lazy What I told everybody, back in early 2002, was that the law requiring airports to hire the TSA instead of private security expired on Thanksgiving of 2002. And since TSA security was going to be no better than Burns, let alone any of the good companies like Pinkerton, and more importantly since it was predicted to cost airports about three times as much, I was nothing less than 100% certain that by January of 2003, or summer of 2003 at the absolute latest, there wouldn't be a Transportation Security Agency. Sure, I said, no airport will be eager to be the first to tell the government to fig off. But at the rate the airlines were already hemorrhaging money and cutting flights to try to make it up, I knew that sooner or later some airport would go so broke that it had no choice. And when the other airports saw that switching back to private security didn't hurt security at all, saw that the TSA was going to be nothing more than the same old Thugs Standing Around that every other agency hires going through the same procedures, the stampede to the exit would be swift and relentless.
I've been more wrong. But yeah, only a couple of times.
And it is in this context that I bring you the following (not entirely safe for work) video, which I saw on actual security expert Bruce Schneier's blog (
schneiersecrty on LiveJournal): Windowpane Films' "TSA Gangstaz:"Given that the agency in charge of Takin' Shampoo Away is now tied for dead last in government agency popularity in the USA? And given that we actually won the war on terror back almost seven years ago when we denied the terrorists national support and reduced them to penury (and more importantly, showed potential national sponsors of terrorism against the US what'd happen to their governments, and showed the terrorists that attacking the US on its own soil is counter-productive)? Given that we denied future terrorists the actual attack used on 9/11 before 9/11 itself was over, when the heroes of Flight 93 rose up to resist? Given that the TSA's own audits show that if the terrorists were actually trying to smuggle bombs and weapons past TSA checkpoints, 70% of them would get through, meaning that it would take at most two terrorists on separate flights to bring down one airliner?
Given that over the last year, it's been proven that every single terror plot the TSA's security procedures are responding to was (a) physically impossible and (b) something made up by somebody who didn't know any ongoing terror plots but who needed desperately to give the Bush administration something to get the torture to stop? Given the several occasions on which TSA negligence has undermined our real last line of aviation defense, the Federal Air Marshal service, by calling unwanted attention to the air marshals? Given that all of the passenger abuse and aggravation, and all the stuff stolen out of luggage we're no longer allowed to lock, was for nothing?
Why in the hell hasn't this been a campaign issue in the 2008 elections?
And what in the hell did I get so wrong? Because I still can't figure out why what I predicted didn't happen.