Sen. Rand Paul Introduces TSA Reform Legislation 585
OverTheGeicoE writes "Over a month after Sen. Rand Paul announced his desire to pull the plug on TSA, he has finally released his legislation that he tweets will 'abolish the #TSA & establish a passengers "Bill of Rights."' Although the tweet sounds radical, the press release describing his proposed legislation is much less so. 'Abolition' really means privatization; one of Paul's proposals would simply force all screenings to be conducted by private screeners. The proposed changes in the 'passenger Bill of Rights' appear to involve slight modifications to existing screening methods at best. Many of his 'rights' are already guaranteed under current law, like the right to opt-out of body scanning. Others can only vaguely be described as rights, like 'expansion of canine screening.' Here's to the new boss..."
It WAS privatized before TSA (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the main problem here... the Federal government offered up "free" security services to airports, what else were they going to do? Now we seem to be stuck with the stellar service that is the TSA - government managed security theater.
Get rid of it. Problem solved.
Rand Paul is disappointing the Libertarian base (Score:1, Insightful)
If Libertarians can be said to have a base, the younger Paul has disappointed it. First he endorsed Romney, and now he's offering this bill that's just shuffling the deck chairs from the public to the private side of impositions on your rights.
Thos of us who are not "the base" of Libertarians yet find some sympathy with Libertarian ideas (especially when it comes to individual rights) can't take much solace in this either. The younger Paul is just transferring the right to grope from government cronies to private cronies. Same shit, different toilet.
Rand Paul, you rode your father's coat tails to the Senate, you sold out. Nothing left for him to do but go to Disney World (TM) (note, this post not sponsored by Disney, but I'll be happy to take their money if they offfer it. Why should big time corporate shills get all the scratch?).
Private security theater is no better than public (Score:5, Insightful)
I fly around the world on a regular basis. There is one thing that every single foreign airport I have ever flown out of shares in common: a lack of security theater.
From Mumbai to Istanbul, Narita to that tiny little airport on the island next to Toronto, I never have to:
1. Take my shoes off
2. Submit to a body scanner
3. Suffer a pat-down
4. Wait more than ten minutes to get through security
Flying within and out of the US is slower, more difficult, more humiliating, than flying through airports where terrorism is ACTUALLY a common threat. I am embarrassed every time a foreigner has to deal with my country's ridiculous soap opera of security, and simultaneously enraged when the outside world reminds me that, outside of the US, flying is a wonderfully pleasant experience from start to finish.
I don't really have a new or insightful point here other than to vent, to be honest. It's deeply frustrating to see the ludicrous amount of money we've spent on body scanners that are not only trivially fooled, but simultaneously don't catch anything actually dangerous a metal detector wouldn't have already caught and still require me to take my god damned mother fucking shoes off. Security is worse, yet somehow takes longer. I have to choose between a ridiculous body scan or an intrusive physical search in my own relatively safe country, but can travel in comfort everywhere else.
It's maddening. I avoid flying as much as possible literally because of the TSA. It's a sad state of affairs when a 12-hour train ride (which, mind you, costs MORE than a flight) is an attractive option to dealing with airport security.
It's maddening to the point that I supported Rand Paul's original initiative to ban/reform the TSA. Rand Paul is a lunatic, yet I dislike the TSA so much that he and I agreed on this one issue.
So now, it turns out, he doesn't want to do what he'd said at all. His proposal address NONE of the things that madden me so, and in many cases make them worse. Privatized security theater is no better than public security theater. The THEATER part is the problem, not the public or private part.
Re:It WAS privatized before TSA (Score:1, Insightful)
No That is Not what happened.
The Minimum wage, poorly trained, high turn over, private screening companies where determined to be un-fixable after 9/11. It was decided only a government run professional service would do.
so;
What a difference 10 years make.
Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Apparently private industry did not do everything better.
Re:The screeners used to be private (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a big psychological difference behind the attitude towards passengers of the average screener empowered by the federal government and one empowered by the local airport.
Re:It WAS privatized before TSA (Score:4, Insightful)
correct, it's on the airline to worry about whether their planes are taken over or fall out of the sky. it's on the passenger to choose an airline that makes them feel safe. Note most skyscrapers aren't cost reduced crap like the Twin Towers were, you run a plane into say the Sears Tower and you'll ruin a perfectly serviceable jet aircraft.
