You may have heard recently about the Transportation Safety Administration’s record for safety measures in airline transportation. The task with which the government agency is charged has become a bit of a joke, with public perception almost of a gang of thieves running a sanctioned-criminal enterprise. The groping and stealing are held back, with apathy and inertia on its side, mainly by the idea that those may be the costs of keeping safe.
The revelations more recently call even that weak assumption into question, where the TSA was found to have a 5% success rate (or, as it should properly be classified, 95% failure rate) in detecting dangerous contraband items, most particularly weapons and explosives. If we tolerate the government’s band of misfits making airline travel an extreme chore all in the name of forestalling the next 9-11, then being fooled or missing 95% of the time is the very definition of a joke. That would prove that there is very little correlation between preventing violent attacks on transportation and what the TSA ‘provides.’
That was as much admitted, repeatedly, by TSA officials who cannot come up with any specific (or even general) cases where their agency’s efforts were fruitful (for the public’s interests rather than specific, rotten TSA agents). Even the agent in charge of screening and all that wasn’t fired, he was shuffled off to another high level position somewhere else in Homeland Security. All of which leaves the TSA as another epitome of bureaucracy, more concerned with its own interests than the original mandate and furthering the empowerment of government reach to the iron-clad exclusionof all other designs and ideas.
This post was published at David Stockmans Contra Corner by Jeffrey P. Snider ‘ June 3, 2015.
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