think most "normal people" with a few of the so-called security-risk-factors listed in an above post will be stopped by this system, but it's scary to think that those criteria are being tracked. And the govt. should accept that there will be false positives (like the current no fly list), and from the getgo, put in a real system to fix them (unlike the current no fly list).

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.train the screeners better at identifying individual explosive device components, instead of a bomb in its entirety..

Yes. But another major source of complaints regarding TSA is the lack of "common sense" in the list of prohibited items. Knitting needles, silverware, and tiny pocket knives are not a serious threat to aircraft. We all know that cooperating with hijackers, not boxcutters, caused 9/11. And we all know that very effective knives/clubs/whips/whatever can be made from common objects that are present on aircraft (broken glass bottles, heavy books or even laptops, belts, etc.). Therefore "common sense" says we go back to the old rule about no blades over 2", and TSA should focus on real threats that it can effectively prevent, like guns, large knives, swords, bombs, etc.

And declaring an in-flight emergency or evacuating a terminal because a pen-knife is found is a side-effect of these policies that needs to go too.

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I think the biggest problem with our airlines is that they bow down to any customer who complains...especially a frequent flyer.

The frequent flyer (and the TSA itself) have to deal frequently with a program that seems to have been largely created to provide feel-good window-dressing security for the once-a-year travelers while being politically correct. The frequent flyer is more prone to complaining because it affects them more and the problems that need to be ironed out are more visible to them.

The window-dressing aspects and the lack of common sense take a toll on the attitudes of frequent flyers, and my guess is that they take a serious toll on the morale of well-intentioned TSA folks who actually joined to "help the country." Maybe over a period of time it really will get better, but that will only occur if complaints are addressed and bad management/employees are replaced with good ones as needed.

And personally, I think that it is impossible to completely secure every potential target in the country against terrorism, so at least some energy should be devoted to rounding up known terrorists and providing an effective deterrent to future attackers and their sympathizers. Maybe Afghanistan provided some deterrent, but I'm not entirely convinced.

So, at least that's why I complain. That, and I'm just wordy.