The TSA is just a huge scam to siphon money and they need to show they are providing value. Taking shoes off is that value, so yeah it’s never going away. We could get out of Afghanistan but will never get rid of the TSA.
It's all incompetent theatre. I remember around 2006 or 2007 snaking through a terribly managed security line in ATL taking off my shoes, doing all the questions and scanning and pat downs and irradiation and getting through and then some random person shouted "did someone drop their passport?" and realizing it was mine and my passport had fallen out of my bag. So I call back "yep, I did" and it gets handed to me by said random person (who hadn't passed screening yet), with nobody in TSA even batting an eyelash or checking to verify that I didn't just grab someone else's passport (or taken something else of security concern.)
Meanwhile I remember flying through Frankfurt in 1994 and opening my (inspected before baggage drop) suitcase briefly to move something and getting pulled politely aside and my items re-inspected. Security policies that made sense and were executed competently by respectful and well-trained staff.
Since 9/11 I just try to avoid flying to or from the US entirely.
Well, just before the pandemic I flew through Frankfurt, Milan and Berlin Tegel forgetting about the Leatherman knife in my backpack's side pocket. I noticed it only when I was back home after my flight back.
I had a friend bring 1L containers of liquid through security in Europe and no one said a word. The limit was 100mL. Nobody was looking at the scanner.
Maybe. I think at least part of the reason is political though.
Nobody wants to be the person who scraps a security policy and then has a terrorist attack happen as a result of their policy removal. Not politicians, not TSA higher-ups, nobody. That's a career-ending mistake, no matter how unlikely it may be.
Not to mention that it's probably not a particularly popular decision amongst the public. Maybe it's security theatre, but people like it.
I think it'd be pretty easy politically, at least from a conservative (i.e. not Republican) standpoint. Argue that DHS is government waste and can't stop shit (point to the numerous studies done over the years of them being able to stop all kinds of shit from going through). Let things go back to the way they were: airports hiring private firms to do security.
This would never happen in today's climate though since both parties are pro-big government.
I had a friend fly to a his grandfather's funeral a few years ago, threw all of his kit into a travel bag and ran to the airport. The kit his grandfather passed down to him: kilt, jacket, belt and spooran ...
A 18" dirk from the 1800s ...
Made it through security without anyone saying anything and only remembered when it clanked as he put it into the overhead luggage compartment.
> Taking shoes off is that value, so yeah it’s never going away.
REMOVE_SHOES is one in probably a thousand settings in TSA's airport security makefile. Like all makefiles of any complexity, the trick is separating out the bona fide settings from the mountains of ineffectual ones that disappear somewhere deep in the nasty bowl of bureaucratic spaghetti.
As programmers, we should all inherently understand the value in not touching that goddamned mess unless someone really understands what they are doing. Even then, that almost always involves building a new system that runs in parallel to the spaghetti so that the "no touching" rule is obeyed at all times.
That's not to say TSA isn't a mess. It's just when I imagine what Libertarian International airport security looks like, the one thing I'm certain of is that they have set the RANDOMIZED_SCREENING flag incorrectly.
