Flying is Safer, But Not Because of TSA

It's Tuesday, July twenty first. So my cousin's husband booked a flight for her the other day and accidentally used autofill for the name, which meant the ticket was under his name instead of hers. She found out three hours before the flight. Luckily, the date of birth he'd entered was hers, so the airline let her change the name on the ticket. But it got me thinking about how rigid airline tickets have become, how your name has to match your ID exactly or you're not getting on that plane. And that hasn't always been the case. Before September 11, 2001, you could transfer an airline ticket to someone else, you could walk all the way to the gate without a boarding pass just to say goodbye to someone, and box cutters were legal to bring on board. The entire airport experience changed after 9/11, and most of us just accepted it because it felt like the obvious response to what happened. But security researchers have been arguing for over two decades that a lot of what we do at the airport doesn't actually make us safer, and the two things that did make flying safer have nothing to do with the line you stand in every time you fly. The Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, was created in November 2001, two months after the September 11 attacks. Before the TSA existed, airport security was handled by private companies hired by the airlines themselves, and the screening was minimal by today's standards. You walked through a basic metal detector, your bags went through an X-ray, and that was about it. There was no shoe removal, no liquid restrictions, no full-body scanners, and no requirement that your name on the ticket match a government-issued ID.

The Aviation and Transportation Security Act changed all of that. It created the TSA as a federal agency with over 50,000 employees and an annual budget that has grown to roughly $11 billion. It required 100 percent of checked baggage to be screened by X-ray. It expanded the Federal Air Marshal Service to put armed marshals on more flights. And it mandated that airlines reinforce cockpit doors on all aircraft to physically prevent anyone from reaching the pilots during a flight.

The changes kept coming in response to specific incidents. In December 2001, a man named Richard Reid tried to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes on a flight from Paris to Miami. He failed, but now every American takes off their shoes at the checkpoint. In 2006, British authorities disrupted a plot to blow up transatlantic flights using liquid explosives disguised as soft drinks. The plot was stopped by intelligence agencies before anyone reached an airport, but now you can't bring more than 3.4 ounces of liquid through security. Each rule was a direct reaction to a specific attempt, layered on top of the previous rules, and none of them have ever been removed even when the original threat evolved or disappeared. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security ran a series of covert tests where undercover agents, known as Red Teams, posed as passengers and attempted to smuggle mock explosives and banned weapons through TSA checkpoints at major airports across the country. The agents succeeded 67 out of 70 times. That's a 95 percent failure rate. In one test, an agent set off the magnetometer alarm, was pulled aside for a pat-down, and TSA screeners still failed to detect a fake explosive device taped to his back. The results were so bad that the TSA's acting director was reassigned.

A security expert named Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about airport security since the early 2000s, coined the term "security theater" to describe what most of the TSA's procedures actually accomplish. Security theater means measures that create the appearance of safety without meaningfully reducing risk. Taking off your shoes, surrendering your water bottle, standing in a full-body scanner with your arms raised: these are visible, time-consuming rituals that make you feel like something is being done, but the data suggests they're not catching much.

Schneier has argued for years that two things actually made flying safer after 9/11, and neither of them involves the checkpoint line. The first is reinforced cockpit doors. After 9/11, Congress mandated that every commercial aircraft install doors strong enough to withstand gunfire and small explosions. As long as the cockpit door holds, a hijacker cannot control the plane, which means the entire pre-9/11 hijacking strategy of using a weapon to gain access to the flight controls no longer works. Kip Hawley, who ran the TSA from 2005 to 2009, said it directly: "Never again will a terrorist be able to breach the cockpit simply with a box cutter or a knife. The cockpit doors have been reinforced."

The second change was behavioral. Before 9/11, the established protocol for passengers during a hijacking was to cooperate, stay calm, and wait for the plane to land so that negotiations could begin. That protocol assumed the hijackers wanted to land the plane somewhere and make demands, which is how nearly every previous hijacking had worked. On September 11, once passengers on United Flight 93 learned through phone calls that other hijacked planes had been flown into buildings, they realized the old rules no longer applied and fought back. The plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania instead of reaching its target. Since that day, every potential hijacker knows that passengers will fight, which fundamentally changes the risk calculation for anyone planning to use a plane as a weapon. That behavioral shift cost zero dollars and required no government agency to implement. There's one more detail about the TSA that I didn't know until I looked into it this week, and it kind of reframes the whole experience: TSA agents cannot arrest you. They are not law enforcement. They have no arrest authority, no badges, and no guns. If they find something illegal in your bag, whether it's a weapon or drugs or anything else, their only option is to call local police or federal agents to the checkpoint and hand the situation over.

The dogs you see at the airport are mostly there for explosives detection, not drugs. And the TSA has publicly stated on their website that they are "not looking for marijuana or other illegal drugs" during the screening process. Their job is finding threats to aviation safety: weapons, explosives, and items that could be used to harm an aircraft. If they happen to discover drugs during a routine screening, they notify local law enforcement, and what happens next depends entirely on where you are and what state law says. In states where marijuana is legal, the local cops often just tell you to leave it behind. In states where it isn't, the local officers can arrest you, but the TSA cannot.

So the agency that screens roughly 2.5 million passengers per day, employs over 50,000 people, and operates on an $11 billion annual budget cannot make a single arrest. The people checking your bags have less legal authority than a mall security guard. The actual security, the reinforced door between you and the cockpit and the willingness of passengers to intervene, exists entirely independent of the checkpoint you spent 45 minutes standing in. What keeps coming back to me is that flying really is safer now than it was before 9/11, but most of the reason why has nothing to do with the experience you go through at the airport every time you fly. A reinforced door and a change in passenger behavior did more for aviation security than an $11 billion agency that fails 95 percent of its own internal tests and can't make an arrest. The shoes, the liquids, the body scanners, none of those rules have ever been rolled back even when the specific threats that inspired them no longer exist. We're still taking off our shoes because of one guy who failed to light his sneakers on fire in 2001, and we'll probably keep doing it forever, because removing a security measure is politically impossible even when the data says it isn't working. Bruce Schneier called it security theater, and once you see it that way, the airport never quite looks the same.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.