TSA and Revealed Preference

I heard a brief talk this evening by someone in the business of improving airport security. The basic conclusion was that there are known technologies for solving all of the problems that make going through security a nuisance, but not yet any way of combining those technologies to solve those problems at an acceptable cost. The speaker thought that that situation would be changing in five years or so and changed in another five.

It did not occur to him to ask whether the relevant organizations, in the U.S. the Transportation Safety Agency, would want to solve those problems. The system he described, while much more convenient for passengers, would require fewer TSA employees, and the employees it used would be playing a lower status role relative to the travelers they are supposed to protect—machine tenders rather than cops. Economists generally accept the principle of revealed preference—what individuals value is revealed by the choices they make. It ought to work for organizations too. What does it imply about what the TSA values?

Part of the answer I have pointed out before. When you travel, TSA agents get to go through  luggage which you are not permitted to have locked against them. That gives them an opportunity for vandalism or theft.

There is a simple way in which the agency could reduce that problem. When an agent searches your luggage, he leaves a note telling you that the luggage has been searched. That note could have a code identifying for the agency the agent who made the search, allowing them to identify which agents were responsible for multiple reported complaints. The idea is sufficiently obvious so that the private organization to which security is subcontracted at San Francisco airport does it, as I discovered when my luggage was searched there. TSA does not. 

The obvious conclusion is that the agency does not much care whether or not its agents steal from the people they are supposed to protect or vandalize their luggage—both of which, in my experience, happen. An obvious suspicion is that they would rather not know which agents are responsible for such problems, since if they knew they might be under pressure to do something. That suspicion was reinforced when I had a brief email correspondence with a TSA representative in San Jose airport with regard to what appeared to be deliberate vandalism of my luggage. His email included a phone number. I tried calling it to continue the conversation. After about ten tries on ten different occasions, none of which reached him, I gave up—and concluded that he really did not wish to talk to unhappy travelers.

If the people running the TSA do not care about the welfare of travelers even enough to take the most obvious precautions and do care, like other bureaucrats, about their own power and influence, it is hard to see why they would go to a good deal of trouble to adopt technologies that made things easier for travelers and sharply reduced the number and visibility of their employees. However good the technologies may become.

P.S. A commenter points me at a much more extensive and detailed account of TSA theft and related problems on another blog.

Is TSA Vandalism Deliberate Policy?

My previous post described a case of TSA vandalism that I recently encountered and raised the question of why the note informing me that my luggage had been searched did not identify the particular TSA employee who searched it—that being an obvious and inexpensive way of discouraging both pilfering and vandalism. One commenter on the post described his own repeated experience, along lines similar to mine, and offered an interesting explanation. 

The TSA agent is telling you not to bring stuff like that in your luggage anymore. Jars within jars containing some weird material need to be investigated by TSA agents. That means work and they don't like it. They are trying to teach you a lesson. The lesson is stop bringing that type of stuff on the plane with you.

Seen from this standpoint, the vandalism is not merely tolerated by TSA it is, at least tacitly, approved of. Which explains why TSA does not take obvious and inexpensive steps to prevent it.

It strikes me as a plausible conjecture but, short of getting a TSA inspector to confess, I cannot think of any easy way of testing it.

Dear TSA: Give Up Already

According to multiple news stories, tests of TSA airport inspection by Department of Homeland Security red team agents found that 95% of simulated bombs and weapons were missed by the inspectors. That suggests that the considerable costs and hassles imposed by TSA on passengers over the past thirteen years accomplished almost nothing. The response by both government spokesmen and the media is that they just need to try harder, do a better job. It does not seem to have occurred to anyone that if, after thirteen years, TSA is still unable to keep people from getting bombs and weapons onto airplanes, perhaps it should give up.

That does not mean taking no precautions at all. There are obvious precautions that have nothing to do with inspections, such as reinforced doors to protect the pilot area of an airplane and arming pilots. Terrorists willing to kill other people are easier to find than terrorists willing to kill themselves, so it makes sense to be sure that if the person who checked a bag doesn’t board, the bag comes off. As a protection against hijackers, it might make sense to have armed sky marshalls on many flights or to train and arm members of the flight crew. That would cost considerably less money than the current system and impose no cost in time and hassle on passengers.

