I remain skeptical that the metal detector actually detected that slight bit of foil at the top when it failed to sound over my metal-framed glasses.

There has also been a notable lack of purple people eater attacks on passenger planes. Since the creation of the TSA, not one purple person has been eaten on a passenger aircraft in flight within the boundaries of the continental United States of America.

(How can we possibly deny them these triumphs?)

http://dushare.dom.edu/CampusNews/SitePages/DisplayArticle.aspx?ID=8710

Why? That's the interesting question here.

The truth is out there (so slam the door and lock it quick!)

Conceivably, I could actually attend this. Maybe I will!

That said, I doubt the TSA could have found that damned bomb.

It wasn't the fact that she was searched that bugged me, it was that the search was as ham-handed and intrusive as possible. Running the wheelchair through the X-ray machine could have been done in less than a minute while she waited in a chair; instead they did a patdown of an old lady who was in early stage dimentia, and who was going home to bury her husband who had died two days before, while she was at her oldest grandchild's wedding. We couldn't get her out before that because we were in a hurricane and all plane flights were cancelled.

I'm convinced the real reason for the overzealousness of the TSA was that the airport was almost empty, and there were probably more TSA than passengers for our flight. We were on the first flight out of the Sarasota, FL. airport on the morning after the hurricane went through, and most passengers had cancelled their flights.

And in exchange for this, the TSA has whimsically and without appeal confiscated a huge amount of passenger's personal property, with no recourse, no compensation, and no shame.

Also, a number of tests of airport security in which individuals smuggled fake guns, knives, and bombs onto aircraft have shown systemic flaws in the TSA systems, as well as a large number of insufficiently trained, motivated, and/or competent personnel. TSA's public attitude towards these tests has been "Nothing to see here, no problem, don't need to change anything, wouldn't be prudent."

The syndrome is bipartisan. I wish things were different, but they're not. Under Democratic leadership, the DHS and TSA appear to be no more competent or transparent than under Republican leadership.

Changing the top management of the Stasi, and putting a reformer in charge instead of a party hardliner, doesn't mean the police state ends, it means the police state purges different people and pursues different internal enemies.

it means the police state purges different people and pursues different internal enemies.

Or not. In organizations like that the lower levels are notoriously disconnected from the upper levels, and their victims are often chosen by the minions for reasons that have little to do with the policy decisions of the bosses.

Will the Democrats change their platform on civil liberties?

A whole bunch of the 2008 platform's promises wrt civil liberties, executive power, and the war on terror contradict stuff the Obama administration has done. My guess is that they'll leave the platform intact, and just try to ignore the issue--after all, no non-Paul Republican is going to run against them on those issues.

Yep. My point is, the kind of organization it is, its job and mission and culture and most of its employees and its expertise and resources and practices, all keep it pointed in the same basic direction. Changing the people at the top can alter some important things about who gets targeted and who doesn't, but it won't change the kind of organization it is or what it does. DHS could have its appointees chosen by Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, and it would still be a force for evil in the world, and probably continue becoming a bigger force for evil in the world as time goes by.

1) He could have legally had a gun on the plane.
2) He (presumably) could have gotten into any of the reduced screening programs, given that he's a a pilot.
3) The only things that helped contain what happened were the crew reaction, reinforced cabin doors and passengers willing and ready to help. Not the TSA.

You still trumpeting for Paul? Come to think of it, thanks for doing that because it takes the sting out of your calling me an Obama apologist. As for your oft-repeated assertion that Democrats are the same as Republicans... I recently promised here not to use rude words next time someone suggested that, but that won't stop me from telling you to just shove it you-know-where.

This one would have been very hard to screen against: he had been a pilot of JetBlue for 12 years, and was a personal friend of the CEO.

The one person most responsible for preventing a nasty incident was the co-pilot, who locked the pilot out of the cabin when he started to act oddly.

Of course, the Paul that's running is in his own little world-bubble with little to no contact with reality and is as dangerous IRL as the rest. It's just a different little world-bubble with no contact with reality than the others'.

But it's really annoying that we have to hope for "brakes on the slide to Hell" (and not get it, as like as not) as a best-case scenario, because all the alternatives seem to be "why yes, there *is* a place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation." Nobody cares about trying to reverse any of this, because it doesn't gain them votes (the ones that care are gamed into "voting one way anyway") or money, and the slide to Hell may not gain them votes (because the people that care are "voting the other way anyway"), but it sure does get them money. And money doesn't equal votes, but lack of money does equal lack of votes.

“Listen carefully, kid, I suspect you’ve been sheltered from the real craziness at the Bureau; you need to hear what it’s like when your boss doesn’t give a crap about doing the job at all, forget about doing it right.

“I was part of the first intake, when Governor Tom set up the Department. I was facing mandatory retirement from the service in a couple of years. It looked like my best opportunity after that was to go mercenary; Blackwater was interested in me, but I knew too many of those hotdogs, and I couldn’t see being a nanny for a bunch of snot-nosed psychopaths. So when my CO passed on the memo about DHS waiving mandatory retirement for experienced counter-espionage liaison officers, I grabbed it and ran all the way to Personnel to fill out the application.

“Of course I knew what I was getting into. You can’t spend more than a decade working out of INSCOM at Ft. Belvoir without knowing how government agencies work at the high levels. I knew there were going to be epic turf battles, and that most of the people setting up the department wouldn’t have a clue about Homeland or Security. Hell, I got to meet Mother Angleton just before the CIA canned him; I know just how crazy you can get in this business even if you do know what you’re doing. But I figured that there’d be more of a chance that DHS would learn how to play nice with the rest of the intel community if someone like me was there to smooth things over and keep the phone lines open, and that if I could get some voice in the hiring decisions I could maybe bring in a few more people with clues.”

