Originally Posted by
username
However, this kind of inefficient rules that wastes resources and unnecessarily inconvenient travelers need to be reviewed. If they view themselves as a law-enforcement agency, then they need to get the people on their side and enforce rules consistently.
It's worse than that. These high-frequency, highly visible, resource consuming false positives eventually dull the ability to spot actual threats when they arise. It's the equivalent of repeating "Wolf!" dozens of times per hour. Even if the current processes were perfectly designed and perfectly implemented, such a high frequency of false positives would drive up the likelihood of operator error to the point where the overall system reliability would drop unacceptably.
This is the inherent problem: As the TSA expends valuable resources to expand security efforts by poorly implementing poorly designed measures, it actually decreases the effective level of security. And it is the effective level of security we should be concerned with, not the political level of security.