By "immediate" I mean that this staggeringly incompetent body to which we have surrendered our freedom of movement and our dignity, physical and metaphysical, was willed into existence as a part of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act passed by Congress on Nov. It is easy to understand why in the aftermath of that tragedy the American people were eager to see something — anything — done. It doesn't mean that years later the first draft that they scribbled on a piece of loose-leaf note paper with a golf pencil is what we should be going on a decade and a half later.
There are lots of things we did during the Bush administration that we don't do anymore, most of them for the good. For years a prominent feature of network and cable news broadcasts was any statement made by the Homeland Security Advisory System, with its painfully moronic color code. When is the last time you took note of whether your chances of being blown to pieces by a stranger were "blue" or "orange" or, heaven help us, "red"?
Banning water bottles and forcing women to put their cosmetic supplies in sandwich bags makes about as much sense in as listening to the deep cuts on American Idiot or pretending that Jon Stewart is funny. In order to make sense of why the TSA still exists, it is necessary to dispense with the fiction that it has anything to do with security, whatever that word means, and everything to do with an arbitrary display of authority.
This is why the Global Entry system exists, after all. We must remind upper-middle-class white people that they really are the monarchs of all they survey, that as "experienced travelers" they are entitled to the luxury of not participating in the fiction that watches and belts are really laser guns.
The Romans had the Coliseum; residents of Elizabethan London had the bear pits. This is why it is the duty of every red-blooded American when dealing with TSA personnel who show the slightest sign of surliness to be as rude as possible.
Be on your guard at all times. Assume that every single one of these people is a monomaniacal pervert who interviewed for this job with the sole intention of one day being able to pretend that the microscopic piece of lint in the button of the left pocket of your chinos is a switchblade or a miniaturized nuclear warhead.
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Nicholas Goldberg: Sen. But why not? All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. In a public hearing after a private classified briefing to the House Committee on Homeland Security, members of Congress called the failures by the Transportation Security Administration disturbing.
Inspectors "identified vulnerabilities with TSA's screener performance, screening equipment and associated procedures," according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security.
The statement added that the findings remain classified but that eight recommendations have been made to the TSA to improve checkpoint security. It is not clear what those recommendations are. The news of the failure comes two years after ABC News reported that secret teams from the DHS found that the TSA failed 95 percent of the time to stop inspectors from smuggling weapons or explosive materials through screening.
The agency opened a training academy for transportation security officers and changed procedures to reduce long lines.
Although lawmakers described the TSA's performance in this round of testing as poor, it was an improvement from two years ago, according to the source familiar with the report.
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