RatherBeOnATrain

An update on Kentucky's junior senator:

PoliticoPro:
Rand Paul planning Round 2 against TSA
1/31/13 3:33 PM EST

A short quote:FWIW, I personally think that he lacks the political capital to get very far. That's probably good; I would rather not have TSA-related bills written by someone who was happy to be irradiated yet refused to be patted down.

Spiff

I think the biggest plus is that he's pushing back: privatizing (though what really needs to get kicked out of the airport is government influence, not just government employees) and passenger protection.

The more national attention that is drawn to what an abomination TSA is, the better.

Herb687

Hopefully he will also introduce something like the Chaffetz amendment (which actually passed the House but died in the Senate) which would have prevented pornoscanners and gropes as primary screening methods.

WillCAD

Privatization will not help one bit if the contractors are held to the same standards and bound by the same regs as TSA.

Things will only get better when the rules are made public, consistent, and Constitutional.

Spiff

Or better yet, when the federal government is kicked out of our nation's airports, permanently.

freezefactor

This. Just privatizing/contracting out TSA work will only end up being a giveaway to a private company. I have a tough time seeing how this will improve things, especially when this seems to not exactly a cleanly functioning "market."

How I see this working would be that private companies would bid to provide the security/screening. But once they win the bid, they are in a monopoly situation and have every incentive to cut costs as much as possible. Furthermore, the lowest scoring bidder would generally win the bids. I don't think "customer service" would improve in this case at all - and you might see security/screening get even slower as they try to keep employee costs low.

jkhuggins

One argument frequently made here is that a private contractor would have a much easier time firing bad screeners than TSA, who is bound by government rules. In theory, this would improve the quality of passenger/screener interactions.

I have no way to evaluate the validity of the argument ... I don't travel enough through the few airports with privatized screening to comment on how they perform versus their government-employed counterparts.

Spiff

Equally poorly.

They use the same "guidelines" for passenger harassment.

Pup7

I agree with you 100%. But I wonder if he can generate enough of a media draw to get information out to the masses. I don't know the answer, so I'll pose the question: what about shows like '60 Minutes'? Don't they still have a good reputation? Have they ever done a major feature on the travesty that is TSA?

Spiff

Many "major" media outlets still think that slamming the TSA = being "soft on terrorism", just like many stupid politicians.

WillCAD

I don't see it that way. I don't think the media outlets give a hoot about the whole "soft on terrorism" thing like politicians do.

However, I do see a lot of media outlets engaging in a feeding frenzy of attacking TSA's incompetence, waste, and criminals among TSO ranks, while almost completely ignoring the broader Constitutional issues of 1st, 4th, and 5th Amendment violations. Little fuss is being made, little attention is being paid, to the issue of a government agency searching millions of people per day, with no warrant, probable cause, or articulable suspicion, based on the limited scope of the administrative search doctrine - but routinely exceeding that doctrine with no oversight and no accountability. And I have yet to see a mainstream media outlet address the outrageous abuse of power represented by the very existence of such a thing as SSI. Secret rules that must be obeyed or we are denied freedom of movement within our own country; sounds more like something from Soviet Russia or Communist East Germany than something from the US government.

But, hey, they played up the stories of TSOs stealing iPads, so I guess it all balances out, right?

freezefactor

The problem here (and what makes it not a good "market" from our point of view) is that the customer (the person paying the bills) is the government rather than the individuals. The one benefit would be that a private company can better find "efficiencies" to make the operation cheaper -- but that could mean a decrease in service quality (from our point of view) since those efficiencies may mean personnel cutbacks -- while still being bound by the same regulations as before.

Ysitincoach

For television media outlets, they cater to a viewer that generally couldn't tell you what the 1st, 4th and 5th Amendment protect. Let alone, what an amendment is. It's so much easier to do a sweeps week piece that consists of stings, arrests, complaints, and animations of flying paperwork (ala Dateline or 20/20). The same sheeple that continue to willingly NoS are the ones watching Newscenter 37 Action News Newschannel [sic].

SeriouslyLost

I'll go against the trend here and say that I don't object to screening being done by the government, per se. I do object to inept and invasive screening, however.

Other countries manage screening (both privately and by the govt) without the problems the TSA has. Look at NZ or Japan - both quite nice to deal with on the screening front and also quite effective. Why can't the US manage it? It's not a matter of scale: the US has the resrouces to manage the scale - clearly they do given they already waste $8 billion a year on doing it ineffectively!

jkhuggins

DHS/TSA would argue that the US has unique challenges. Nobody has tried to fly an airplane into the Plimmer Towers or the Sumida Tower. The US is a target for terrorism in a way that other countries or not (self-inflicted, perhaps); to suggest that security solutions from countries not similarly situated would be effective doesn't follow logically.

Case in point (cited frequently here): Israel. I don't hear lots of people wondering why El Al doesn't simply adopt screening procedures from New Zealand or Japan; most of us understand the need for different kinds of procedures.

Having said all of that ... I'm not saying that DHS/TSA's approach is correct. DHS/TSA displays (at times) a staggering degree of hubris regarding its own capabilities and knowledge of the right way to do things. DHS/TSA should be willing to learn from any and all other sources. But to suggest that the security challenges the US faces are the same as other countries is unfair.