TSA chief sketches out the future of airline passenger screening

People are just lapping up the bull ...

GovernmentExecutive.com: TSA chief sketches out the future of airline passenger screening

In other words, they'll be throwing more megabucks at government contractors and their lobbyist friends. Almost forty years in software development & engineering have taught me that once simple principle is more important than anything else: Keep It Simple Silly/Stupid (KISS). The more expensive & complex your system, the greater its theatrical performance should be -- no doubt tomorrow's security theater will be one (expletive deleted) of a performance -- but in the end it will be defeated by 1 or 2 or 5 guys with brains & wile.

* I wonder if these tunnels will be at all like the psychedelic tunnels underneath ORD & DTW? They would still be a total waste of taxpayer money but with the right lights & tunes could also be "cool".

 

The media is just lapping up the coming "changes" ....

Peter Greenberg.com: Travel Detective Actually Approves Of TSA’s New Security Policy

Hate to burst your bubble, Peter, but when you take a bunch of stupid people with no marketable skills who answer ads on pizza boxes & gas pumps & give them four days of voodoo training (& a three-day residency) and turn them loose in an airport ... you have a bunch of stupid people wandering around an airport.

Noah Shachtman is even going so far as to suggest that Reichskommissar John Pistole is channeling Bruce Schneier....

Wired: Bruce Schneier’s Telepathic Takeover of the TSA

At the end of each day, for days & months & years to come, you will still have an agency of 60,000 stupid people hired from ads on pizza boxes & gas pumps. The agency has gotten so bad in the last 1.5 years that I simply don't believe it can be salvaged before it self-destructs. On top of that, Reichskommissar John Pistole's had a year to show himself to be a decent human being and put a stop to the gropes & abuses at the checkpoints. He's been a complete failure and I have zero expectation that there will be any success in his future.

 

Except that in "years to come", there will probably be 100,000 stupid people hired from ads......

 

Sad but true. Our tax dollars at waste.

 

Apparently, the WSJ has an opinion piece on this subject, but I can't open the entire article.

However, I could read all the comments, including this one:

 

I believe the WSJ opinion piece is the Shachtman article that I linked above from a different source.

 

It's not verbatim from Shactman's Wired piece, but it is him discussing Pistole. Same basic theme.

 

The new program is based partly on the Israeli model that relies on having a simple conversation.

A thousand times on the blackboard, Peter - TLV style security is not scalable to what we have in the States.

 

And besides, Peter, the Israelis are TRAINED for far longer than 4 days plus 3 days OJT. What a dunce.