Comment Re:Enough with the security theater! (Score 1) 289
Personally, I think any TSA employee in charge of TSA procedures needs to go through said procedure/screening every day before work.
Actually, they need to be fired and replaced by people with proper risk management training, as opposed to risk avoidance.
Risk Avoidance: Do everything in your power to prevent some risk, no matter the cost Risk Management: Assess the risk, consider the liklihood of the risk, the damage it will cost if it happens, then look at mitigations, how likely they are to work, how much they'll cost, etc... And make the cheapest decision. IE if on average the mitigation will prevent more loss than it costs, you impliment it. Otherwise you just accept the risk.
I agree with you in principle, however, this ignores how politics have played into the equation. What made me realize this was when the TSA proposed a change to the rules to allow small knives (up to 2.36") on planes again. At the time, this seemed like an exercise in proper risk management to me. However, there was an uproar among citizens and flight attendants. For (what appears to be) strictly political reasons, these proposed changes were cancelled.
It seems that the public suffers from a strange dichotomy where many of us are critical of security theater, but we still want security theater. Many want to believe that the government offers a great big security blanket that will never let anything bad happen to us. I'm sure that you and I know that there is no such thing, and the cost of this illusion is extremely high (both financial and to that of liberty).