"According to the FBI's internal inquiry on counterterrorism training, the FBI taught agents that the Bureau 'has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedoms of others;' that agents should 'never attempt to shake hands with an Asian;' that Arabs were 'prone to outbursts' of a 'Jekyll & Hyde' nature." Even better: "That review, now complete, did not result in a single disciplinary action for any instructor. Nor did it mandate the retraining of any FBI agent exposed to what the Bureau concedes was inappropriate material. Nor did it look at any intelligence reports that might have been influenced by the training."

I'll grant they've stopped overtly torturing (even as they've let the torturers off the hook). The President also made some noises early on advocating closing Guantanamo's prisons, which he then dropped after Congressional resistance. Anything else?

(I'm also not disputing, nor do I think albatross is, that there are definite differences between the parties on a number of *other* issues. On this cluster of issues, though, there's all too much shared investment from both parties in the brutally authoritarian state.)

I suspect the latter...because that's quite bad enough for my nightmares.

Sorry, it's not on line. It's only about 90% written (by which I mean I never finished writing the ending, right now it ends in the middle of the climactic chase scene). I keep meaning to go back to it, but there are so many other distractions.

I think that they think they know things we don't that do in fact justify what they're doing. The problem is that if we knew those things, we probably wouldn't agree that they make a good justification, and it may even be that if they were simply removed from the atmosphere of fear and groupthink that pervades the "defense" and "intelligence" communities, they might change their minds on that justification.

They know that prominent Democrats are complicit in the crimes committed by the government in the panic after 9/11. Thus the truth must never come to light. Thus the retroactive amnesty for FISA violations. Thus "we must move forward".

Regardless, if the storied "incoming-president's orientation" includes warnings to the the effect of "you're not actually top dog here -- let us do whatever we want, and you get to keep prancing around on stage", that would cover at least some of the bases.

The point is that resilient, simple measures will handle unexpected issues far better than the current maginot line.

Also, two of those are Bruce Schneier's top two security enhancements since 9/11.

I'm not offended, but I think your anger is misdirected. On the war on terror, executive power, domestic spying, homeland security, and treatment of whistleblowers, Obama did a 180 once in office and sold out voters like me who voted for him specifically on those issues. There is only one man ultimately responsible for that decision, and it's not me.

I imagine they "know" a great many things, and some of them are even right.

The only way I know to judge is to look at decisions from the intelligence/military/foreign policy elite in the past, and see if they actually seem to be very effiicient or capable. Perhaps this is my bias, but I don't see much evidence of it. Does our performance in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Libya, say, suggest to you that the folks making the decisions really know what they're doing?

Those same elites fight like hell not to allow any oversight of their actions--as witness the hammering of whistleblowers and thuggish attempts to silence Wikileaks, or the occasional targeting of critical journalists. Look at the decision, ultimately bioartisan, not to try large numbers of terrorism suspects we claim are serius terrorists, and to try others in specially made uo military tribunals where normal rules don't apply. Does that look like the actiion of people confident they've performed well and that the public will be happy with their actions?

Look at the TSA avoiding critical scrutiny here, or refusing to tell anyone what the rules are for getting added tothe no fly list or flying with ID. Does this look like people who know what they're doing but just can't tell you about it?

The intelligence services have fought hard to avoid allowing any congressional or GAO oversight. Probably, this isn't because they are so confident that any oversight will simply confirm what upright, competent, successful agencies they are.

As it happens, I have dealt with smart, capable people in my field who do know a lot and are competent and do have secrets they have to keep. They don't come off like these overpromoted mall cops and Colonel Flag clones.

No, that's my conclusion as well, that the people in charge of our foreign affairs, military, intelligence, counter-intelligence, and counter-terrorist agencies (and a bunch of other agencies besides), are not competent, are not particularly invested in furthering the interests of the United States as opposed to their own and their friends' interests, and are overly concerned with covering their own asses in lieu of doing their jobs.

Also that all the much-ballyhooed attempts to unify those agencies and provide oversight at least up their own ostensible chains of command have actually been counter-productive. I deduce this from the fact that as far as I can tell the CIA is running at least 2 wars all by itself (Yemen and Pakistan).

Didn't Robert McNamara admit, 30 years after Vietnam, that when he said "We know something you don't know" he was flat out lying?

I doubt there's a huge reservoir of secret knowledge the elites have and we do not.

Going to the specific case of the TSA:

The TSA has been given two tasks: 1) Prevent any terror on planes and 2) make people feel safer when they fly while not impeding them in any significant way. They're in a no-win situation on both of those, but they've decided to work on the first half of the second item.

Didn't Japan have a Minister of Earthquakes so they'd have someone to blame?

A Japanese "Minister of Earthquakes" makes as much sense as any position of political responsibility for disaster preparedness. One of the weaknesses I see in the modern world is that there is no feedback on failure. CEOs walk away from disaster with huge paychecks. Politicians who appoint idiots to power never get any comeback.

Some of the ancient corrupt practices had more feedback than any "honest" system in use. People took note, in systems of patronage, who recommended the idiots.

A "Minister of Earthquakes" might work well, if the political culture doesn't tolerate incompetence. I know we over-simplify some aspects of Japan, but there are enough earthquakes in that country that it isn't hard to imagine it as a position to appoint enemies to, complete with blood-stained office floor.

Or at least a nice beachfront office....

*Now, if Bush had said Brown was doing "a job of Heck", he might have had a point . . . .