Re:It WAS privatized before TSA (Score:2, Insightful)
eh, the only reason some of the 9/11 were in the country is because government agencies were watching them to see what they would do. and so we saw.
really there needs to be an inquisition and some executions of some of OUR people for high treason regarding 9/11. Obama shot off his mouth about a full inquiry, but of course didn't do jack as he a mega-corprate bitch just like bush/cheney
Re:100% foolproof plan! (Score:2, Insightful)
- Sub cudgels for knives. Last thing I want is to get cut by some potentially diseased, random jackass who doesn't know how to properly handle a sharp. plus, a Louisville Slugger has a much greater range than a box knife.
Also, rubberize the interior of the passenger compartment to make cleanup a breeze.
Re:Election Year Bullshit.. (Score:5, Insightful)
His proposal is to change virtually nothing. Pretty much the same security theatre, but performed by the private sector rather than the public sector. Pointless.
Re:100% foolproof plan! (Score:4, Insightful)
In addition:
1. Remove the ability for the passenger compartment to talk to the pilots except for a single emergency button that informs the pilots that we need an immediate emergency landing at the nearest airport. Hijackers can't tell the pilot where to go and they can't even threaten to kill people to achieve that goal.
2. Upon emergency landing the plane is met at the gate by EMTs and police. Hijackers aren't given a chance to negotiate before police are expected to enter the passenger compartment. This makes it impossible for them to use hostages as a buffer against police entry. EMTs, of course, are in the much more likely case that the emergency is medical in nature.
3. Once the plane touches down for an emergency prevent it from starting back up unless initiated from an access panel requiring a physical key held by the airport or local police and a password in the middle of the passenger compartment requiring at least two officers to operate. This means that unless an authorized technician is allowed into the center of the passenger compartment the plane can't just be reloaded with a new pilot and take off after the hijackers have had a chance to talk to the police. They need to allow multiple actual police officers into the compartment to even get off the ground again.
Or, even better, just keep the locked cockpit door and make sure passengers understand that hijackers are more likely to kill you than let you go nowadays. This requires almost no changes to the plane...
Re:Election Year Bullshit.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A lot later than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
"It was also legal for pilots to have guns with them."
It still is. The laws that temporarily took guns away from pilots were misguidedly attempting to somehow keep us "safe"... from the very people we were trusting with our lives when we stepped on the plane in the first place.
What a boneheaded, f*ed up thing to do.
Fortunately, some politicians who had at least a few working brain cells left got that situation reversed, and explicitly made it legal (again) for pilots to carry guns.
Re:The screeners used to be private (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"privatization" (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly; just take a look at the private for-profit prison industries.
If you have to have a government service, and there's no way to make it competitive, it simply makes more sense to have the government do it outright. There's no way to make the TSA's job competitive; it's not like there's 5 different airports right next to each other that you can choose from if you don't like the screeners at one airport. By having the government do it directly, it's more answerable to the people than a private company is. However, as in the case of the USPS, it does sometimes make a lot of sense to have the function done not by a government agency, but rather by a government-owned and managed corporation, so it's not subject to as much politicization. But for the TSA, I don't think that's such a good idea; it really should be more like the FBI or police departments.
lack of courage (Score:5, Insightful)
So what is wrong with current situation. It is that the TSA is a symptom, not the cause. The cause is Homeland Security, a department, which this year is adding $3billion in deficient spending over what it has been adding all the years since Bush decided that bigger government was the way to go. If we want smaller government, Paul should be giving us legislation to get rid of the DHS, putting the duties into other departments. He should get rid of medicare part D. He should stop the department of education from doing anything but reference curriculum and grants for innovative local teaching ideas. This would be smaller government and real savings. But instead he will continue to attack workers and pretend to care about the people.
Re:It WAS privatized before TSA (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>bits of high-tech thermite
Nonsense. All we have is someone CLAIMING there was thermite. All that tells me is someone should be writing episodes of 24... not that there was thermite in the building.
And yes the building was designed to handle the IMPACT of an airplane. Unfortunately the engineers forgot (per usual) to account for the effect of a thousand-degree fire on the steel beams. Ooops.
Re:Government is more efficient than private indus (Score:4, Insightful)
You clearly don't understand a word about what you think you do.
Re:The screeners used to be private (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah you can sue a private screener.
Says who?
You watch, Federal regulations will end up giving these guys immunity in exactly the same way the TSA has immunity.
Re:"privatization" (Score:4, Insightful)
LOL, you think you're going to be able to choose among competing pat-down companies? You'll have as much choice as you have in your (privatized) electric company, your (privatized) trash service, and, I bet, your (privatized) cable company.
Privatization simply means your money is being funneled into the pockets of a company rather than government workers.
Re:The screeners used to be private (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah you can sue a private screener.
Just like you can sue the phone company for spying on you?
