"Let's do it like the Israelis," is the retort many people fed up with TSA airport screening provide when you ask them for suggestions on a better system. I've posted on the "Israeli system" before and mentioned the high costs of such efforts but the Washington Post's Dan Milbank has actually crunched the numbers.
In a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, Israel uses profiling, background checks and extensive interviews to filter out the highest-risk fliers, who are then subjected to searches of luggage and person more invasive than anything the Transportation Security Administration has conjured. The air security argument has been about whether Americans would prefer Israeli-style profiling to the current system of body scans and pat-downs. But this overlooks a more fundamental problem: The Israeli system, even if it could be scaled up, is out of our price range.It's even more curious when you consider that most of the folks demanding such a change are against bigger government or consider the government a big, bloated, bureaucratic animal.
El Al, Israel's national carrier, reported spending $107,828,000 on security in 2009 for the 1.9 million passengers it carried. That works out to about $56.75 per passenger. The United States, by contrast, spent $5.33 billion on aviation security in fiscal 2010, and the air travel system handled 769.6 million passengers in 2009 (a low year), according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. That amounts to $6.93 per passenger.
The analogy isn't perfect, because security is largely handled by the airline in Israel and by the government here. (In both countries, the government pays just under two-thirds of the security costs.) But this rough comparison indicates that Israel spends more than eight times as much on security per passenger. To duplicate that, the United States would need to spend an extra $38 billion a year.
And that might understate the cost of staffing the nation's sprawling air travel system with highly skilled interrogators; Israel, after all, has only one major airport. In Foreign Policy magazine, Annie Lowrey calculated early this year that if each passenger flying through a U.S. airport were subjected to 10 minutes of questioning by a guard, we would need 3 million full-time guards, at a cost of more than $150 billion a year.
There may be ways that the TSA screening process can be improved, but it is clear that "doing it like the Israelis" isn't going to work given the current fiscal climate in the United States.
-via Bark Bark Woof Woof
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13 comments:
As usual, the wrong issues are being focused on, and the larger facts ignored.
You say we can't afford it; then you give a per capita breakdown of the cost.
But you've ignored the fact that Israel has a smaller GNP than the US; how is it that a smaller number of people can afford a higher cost in security?
The answer; they made it a priority.
A $7 per passenger system that doesn't catch terrorists is less effective than a $56 security system that nails them.
No one is debating how effective the Israeli system is, CLJ, although I haven't heard of the Israelis "nailing" anyone lately.
What's being discussed the applicability of the Israeli system here in the U.S. You and I both know that American politics and the American people wouldn't go for all that money being spent per passenger. Whether you like it or not, that's a reality that has to be considered any time a solution is being proposed.
There's a lot of different things that could be done to improve the system, but you have to use reality-based solutions otherwise it's just dreaming that serves no purpose.
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"Just dreaming that serves no purpose." Sounds like the TSA.
Rick, just because one guy "ran the numbers" doesn't prove much. There are so many variables to consider. How much is TSA spending now? What about Americanizing the Israeli system, modifying it for our society?
I guess it really comes down to what sets off a person's triggers. It appears to me, and forgive me if I am incorrect, that you have a deep respect for government. It appears that your default position is that the government is always right. Be it local police, local governments, state or national, that appears to be where you rest. (With the exclusion of any conservative in government, of course. LOL)
For me, it is personal freedom and constitutional rights. That is my trigger. My hot button. Anytime a system threatens those individual rights, I am going to go bonkers. And this TSA body scanning and groping is something that really, really bothers me. And with them talking about bringing this to football stadiums and who knows what else.....it is just scary.
TSA needs to get creative, and not let corporate America bride them into buying ineffective body scanners.
Forgive me if I offended you in any way, that is not my intention.
Peace.
SBG...I think Milbank determined what TSA was spending now. And he compared it to the Israelis...it's all right there in the article and in my post.
I have a respect for our government, SBG, and I love my country. If you spent any time whatsoever reading this blog you would know that I take issue with the government whenever I feel the need. But I'm not a fanatic and I don't like to rant and rave unless I know what I'm talking about and I have a solution.
I don't like to walk through an xray machine or get patted down every time I want to fly but I really don't have an alternative solution to offer. I wish I did but until I come up with something, I see no sense in bitching about a system that is meant to protect us when we fly. Could it be better? Hell yes. Do I know how to fix it so that tax-obsessed Americans will be happy and it will still work? No.
BTW, am I still banned from your website? Just wondering.