Those precautions will not stop someone from blowing up an airplane with himself on it, but, to judge by the results of the red team tests, neither do the current precautions. That no such events have occurred is evidence that few or no attempts are being made.

A defender of the present system could still argue that even if it only stops one or two incidents, it is worth doing, since human life is infinitely valuable. There are two things wrong with that argument. The first is that human life is not infinitely valuable, as shown by the choices humans make. All of us choose to take some risks we could avoid, to drive to visit relatives when we could stay home, to eat something short of the perfect diet, to see the doctor less often than we would if avoiding death was something we regarded as infinitely valuabie.

The second thing wrong with the argument is that the present system also has a cost in life, less visible than a terrorist attack but probably larger than the cost of terrorist attacks prevented by the TSA. The more expensive, in money, time, and hassle airline travel is, the more people choose to drive instead. Driving is a great deal more dangerous per mile than flying, so more people driving means more people dying.

We cannot calculate the number of dead without knowing the size of the shift from flying to driving produced by the TSA, but we can at least get some feel for the order of magnitude. The mortality rate from driving is about one death per 100 million vehicle miles. The mortality rate from flying is very close to zero—one estimate I found was .07 deaths per billion passenger miles. So, roughly speaking, every hundred million passenger miles diverted from flying to driving represents one more highway death.

In February of 2015, passengers on commercial airlines flew 60 billion passenger miles. Assuming the figure is the same for other months, that’s about 700 billion passenger miles a year. If we assume, I think conservatively, that one percent of passenger miles are diverted from flying to driving by TSA hassles, that comes to 7 billion passenger miles or about 70 deaths. Add that up for the thirteen years the TSA has been in operation, and it has killed almost a thousand people. Invisibly.

TSA: The Problem of Trust

The Transport Safety Administration, the President, the Secretary of State, and very nearly everyone else agrees that that the full body searches and alternative pat downs the TSA has started to implement are intrusive. The TSA, however, insists that they are a necessary precaution to prevent future aircraft bombings.

This would be a persuasive argument if the rest of us had any reason to take claims by the TSA seriously, but we don't. Whether or not this particular requirement makes sense—I have seen arguments by people better qualified to judge than I am who think it does not—enough past requirements were clearly security theater rather than security to destroy any claim the organization might have had to be trusted.

To take the earliest and most striking example, the TSA used to, for all I know still does, interpret the rule against knives to cover the inch long nail files sometimes built into nail clippers, with the result that anyone who happened to have a nail clipper with him and did not want to trash it was required to let them break off the file. To take a long continued example, the TSA insists that its agents be able to search our luggage but has failed to take the most elementary precaution to keep them from pilfering valuables—including in the note enclosed in searched luggage a number identifying the agent who searched it. In these ways and others, the organization has demonstrated that its concern, insofar as an organization can be said to have concerns, is with something other than the welfare of the people it claims to protect.

And, for the latest example, the TSA initially insisted that the new search requirements applied to pilots as well as passengers. Only after someone pointed out to them that a pilot who wanted to crash the plane he was flying didn't need explosives to do it—and, more important, after it became clear that enough pilots were unwilling to go along with the requirement to provide, at the least, a very serious public relations problem—did they reverse that part of their policy. The implication is either an organizational IQ at the idiot level or, more plausibly, an organization more concerned with image than substance.

Trust, once lost, is hard to get back.

TSA Vandalism

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew to Colorado to participate in an SCA event where we were teaching classes on medieval cooking, including a hands-on class at which we planned to actually cook several dishes. One required sourdough, so I put some in a small glass jar, screwed the lid on tightly, put the glass jar in a slightly larger plastic jar, screwed the lid of that on tightly, and put the whole assembly in my checked luggage.

When we picked up our luggage in the Denver airport, one of the two checked suitcases was partly open, with a broken latch. Fortunately it also had a luggage strap on it which kept it from opening very far. It was a Zero Halliburton metal suitcase, the luggage equivalent of a tank, purchased long ago for transporting a personal computer in the days before laptops. Breaking it is not easy. I do not know whether TSA or the baggage handlers were responsible.

When we unpacked the other suitcase, we discovered a second problem. It contained a note from TSA saying that they had searched it. It also contained sourdough—out of the jars and spread over the contents of one end of the suitcase.

At first glance, that could have been due to carelessness rather than malice, a TSA inspector who opened both jars to check what was in them and did not take much care in closing them. But one of the things at that end of the suitcase was the case for my electric toothbrush. It was zipped closed when I packed the suitcase, zipped closed when I unpacked it—and there was sourdough inside it.

I cannot see any plausible way that could have happened other than the sourdough having been deliberately dumped out of its jars and over the contents of the suitcase, at a point when the inspector had unzipped the toothbrush case. Hence I conclude that I was the victim not of carelessness but of deliberate vandalism.

There is a simple way in which TSA could make both vandalism and pilfering by its inspectors much less common. All they would have to do is to include on the note saying that the suitcase had been searched a number identifying the inspector who searched it. If they got multiple complaints about the same inspector, they could investigate and take appropriate action. 

The fact that, more than ten years after TSA was set up, they have not yet taken that simple precaution seems to me to be overwhelming evidence that, as an organization, they do not much care whether their employees rob or vandalize the luggage they are given access to, and at least weak evidence that they would prefer not to be able to identify those responsible.

Interestingly enough, on a different trip, I found that the note informing us that our luggage had been searched did contain information identifying the agent who had searched it. The note was not from TSA but from a private firm contracted by San Francisco Airport.

The Evidence

Doing it wrong and doing it right

My case against TSA

Shortly after the system of luggage searches by TSA went into effect, some inexpensive jewelery in an outer pocket of a suitcase I checked disappeared. I suspected pilfering by whoever searched it, but since I had no way of either proving anything had been stolen or identifying the person responsible, I did nothing.

On my most recent trip by air, I had two suitcases--a big metal one and a smaller soft sided suitcase. The metal suitcase had a combination lock which I left unlocked, since otherwise TSA was likely to break it. Since without the lock I thought there was some risk of the suitcase opening, I put a luggage strap around it. The strap had no lock--you just pressed the sides of the catch to open it.

When I picked up the suitcases, the strap had been broken open. The other suitcase has two built-in straps to cinch it tight. Both were unfastened and hanging loose, at obvious risk of getting tangled in the luggage handling machinery. Nothing stolen, so far as I know, but the wanton destruction of about ten dollars worth of property and a risk of further damage.

Obviously, even if I knew for certain that TSA employees were responsible in both cases, that would not demonstrate that the organization itself was at fault--even a well run and well intentioned organization may sometimes hire a dishonest, irresponsible or careless employee.

My case against TSA starts by asking what they would do if they cared about such matters--if they were concerned to prevent vandalism or pilferage by their employees. The answer is pretty clear. When they search your luggage, they leave you a printed note telling you that they did so. All they would have to do in order to identify employees responsible for stealing or damaging property would be to have each note stamped with the name of the employee who did the search. If they got complaints from multiple passengers about the same employee they could then investigate further.

I take their falure to follow that policy or something similar as clear evidence of culpable negligence, reason to think that they don't actually care. Am I missing something?

Norway and 9/11: Fighting the Last War

A common criticism of militaries is that they are always preparing to fight the last war instead of the next. The recent attack in Norway suggests that the same problem exists for the "war" on terrorism. The point is made clearer if we compare that attack to its closest equivalent: 9/11.

The attacks have two critical characteristics in common. The first is that the form of the attack was original. The second is that it was strikingly successful, from the standpoint of its objectives—did a lot of damage at a relatively small cost to the attackers. That is not terribly surprising, since an original attack is one that potential defenders do not expect and so fail to take precautions to prevent.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was obviously imprudent, arguably suicidal, for a political party to put a large number of its younger supporters, its future elite, on a not very large island with no guards. That created a situation where a single gunman could murder about eighty victims and badly handicap the future of a major political party. 

