3 thoughts on “Oh, now I get it”

  1. As usual the takeaway from this is lost in the lack of nuanced, intelligent discussion. The Israelis do psychological profiling, not racial or ethnic profiling. They look for terrorists, not weapons. If you’ve ever flown El Al, you get it — no $150,000 technocrat’s dreamy backscatter x-ray contraption, but humans looking into the eyes and observing the behavior of other humans. This subtlety is lost on North Americans, in general. Making a 60-year-old woman or a three-year-old go through a strip search and throw away their water and perfume bottles isn’t addressing the risk of terrorism. The TSA is security theater and it needs to be defunded. Cockpit doors are armored and no group of passengers will ever allow their plane to be commandeered again. But The Fear drives the idiot herd.
    Click here to read about a rational approach to airplane and airport security: http://tinyurl.com/ycofglh

  2. Sorry, Rubarbara, won’t happen in the USA. Psychological profiling requires that the people doing the profiling be intelligent, superbly trained, and take the job extremely seriously.

    You don’t get that with near-minimum wage TSA screeners. It costs some real money to get the people to operate an Israeli-style a/p security system. (and no, this isn’t about unionization or stuff like that; it’s the fundamental mismatch between the skillset needed and what it costs to hire such people away from other jobs)

    ALL of Israel’s flights are international. International travel costs more, and so extra security costs can be justified.

    The vast, vast majority of US flights are domestic, many are very short (JFK to Philly anyone? Might as well just taxi the airplane down the NJ Turnpike) and very low cost. Add a few hundred $ to each ticket for security, and sure, you’ll get Israeli-style security, with an Israeli-style airline route map: long-haul only.

  3. Arkia and Israir both do domestic flights all over Israel, which are not international.
    The USA can never have Israeli-style security because Americans simply do not care about each other enough to make it happen. It’s all about the bottom line. In fact, a good way to rationalize the TSA out of existence is to consider the cost-benefit of the kabuki security theater now going on against the cost of an attack ( at 0.00000002 percent chance of a terrorist attack even happening), including paying compensation to the victims’ families and cost to the airline. Much cheaper to go without the scanning/groping. Cockpit doors are impenetrable now. Passengers are alert to what they have to do to any would-be EVILDOER. We live in a new paradigm and the TSA is useless, except to molest our children and grandparents.

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