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Look at it this way; we're wasting $7 a passenger, because the system is inherently flawed.
The Israeli system costs more, but actually keeps terrorists out of the airport.
But you ask "how do we know that?"
Simple; we know there have been terrorists in Israel over the last decade: there are numerous stories about terrorist attacks on the streets of Israel.
But not one of them has been at the airport.
It's great to see you being such a cheerleader for the TSA, but even the TSA officials themselves are questioning the pat-downs, including one who is saying that it's senior citizens who end up getting frisked because of their artificial hips, plates and pacemakers.
http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2010/11/25/local-tsa-agent-speaks-out-on-pat-downs/
Where am I cheerleading for the TSA, Carlos? Please show me.
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The problem, Rick, is that you seem to equate the criticizing of these invasive tactics as nothing but right-wing diatribe.
It's not. Citizens from both sides of the aisle are not happy with it.
I'm sure there are many right-wingers who remained quiet during the Bush era who are suddenly speaking out, but this is not about them, this is about all of us.
The whole TSA charade is nothing but security theater. It doesn't make us safer.
And now you're demanding to know from you're readers what we can do to make it better.
Well, citizens throughout the country are doing what they believe what it takes. Taking a stand. Voicing their outrage. Or simply not flying.
Perhaps many people didn't opt-out of the scanners last Wednesday, but it appears many people opted-out of flying altogether.
I was at MIA Wednesday and you would never know it was the busiest flying day of the year. I've read similar reports from around the country.
When you make this about partisan politics, you become no different than those right-wingers who make it about partisan politics.
You're not alone. The Nation, one of supposedly most respected progressive publications in the nation, recently fell victim to this themselves where they had to issue an apology.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/156700/apology-john-tyner
Why was my comment deleted?
It wasn't deleted, Carlos. The link knocked it into the spam hold file.
First you say that I'm cheerleading for the TSA and I challenge you on it and you got nothing.
Now you accuse me of making this a partisan issue and I'll challenge you on it again: show me.
What I HAVE said is that the people who were all for these intrusions during the Bush years have, all of a sudden, had a change of heart since a Democrat is running things. Just like deficits, and international trips and just about everything else that was okay during Bush is now not okay with the Obama Administration.
I've gone back and forth with Discourse, maybe one of the more progressive bloggers in South Florida, on this issues and I visit many more progressive blogs so I have a real good idea of what's going on out there, Carlos.
Personally, I hope that more people voice their outrage by staying far away from airports. Makes it easy peesy for me when I decide to fly and I don't have to hear all the complainers.
BTW, I'm still waiting for any one of my readers to offer a workable solution to the current screening system.
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In the Netherlands, they use a system that is just as effective in finding foreign objects on a person but does not record people's genitals, according to a Washington Post article.
These systems are also considered safer because they do not produce as much radioactivity.
Of course, that company probably did not give as much to politicians, which is why they were not contracted.
Link and excerpt below.
"As currently used in U.S. airports, the new full-body scanners fail all of Alito's tests. First, as European regulators have recognized, they could be much less intrusive without sacrificing effectiveness. For example, Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, the European airport that employs body-scanning machines most extensively, has incorporated crucial privacy and safety protections. Rejecting the "backscatter" machines used in the United States, which produce revealing images of the body and have raised concerns about radiation, the Dutch use scanners known as ProVision ATD, which employ radio waves with far lower frequencies than those used in common hand-held devices. If the software detects contraband or suspicious material under a passenger's clothing, it projects an outline of that area of the body onto a gender-neutral, blob-like human image, instead of generating a virtually naked image of the passenger. The passenger can then be taken aside for secondary screening. "
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/26/AR2010112604290.html
So I guess you bailed on my challenge to show how I'm being partisan on this issue, Carlos? You're 2 for 2 here just today, buddy.
Oh, wait. 3 for 3. Because when you take the time to click over to the 2nd page of that link you sent me there's this...
In January, the European Commission's information commissioner criticized the scanners' "privacy-invasive potential" and their unproven effectiveness. And tests have shown that the machines are not good at detecting low-density powder explosives: A member of Britain's Parliament who evaluated the scanners in his former capacity as a defense technology company director concluded that they wouldn't have stopped the bomber who concealed the chemical powder PETN in his underwear last Christmas.
So there's good reason to believe that the machines are not effective in detecting the weapons they're purportedly designed to identify. For U.S. courts, that's yet another consideration that could make them constitutionally unreasonable.
*sigh*
Still waiting.....
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