I agree, the TSA pretend-security is theater at best.
My concern is publicizing vulnerabilities that may be exploitable. The worst case scenario would be someone using that data as site surveillance for some action. Why buy a ticket and send someone into the TSA “Sanitized Zone” to do surveillance when this guy did it for free?
I always chuckle when I’m in a Sanitized Zone, it sounds so Star Trek.
As I mentioned in a recent post, TSA responds to very specific threats with very specific “rules” and procedures. It’s like the little scenarios they used to use to sell GI Joe dolls, the TV ad would show Joe being winched up a cliff with the new Battle Action Harness and Jeep with Real Tactical Winch Action, and once you buy the stuff, that’s pretty much all you can do with it.
So the Fruit of the Boom guy goes to the head two hours before landing and has a blanket in his lap, so for a while NOBODY WHO FLEW could go to the head or have a blanket for the last two hours of flight, to stop an exact repeat of what FotB tried to do! That ruling lasted about six hours before Janet was overruled, I think. Seven or eight people talking in a foreign language in a group in the aisle frightened someone, so now on an eight hour flight, I can’t stand up for 30 minutes every couple of hours because I might frighten someone too, especially if there are FOUR of us down by the rear kitchen. Lots of the idiocy comes from single, specific incidents, rather than trying to see the type of person who would do the act.
Great observations. That more-ornate regulations and procedures firstmost and always reaction to ANYTHING new was also a hallmark of the FAA which begat the TSA.
Still, the pilot was right. It’s not the fear of these new regulations that the idiot bastards will quickly put in force in blindly vile reaction to this incident that must drive us, the sane, it is rather a whole intolerance for such bureaucratic reactionism, the culture and the bureaucracy that create, suckle and fester it. As such we must celebrate and support the pilot in this case.