Transportation Security Administration overview

¶ … TSA

History of TSA

On March 9, 1972, a Trans World Airlines jet bound for Los Angeles took off from JFK International Airport in New York. Moments into the flight, the airline received an anonymous phone call warning there was a bomb on the flight. The aircraft returned to JFK where passengers were evacuated and a bomb-sniffing dog named Brandy was brought aboard to search. Brandy found the explosive device just 12 minutes before it was set to detonate. That same day, then-President Nixon directed the Secretary of Transportation to use innovative means to combat the problems plaguing civil aviation. The result was the creation of a unique federal project - the FAA Explosives Detection Canine Team Program - designed to place certified teams at strategic locations throughout the nation so that any aircraft receiving a bomb threat could quickly divert to an airport with a canine team.

While technology has afforded modern man the ability to travel across the world in relatively short time spans, a great cost is also associated with this luxury. The dangers that terrorism has presented to the world since the fateful attacks on 9/11 has changed that the way travels through the air. The United States Transportation Security Administration has been a massive failure and has wasted millions if not billions of taxpayer money with little to no reduction in terrorism. It is time to reexamine the efficacy, efficiency and economics of the TSA as it relates to common sense travel.

Due to the large increase in world air travel and the growing technology to produce undetectable weapons the U.S. should take the lead with other nations to secure the skies. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how the TSA is ultimately ill equipped to deal with this problem and that a new solution is obviously necessary. This essay will highlight three main problems with the TSA and its approach to airline safety before concluding with a message to urge for change.

Problems with TSA

The most important and obvious failure of the TSA since 9/11 is that is blatantly ineffective. Terrorism itself is an almost impossible thing to defend due to the ambiguity of the word and the charged emotions that always accompany its usage. The TSA is not capable of handling such security checks. Blakely (2013) agreed with this idea when he wrote "The TSA has been notoriously terrible at catching threats. The failure rate of 70% on guns and knives is comically bad, and in March a TSA agent was able to sneak a bomb in his pants through two checkpoints and a pat down. Given that the rate of terror attacks has fallen exponentially since 1970 and the odds of dying in a terror attack are about one in 20 million, what difference does the TSA make? To put this in perspective, Americans are twice as likely to get struck by lightning as they are to get killed in a terror attack. They are 200 times more likely to die by choking, possibly on bad airline food. "

The question remains is why does the government let these people continue to work when in actuality they are undermining the capabilities of the American people. The TSA doesn't make sense if it can't catch terrorists. For this reason it is obvious that its existence should be questioned and Americans need to figure out if this group is worth saving.

Besides being grossly ineffective at their job, the TSA also violates the human rights of everyone who goes through these searches and seizures. The American way of life has been threatened as these unnecessary screening checks are haphazardly applied as the privacy and human decency of each person going through these checks is violated. The humiliating experiences of removing clothing and going through body scanners, just to travel from one point to the other demonstrates the tyrannical nature of the U.S. Federal Government and its inability to control any situation.

The U.S. Constitution's fourth amendment was supposed to protect against this type of unlawful invasion of personal freedom, but due to the exaggerations of the terrorist threat by media and politicians we are stuck with a despicable and ugly organization. There has been much debate about this problem but Macsata (2010) explained how this is a violation when he wrote "Benjamin Franklin once said, "He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither."