this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
1050 points (99.2% liked)
Microblog Memes
6027 readers
1712 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The "agents" always swear the rules are the same everywhere even though I was just in the other airport a few hours ago and no they aren't!
Random Antiterrorism Measures
This is basically what's going on. The theory is that by making changes to the process it will be more difficult for someone to plan a way to defeat it (not really true, as several TSA pentests have shown).
There's also this classic quote attributed to a German general during WWII:
It may look like the front-line guys have no idea what's going on, and that might actually be true. If they have no idea what's going on, neither will anybody observing their activities.
It makes sense in theory to deter someone planning something sketchy. But if that's the purpose, they should try to make it known to everyone.
Basically, the agents should be telling everyone - "yes, the procedure can change every time", so the potential villain scouting out the procedures would think "oh man, I thought I got it figured out, but what if tomorrow they change the rules?"
If they instead keep insisting "you should know this, it's the same every time", the potential villain is more likely to feel confident in their preparation and go ahead.
The other problem is TSA agents seem to massively overestimate how often people use air travel and how uncommon it is for like 95% if the population.