Re:Government is more efficient than private indus (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The screeners used to be private (Score:4, Insightful)
i hear this alot: (Score:5, Insightful)
suing as the source of rights preservation
really?!
so rather than "evil" government regulations, it's far better to:
1. get abused
2. go through the litany of trying to get a lawyer to take your case, wait a long time to start a trial
3. wait a long time during a trial, because you don't have anything better to do with your time and money
4. maybe not get any satisfaction at all in the end, and now an expensive legal bill on top of your now public mockery of your misery, because you are outgunned in the courtroom by the corporation's legal goon squad
really?
the court of law is better than government regulation?
Re:Indeed...because it was for profit (Score:5, Insightful)
thank you
there are plenty of things that should NEVER be privatized
healthcare insurance, for instance
amazing! it solves two major problems with the TSA (Score:5, Insightful)
1. it makes them immune to Freedom of Information laws, as they only apply to government and government agencies
2. eliminates the horrific waste of potential for profit and corporate welfare - it's never a good idea for a government to do something when they can pay corporations ten times as much to do a crappier job.
remember children: "Government Bad! Business Good!"
Re:A lot later than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's tricky. Terrorists are looking for soft targets. If there's no security on aircraft, they'll attack aircraft. If their most 'dead americans per dollar' is in Iraq then they go to iraq, or afghanistan or whatever. Depends also on what metric they decide to use, and what they think will be successful.
In this day and age it's very unlikely they'd be able to take and keep possession of an airplane. That was a one trick pony, and they seriously under delivered. For probably another 20-30 years hijacking an airplane is simply not going to work for suicide bombing. Passengers will resist, improvise weapons or whatever. Blowing up an airplane... harder to say.
But they *are* looking for ways to kill people. And the TSA is terrible at their job. Those two aren't mutually inclusive or exclusive. You need security looking for bombs, and poison gas, you need to secure airports themselves against ground based lasers and rockets and so on (because god knows, if you can blind a pilot to crash a plane they'll try that). Ultimately security like this is an uninsurable problem, it has to be the government running it. The TSA acts like some lunatics crazy scheme that had no chance of success 7 years ago should dictate the experience for everyone flying today - that's fundamentally flawed in a lot of ways.
You could have made the same argument about pearl harbour. Well the japanese only attacked pearl harbour on one day, so if the US had just ignored it everything would have been fine. And that would be complete nonsense. It's taken 11 years to tear apart al qaeda and they're still not gone, and their ideology, even if not their senior membership, is still resilient. Unlike the death of Stalin (korean war) or the death of Hitler, or Mussolini where everyone proclaimed they were going to continue the fight, and then immediately gave up, Al Qaeda was fully expecting bin laden to be killed, and is ready to carry on without him.
There's nothing silly about taking al qaeda seriously. Taking them seriously doesn't necessarily mean flinging hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem, but doing nothing is an invitation for them to cause chaos, and the more chaos they cause the more recruits they get and so on. Having bomb sniffing dogs in airports, making sure the area around airports is secure from anti aircraft missiles, and helping the government of afghanistan (whatever the hell that actually is), fight Al Qaeda is perfectly sensible. Groping 4 year olds and 94 year olds, and using ionizing radiation body scanners on everyone.... not so much.
Remember, they did try and blow up the WTC previous, with a car bomb. And failed. Whatever else they are, they are persistent bastards. Whether that means their focus will move to north africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, the middle east and Pakistan from the US for a while I have no idea.
Re:The screeners used to be private (Score:5, Insightful)
One big problem is that when privatizing many government functions they can turn out to be actually be more expensive. Ie, inefficient not-for-profit group versus inefficient for-profit group. And indeed after privatizing you still have the _same_ managers and employees and equipment and procedures and rules except that they will be even less accountable to the citizenry than before.
There are some people who have this irrational hatred of governments and who are actually happy to spend even more money to get rid of the government label but change nothing else. These are not fiscal conservatives since their goal is not to save money. I think much of the time they're just trying to get votes from people who don't know any better than to solve an actual problem.
For-profit companies can do a good job in many areas, especially areas that involve making money. However they very often fail in areas that are not for profit. They just can not be run and managed the same way.
Re:A lot later than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's tricky. Terrorists are looking for soft targets."
It is tricky, in the way you meant, but not tricky in other ways. For example: the U.S. made airplanes even softer targets by disarming everyone else. They even took dull plastic knives off of airplanes, at least for a while!
You do not prevent someone from attacking or terrorizing a crowd of people by disarming all the other people in the crowd! That's not just misguided, it's downright stupid! Yet that is what our bonehead politicians did.
You don't stop violent attackers by preventing other people from defending themselves. That has been tried again and again for millennia, yet has never worked.
