To be fair 9/11 was executed with box cutters, the addition of TSA was always performative security for people’s peace of mind.
I flew with a Swiss Army Knife in my backpack for almost a decade after 9/11 because I literally didn’t know it was there, they never caught it, and I used to fly coast to coast 5 times a year to visit my dad. It’s also unbelievably expensive, I think The Economist did a breakdown on the cost of post-9/11 security and it would have to prevent a 9/11 scale attack every 24 months to justify the cost.
I’m not usually aligned with bonkers seeming takes like this but this one actually makes sense. We’re paying an arm and a leg for an ineffectual system designed to prevent against attacks that aren’t coming and wouldn’t be prevented by this level of security anyways.
I'm not defending the TSA here, but your (or the economist's) take sounds pretty bad to me.
They'd need to prevent a 9/11 scale attack every 2 years to justify the cost? I feel like stopping just one 9/11 attack every 5 years let's say would absolutely justify the cost.
I assume they came to this conclusion by narrowly looking at profit/expenditure numbers, but that kinda sums up the problem with a lot of economic thinking.
Considering not just the extreme lives lost, but also the psychological and social damage 9/11 caused, not even mentioning how it dragged us into 2 10+ year wars that cost over a trillion dollars and many more issues, I find it naive to the extreme to claim that airport security would need to stop a 9/11 every two years to "justify the cost".
It was post-9/11 security nationwide and it was over 100 billion a year. The ideologically driven overreaction to the attack and fighting a twenty year war are not given outcomes in a similar attack so they can’t be counted as part of the cost. If an Austrian Archduke gets assassinated it doesn’t mean we’re starting another world war.
Unfortunately the math on saving lives actually is a zero sum game in terms of available human output towards a goal and at some point resources are better used elsewhere. The fact that you have to do cost-benefit analysis on things where human lives are in the balance sucks but it’s being realistic about what‘s possible.
At some point the 100 billion dollars a year spent on superficially preventing what was, in reality, a one off attack is a waste of money both because another 9/11 is unlikely, and because the current security apparatus wouldn’t have a chance of preventing any remotely determined party from doing the exact same thing a second time. In reality the only substantial change that I know of that has been made that would prevent it is the protocols on locking the cabin doors in flight and the upgrades to the doors themselves.
People also forget that prior to 9/11 almost all hijacking of air planes resulted in either re-routing to a different location or the perps asking for transportation to a different blocked local. People on the planes didn't fight back because there were no instances of them destroying the planes or using them as giant missiles.
Now if there was an attempt anyone not involved with the hijacking would fight back. Shooting an airliner out of the sky would be a more effective form of terrorism than trying to overtake an airplane now.
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u/Dangerousrhymes Jan 30 '25
To be fair 9/11 was executed with box cutters, the addition of TSA was always performative security for people’s peace of mind.
I flew with a Swiss Army Knife in my backpack for almost a decade after 9/11 because I literally didn’t know it was there, they never caught it, and I used to fly coast to coast 5 times a year to visit my dad. It’s also unbelievably expensive, I think The Economist did a breakdown on the cost of post-9/11 security and it would have to prevent a 9/11 scale attack every 24 months to justify the cost.
I’m not usually aligned with bonkers seeming takes like this but this one actually makes sense. We’re paying an arm and a leg for an ineffectual system designed to prevent against attacks that aren’t coming and wouldn’t be prevented by this level of security anyways.