[PUBLIC] Traveling In The New World
Last night juldea went out of her way to ask me how I felt about the "new" TSA scanning regulations. The short answer is that I've been living with the backscatter and millimeter wave machines for months now, and they do annoy me, but not for the reasons they seem to be annoying everybody else.
When I come to a metal detector, my carry-on bag is configured to meet TSA regulations. In the absence of other passengers ahead of me, I can go from standing with my bag on my shoulder to unpacked, barefoot, properly sorted, through the metal detector and x-ray machine and packed back up on the other side in under 30 seconds. I recognize that business travelers are somewhat anomalous in this regard, but if you did it a couple times a week, you would be, too.
What irritates me about the millimeter wave and the backscatters isn't that somebody's looking at me "naked" (seriously, have any of you actually seen these pictures? Its like a Ken Doll with an unshippable manufacturing defect,) it's that they require you to empty your pockets. The first time I went through a MMW, they picked out a pair of Foam Brain six-siders buried so far down my pocket I hadn't felt them there. They require me to remove my wallet, my passport, any pens that I'm carrying, all the items that I carefully selected to be capable of passing through a metal-detector unimpeded. The first time I had to deal with one of these, my carefully-shaved through-time jumped to over a minute. Its lower now, but still half again slower than it was.
I agree whole-heartedly that security screening is overblown and ineffective at this stage. I would gladly accept a 100x or even 1000x greater chance of my aircraft being a target of a terrorist than have to go through security screen several times a week. I do not think, however, that people are realizing the full implications of what they're suggesting when they think its a good idea to opt out of backscatter or MMW. They're right -- it will slow down screening at the checkpoints and it will tax the resources of the gate employees. What it will also do, however, it quadruples the processing time of the people involved. I certainly have seen people opt out in my regular day-to-day flying, and that's swell, but if a single-digit percentage of the flying public starts doing it, the second-order effects are going to have a huge impact. They're going to screw over your fellow travelers.
Planes at the gate don't wait for everybody who's checked in to board. They leave when they are scheduled to. If you're still standing in a security line because the travelers ahead of you decided to tie up all the TSA folks by demanding personal screening, getting through that 300-person security line on Wednesday is going to take nearly a minute a person, plus all the families with baby strollers, people with bags the size of Volkswagens, and morons who put their laptop in the bottom of their rollaboards. One or two the line can surge around, but there comes a point of congestion. The practical upshot is simple: missed flights.
The airline carriage contracts aren't affected. They get their money as soon as you check in -- if you didn't have the foresight to leave enough time to get to your plane, its not their problem. In fact, you're helping the airlines by keeping paying passengers off their planes and reducing the fuel cost. The TSA gets paid the same whether they process 60,000 passengers or 6,000 in a day. Technically speaking, they report to the airport, not the airline, but nobody I've seen is raging at MassPort so far. Finally, you stand the risk of being arrested.
By opting out of scans this week, you aren't hurting the airlines, or the TSA, or the airports. You are screwing over your fellow passengers who are trying to get to Grandma's, or their client site, or their friends, or just trying to get home. You will be responsible for people missing flights, flights that can't be easily replaced. During the holidays, the next available seat may be days aways (just ask rgfgompei.) You don't punch somebody in the face before asking them to sign a healthcare petition, so why would you make them miss their flight and then ask them to vote for travel security reform? I agree that procedures need to change, and that the current security theatre is broken, but the people you're going to be hurting are exactly the people you need to change the rules in a democracy: the public.
I humbly suggest you don't go pissing them off.
When I come to a metal detector, my carry-on bag is configured to meet TSA regulations. In the absence of other passengers ahead of me, I can go from standing with my bag on my shoulder to unpacked, barefoot, properly sorted, through the metal detector and x-ray machine and packed back up on the other side in under 30 seconds. I recognize that business travelers are somewhat anomalous in this regard, but if you did it a couple times a week, you would be, too.
What irritates me about the millimeter wave and the backscatters isn't that somebody's looking at me "naked" (seriously, have any of you actually seen these pictures? Its like a Ken Doll with an unshippable manufacturing defect,) it's that they require you to empty your pockets. The first time I went through a MMW, they picked out a pair of Foam Brain six-siders buried so far down my pocket I hadn't felt them there. They require me to remove my wallet, my passport, any pens that I'm carrying, all the items that I carefully selected to be capable of passing through a metal-detector unimpeded. The first time I had to deal with one of these, my carefully-shaved through-time jumped to over a minute. Its lower now, but still half again slower than it was.
I agree whole-heartedly that security screening is overblown and ineffective at this stage. I would gladly accept a 100x or even 1000x greater chance of my aircraft being a target of a terrorist than have to go through security screen several times a week. I do not think, however, that people are realizing the full implications of what they're suggesting when they think its a good idea to opt out of backscatter or MMW. They're right -- it will slow down screening at the checkpoints and it will tax the resources of the gate employees. What it will also do, however, it quadruples the processing time of the people involved. I certainly have seen people opt out in my regular day-to-day flying, and that's swell, but if a single-digit percentage of the flying public starts doing it, the second-order effects are going to have a huge impact. They're going to screw over your fellow travelers.
Planes at the gate don't wait for everybody who's checked in to board. They leave when they are scheduled to. If you're still standing in a security line because the travelers ahead of you decided to tie up all the TSA folks by demanding personal screening, getting through that 300-person security line on Wednesday is going to take nearly a minute a person, plus all the families with baby strollers, people with bags the size of Volkswagens, and morons who put their laptop in the bottom of their rollaboards. One or two the line can surge around, but there comes a point of congestion. The practical upshot is simple: missed flights.
The airline carriage contracts aren't affected. They get their money as soon as you check in -- if you didn't have the foresight to leave enough time to get to your plane, its not their problem. In fact, you're helping the airlines by keeping paying passengers off their planes and reducing the fuel cost. The TSA gets paid the same whether they process 60,000 passengers or 6,000 in a day. Technically speaking, they report to the airport, not the airline, but nobody I've seen is raging at MassPort so far. Finally, you stand the risk of being arrested.
By opting out of scans this week, you aren't hurting the airlines, or the TSA, or the airports. You are screwing over your fellow passengers who are trying to get to Grandma's, or their client site, or their friends, or just trying to get home. You will be responsible for people missing flights, flights that can't be easily replaced. During the holidays, the next available seat may be days aways (just ask rgfgompei.) You don't punch somebody in the face before asking them to sign a healthcare petition, so why would you make them miss their flight and then ask them to vote for travel security reform? I agree that procedures need to change, and that the current security theatre is broken, but the people you're going to be hurting are exactly the people you need to change the rules in a democracy: the public.
I humbly suggest you don't go pissing them off.