I am an fairly average American and have friends and family there, but I don’t want to go back for vacation partly due to this mess which has cost me enough inconvenience as it is.

That being said, the F-22 program reportedly cost $67 billion and they got like 140 fairly cool planes out of the deal.  If the TSA slashed their budget down to about $10 million a year for some rent-a-pervert-cops, sold the pornoscanners on eBay and bought some of those much cheaper and just-as-effective-at-stopping-terrorists magical Iraqi wands that detect bombs, AND drugs AND money then they could take the other 55.9 billion and spend it on something useful, like a giant space-based anti-terrorist laser or an aircraft carrier or two.  Or just refund it to all those poor, over-taxed, over-burdened, “I just want to create good jobs for good, honest, hard-working Americans!” millionaires.  Won’t someone think of the millionaires?

The airlines and airports barely conduct employee background checks, Brandt claims

I can’t speak as to the background checks performed by America’s “partners” but as a holder of numerous SIDA badges, I’m actually fairly impressed by some of the things coworkers have been flagged for.  They are clearly looking much more broadly than criminal and immigration background.  Now we always go after the “all access” badges, so perhaps the checks on those are more rigorous than those with only sterile area or other restricted access…

Made me very aware that the attitude at the security gates in the airport is a feature not a bug – they are trained that way and the internal culture is that way

Justice Robert Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials

Initially, DHS was supposed to function as you described. That and act as a clearing house for the collected intelligence activity of the FBI, NRO, NSA, CIA, etc… Unfortunately, by the time it was finalized, some seemed to feel that what they were doing wasn’t visible enough to “reassure” the public and started all these reactionary policies and procedures.

A government’s departments ultimately exist to justify their continued funding. By perpetuating a culture of fear, they are able to do this without actually fulfilling their mandate.

DHS in general and TSA specifically need to stop reacting to the last threat and focus more on prevention of future events through the use of Investigation and Intelligence. Of course this would require all the various TLAs to be able to coordinate resources and pool information. Which is supposedly why DHS was created in the first place.

I worked in the security field for a while before getting fed up and moving on to more lucrative and rewarding endeavors (I was evaluating and designing FRAMEWORKS not specific end products). While my particular thrust was information and communications, the foundation of threat prevention and mitigation seems fairly similar no matter the applied domain (physical, information, etc..) It’s simply frustrating to not only see groups fail to learn from the past and abandon what doesn’t work, but to ignore experts who are screaming at the top of their lungs that what they are doing doesn’t work. It’s one reason why I left the field.

That’s all it’s ever been since 9/11.

And frankly, it’s all I expected when they announced that they were going to call it the Department of Homeland Security. “Homeland” is a loaded word with all the wrong connotations. If they were serious they would have used “Domestic”… and they would have made it an advisory and best-practices-sharing group rather than trying to control everything from that point.

And people still think the Republicans know something about national defense? Pitiful.

tl;dr Someone said it; TSA = Security Theatre.

http://thenewamerican.com/economy/commentary-mainmenu-43/5240-getting-rich-from-the-naked-body-scanners

HUGE Prop Budget, poor acting, limited dialog, no real plot to speak of. Poor direction.