POLICY & POLITICS

The TSA is a waste of money

that doesn't save lives and
might actually cost them
Updated by Dylan Matthews on May 17, 2016, 9:20 a.m. ET @dylanmatt dylan@vox.com
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Look at these dangerous people being intercepted.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Things aren't looking great for the Transportation Security Administration of late,
judging from the headlines:"OHare Airport becoming oh wait airport." "Long TSA
lines snake through Atlanta airport." "Charlotte airport considers dropping TSA
at checkpoints."
While TSA waits have never been short, they've grown dramatically in recent
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months as summer travel starts. The TSA employees' union, naturally, wants to hire
more screening agents. But many airports are leaning toward just junking the TSA
altogether and using private security screening.
It's not a bad idea. The TSA's inefficiency isn't just aggravating and unnecessary; by
pushing people to drive instead of fly, it's actively dangerous and costing lives. Less
invasive private scanning would be considerably better.

Why the TSA falls short

The TSA is hard to evaluate largely because it's attempting to solve a non-problem.
Despite some very notable cases, airplane hijackings and bombings are quite rare.
There aren't that many attempts, and there are even fewer successes. That makes it
hard to judge if the TSA is working properly if no one tries to do a liquid-based
attack, then we don't know if the 3-ounce liquid rule prevents such attacks.
So Homeland Security officials looking to evaluate the agency had a clever idea: They
pretended to be terrorists, and tried to smuggle guns and bombs onto planes 70
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different times. And67 of those times, the Red Team succeeded. Their weapons
and bombs were not confiscated, despite the TSA's lengthy screening process. That's
a success rate of more than 95 percent.
It's easy to make too much of high failure rates like that. As security expertBruce
Schneier likes to note, such screenings don't have to be perfect; they just have to be
good enough to make terrorists change their plans: "No terrorist is going to base his
plot on getting a gun through airport security if there's a decent chance of getting
caught, because the consequences of getting caught are too great."
But even Schneier says 95 percent was embarrassingly high, and probably not
"good enough" for those purposes. If you're a prospective terrorist looking at that
stat, you might think smuggling a gun onto a plane is worth a shot.
Schneier isn't a TSA defender by any means. He likes to note that there's basically
zero evidence the agency has prevented any attacks. The TSA claims itwon't provide
examples of such cases due to national security, but given its history of bragging
about lesser successes, that's a little tough to believe.For instance, the agency
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about lesser successes, that's a little tough to believe.For instance, the agency
bragged plenty about catchingKevin Brown, an Army vet who tried to check pipe
bomb-making materials. Brown wasn't going to blow up the plane the unfinished
materials were in his checked luggage but if the TSA publicized that, why wouldn't it
publicize catching someone who was trying to blow up the plane?
The Government Accountability Office is also skeptical that the TSA is stopping
terrorists.Itconcluded in 2013 that there's no evidence the agency's SPOT program,
which employed 2,800 as of the study and attempts to scan passengers for
suspicious behavior, is at all effective.Only 14 percent of passenger flaggings by
TSA officers led to a referral to law enforcement. Only 0.6 percent of TSA flaggings
led to an arrest. None of those arrests were designated as terrorism-related.
What about the most loathed TSA rules: the shoe removal requirement, and the ban
on all but the tiniest containers of liquids? There's never been any evidence that these
are effective. Remember: We caught the people who tried to attack with their shoes
and with liquid explosives, without these rules in place. Europe isgradually phasing
out the liquid ban.
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The TSA has never presented any evidence that the shoe ban is preventing attacks
either. "Focusing on specific threats like shoe bombs or snow-globe bombs simply
induces the bad guys to do something else," Schneier tells Vanity Fair's Charles
Mann. You end up spending a lot on the screening and you havent reduced the total
threat."

How TSA hassle kills people

The TSA doesn't save lives, but it probably ends them. Onepaper by
economistsGarrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel Simon found that,
controlling for other factors like weather and traffic, 9/11 provoked such a large
decrease in air traffic and increase in driving that 327 more people died every month
from road accidents. The effect dissipated over time, but the total death toll (up to
2,300) rivals that of the attacks themselves.
Another paper by the same authors found that one post-9/11 security measure
increased checked baggage screening reduced passenger volume by about 6
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percent. Combine the two papers, and you get a disturbing conclusion: In their words,
over the course of three months, "approximately 129 individuals died in automobile
accidents which resulted from travelers substituting driving for flying in response to
inconvenience associated with baggage screening."
This isn't just one set of studies; there's other evidence that 9/11 led to an increase in
driving, whichcost at least a thousand lives.The 129 deaths per quarter-year figure
is, asNate Silver notes, "the equivalent of four fully-loaded Boeing 737s crashing
each year."
You can dispute the precise figures here; these are regression analyses, which are
hardly perfect. But it stands to reason that having to get to the airport two or three
hours before a flight reduces demand for flights relative to a world where you only
have to arrive 30 minutes beforehand particularly for flights on routes where a twoto three-hour wait dramatically increases travel time relative to driving, like New York
to Washington, DC, or Boston to New York. That means more driving. That means
more death.
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That might be worth it for a system that we know for a fact prevents attacks. But
there's no evidence the TSA does.Meanwhile, asBloomberg's Adam Minter notes, a
classified TSA study found that private screeners were more effective than TSA staff,
and a 2011 report from the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee
suggested that private screeners are considerably more efficient at processing
passengers.
The solution is clear: Airports should kick out the TSA, hire (well-paid and unionized)
private screeners, and simply ask people to go through normal metal detectors with
their shoes on, their laptops in their bags, and all the liquids they desire. The increased
risk would be negligible and if it gets people to stop driving and start flying, it could
save lives.

The better way to board a plane

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The TSA is a waste of money that doesn't save lives and might actually cost them
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