And contrary to popular belief (see one comment above), a bullet hole in the side of a modern airliner is no catastrophe. The air compressors are well able to handle such a situation, and a $2 can of insulating foam can seal the hole in a moment or two anyway.
Granted, there's nothing silly about taking terrorism seriously. But it must also be kept in perspective. As mentioned before, a typical American (even a frequent flyer) is far more likely to die from a lightning strike or a fall in the bathtub than become a victim of terrorists.
I think we agree that reasonable safety measures are in order, but that the current situation is ridiculously far from reasonable.
Re:The screeners used to be private (Score:4, Insightful)
These are anti-government people. They honestly believe that all government is too big and needs to be shrunk down to nothing except the military. Even one mayor in a town of 100 people is too large for these kooks. They are willing to risk economic meltdowns if it causes governments to fail, witness the idiotic and irresponsible refusal to fix the debt ceiling.
Re:Government is more efficient than private indus (Score:1, Insightful)
Do not blame the free market for a law that didn't provide for a free market. A 10% dig at wholesale and another 17% at retail is not a free market. The reason is clearly the government wants your money. You should reject a booze tax as much as a income tax. You still have a sin tax, apparently on steroids!
Re:The screeners used to be private (Score:4, Insightful)
It is much easier to sue a private corporation than the government.
Not if the companies have a 'hold harmless' clause in their contracts - which they most certainly would. Remember, anybody can hire good lawyers if you've got the money.
Re:A lot later than that. (Score:4, Insightful)
You could have made the same argument about pearl harbour. Well the japanese only attacked pearl harbour on one day, so if the US had just ignored it everything would have been fine.
Pearl Harbor was a little different, Fox News's rhetoric aside. Pearl Harbor was a coordinated attack by Japanese military planes on a U.S. naval base, a legitimate military target. The Japanese were conducting a war; they weren't walking into crowded discotheques and blowing themselves up. We were pretty mad that they gave us no warning, but how much warning did FDR give Hitler that we were landing on Normandy? (Answer: None, and in fact we even conducted decoy operations to confuse the enemy.) When a government sends over 300 planes, destroys hundreds of your planes and sinks eight battleships (not cheap, those), I don't think it really accounts as "a one-day attack" -- as opposed to the type of attack where the solution is to lock the cabin doors on your own planes.
It's taken 11 years to tear apart al qaeda and they're still not gone, and their ideology, even if not their senior membership, is still resilient.
Possibly more so than ever. Mission accomplished?
Re:A lot later than that. (Score:4, Insightful)
"In fact, why don't you go over to your neighbors place and start rearranging their furniture to how you think it should be. "
Funny, in a way. This was almost exactly my own argument against invading Iraq. I heard a lot (and from women particularly!) "We should invade them even if they weren't involved in 9/11 because of the terrible way they treat women."
And my argument was: "What business is that of mine, or yours? It may be true by our standards, but how dare you make moral judgments for some other entire culture? What if they came and attacked us, because we don't make women wear burkhas? How would you feel then?"
Further:
"Karma is a bitch. I strongly urge you not to support war on the basis that you feel their culture is immoral. Right now, their women can only gain. YOU, on the other hand, have a lot to lose."
Re:Government is more efficient than private indus (Score:4, Insightful)
UPS and Fedex are prohibited from providing standard mail service by Federal Law ... Plus, the mail is not a societal problem, if the USPS was shut down all that would happen is I would have to throw out all that junk mail.
I respectfully call bullshit on your bullshit
It may be the case that UPS and Fedex are prohibited from providing standard mail service (I do not know). However, as I understand it, USPS is certainly forced to deliver mail everywhere, not just the well-populated and juicy areas. If you live an urban area, UPS/Fedex will step in to substitute for USPS. However, if you live in a remote village, you may notice that your letters will then cost $20 to deliver.
Re:The screeners used to be private (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A lot later than that. (Score:5, Insightful)
If a pilot goes crazy while piloting an aircraft I'm flying, frankly, the last thing I'm going to worry about is whether he has a gun.
Re:Government is more efficient than private indus (Score:4, Insightful)
Why, "corporate socialism" is perfectly possible. A corporation, after all, is a small dictatorial state; if given sufficient room to do whatever it wants, it can well delve into some form of paternalistic socialism if that's how the people running it are inclined. Ford is a pretty famous example of that, but there are plenty more [wikipedia.org].
The fundamental problem with this arrangement is the same as with any dictatorship with an "enlightened ruler" - it's run on the whim of a single person or a small group, and does not respond to the populace. Therefore, it can change its nature quite radically for no reasons whatsoever. Practice shows that such arrangements don't last long term.