If the final point is not obvious, consider the equivalent U.S. case, scaled. The U.S. has more than sixty times the population of Norway. What would be the effect on the future of the Republican or Democratic party if more than 4000 of the most active members of the Young Republicans or Young Democrats were killed?

What was the cost of accomplishing that to the perpetrator? As far as we  know, he did it all himself. The shooting spree required one rifle, one pistol, and a lot of ammunition—total cost probably under a thousand dollars. The previous explosion, part of whose purpose was presumably to set up the opportunity for the subsequent shooting, cost one car, very likely rented, a lot of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, and some sort of detonator and timer. For a wild guess, total cost of the whole project between one and ten thousand dollars. 

Plus, presumably, life imprisonment, a cost balanced by the opportunity to get wide publicity for his political views.

Which gets us back to where I started. Most of what one can see being done to prevent terrorism, most obviously the exertions of the TSA, is aimed at preventing a repeat of 9/11. It ought to be aimed at the next, and entirely different, 9/11.

Which is a much harder thing to do, since we do not know what it will be.

A Different Sort of Bullying

There has been a good deal of talk in recent years about the evils of bullying and what to do about it. Almost all of what is discussed seems to be bullying of low status people by low status people, largely schoolchildren bullying schoolchildren. There is another sort of bullying that is unfortunately common in our society, arguably a more serious problem, and the subject of less, or at least less uniform, condemnation. Some examples are illustrated by two of my recent posts and one older one.

The first is anti-smoking rules carried beyond the point at which they can plausibly be defended as protecting non-smokers. My example is a proposed rule to ban all smoking from my campus. Smoking is already forbidden in buildings and, I'm pretty sure, near the entrance to buildings, so the proposal would have only a tiny effect on exposure to second hand smoke. I am a non-smoker, find cigarette smoke mildly unpleasant, and cannot remember having ever been significantly bothered by it on campus. The document circulated on the ban asserted a number for total excess mortality due to second hand smoke that I argued in my post on the subject was doubly bogus—it misrepresented the claim it was based on, and that claim was almost certainly based on cherry picked data. And, even if the number were correct, it would say little about the effect of the small additional reduction due to the proposed rule.

One motive for such a rule—whether it has passed or will pass I do not know—is probably paternalism, the theory that if you make smoking sufficiently inconvenient smokers may give it up. But I suspect that another motive is bullying. People, unfortunately, enjoy pushing other people around. Such a rule lets people who disapprove of smoking make life more unpleasant for those who smoke,  demonstrating the power of the former over the latter.

My second example is the behavior of police officers. There are obvious reasons why police officers would wish other people to be deferential towards them, since the more extreme forms of non-deference can, in that context, be lethal. If the only people who talk back to them are criminals, mostly criminals about to attack them, that provides a useful signal of when to be on their guard. Making things unpleasant for people who demand a badge number (I once got arrested for assisting someone else to do so), point a cell phone camera at them, or in other ways fail to acknowledge their status and authority, is one way of getting that deference.

There are also obvious reasons why people in general want other people to be deferential towards them, making a profession which legitimizes the demand for deference and makes it possible to enforce it with the threat of death, injury, or prison, attractive to those with that taste. Which I think helps to explain the increasingly common pattern of unnecessary SWAT style raids, kicking in doors, pointing guns at innocent people and ordering them to lie on the floor, shooting dogs. 

I do not think it would be hard to come up with other examples in both categories. People like pushing other people around. Doing so is generally safer and more effective when you have the power of the law on your side. One way to do so is to make rules or pass laws that make life harder for people you disapprove of, whether smokers, gays, or college students who get drunk and have sex. Another is to get a position one of whose perks is the right to order other people around—and, in some contexts, threaten, assault, beat, even kill anyone who objects, with minimal risk of suffering any criminal penalties for doing so. That includes TSA agents whose opportunities are limited to vandalizing checked luggage and ordering people to stand still while being patted down, and police officers with a wider range.