Time to Fire the TSA

Joel Johnson from Gizmodo writes a piece about the failed TSA experiment and why it needs to go.
Excerpt:

There is no other way to interpret it: The TSA is saying clearly that they can't prevent terrorists from getting explosives on airplanes, but by god, they'll make sure those planes only explode when the TSA says it's okay.

I want our government to prevent terrorism and to make flights safer. But we are spending billions of dollars and man-hours to fight a threat that is less likely to kill a traveler than being struck by lightning. In the last decade, according to statistician Nate Silver, there has been "one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown [the] equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune." (Sadly, this does mean that in the future we can expect one out of every two round-trip flights to Neptune to be hijacked.)

I have to say I agree. I fly to random places, and I've been through the sketchiest security checkpoints to ridiculous ones (I misplaced my Swiss Army knife into my carry-on instead of checking it in, got through security just fine, but try flying through Miami right after 9/11--every bag we packed was thoroughly checked). I have never felt safer or unsafe, mostly inconvenienced, annoyed, and most importantly, misled. TSA wants passengers to feel safe--this is its whole charade. But what happens when passengers feel safe, but really aren't safe?
If you haven't checked out some of my older postings on the topic, there's some interesting stuff in them (also included are links to the original articles which prompted my postings):
-Our Security in the Homeland
--The Things He Carried (Atlantic)
-Tuesday Update Strikes Back!
--TSA "behavior detection" is wrong more than 99 percent of the time (BoingBoing)

It doesn't work. Let's move on.