Tuesday, December 16, 2014

A TSA apologist in Connecticut

Yes, there are still people who publish about how hard it is to be someone on the state's payroll doing things that are otherwise illegal. Jim Cameron wrote an opinion piece in the Easton Courier that actually says we should lay off because TSA agents are only doing their job. Just like British troops in colonial America, Nazis, Soviet Gulag Guards, and Saddam Hussein's henchmen. The whole point is that it is not heroic to take a paycheck to abuse the rights and privacy of innocent civilians. That's why we must make TSA agents think twice about what they're doing.
He then goes on with "evidence" about how the TSA agents keep us safe. The proof is all of the weapons they seize. Nevermind that these weapons trend to be legal and in the possession of non-criminals who usually just forget to remove them from their bags before they get to the airport. So the TSA agents are not protecting anyone; they are just taking property from innocent travelers. (I'm not sure what his point is about the woman who faked a bomb threat...seems neither here nor there for this discussion.)
The last thing I want to take down from this op-ed is this:
Remember the holy triad of service: Fast, good and cheap. You can achieve any two of those, but not all three. Clearly, the top priority is “good” security. So, in this era of sequestration, we’re unlikely to see quality compromised for speed or lower cost.
The TSA is not a business, it is a government bureaucracy (and a bloated one at that). There is no service being provided, no calculation on the trade-offs between profit and loss. It is supremely naive to think that the institution of federal airport security can ever consistently achieve even one part of the service triad.
So far, the evidence is on the side of those who give TSA agents grief: security is not fast, not good, and not cheap.