1169: TSA | Skeptical Sunday

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Welcome to Skeptical Sunday.

I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.

Today I'm here with Skeptical Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher Nick Pell.

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So, as y'all probably know, I fly a lot.

And while I like to travel, there's one part of traveling that I definitely do not enjoy.

You can probably guess what I'm talking about.

It's the TSA, the Transportation Security Administration, the guys who feel up your junk when you're trying to get onto a plane.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

Hey, we need these guys and gals, right?

They're the only thing standing between us and a 9-11 every other day of the week.

I was curious about what it is that the TSA is actually accomplishing.

So I called my buddy, writer and researcher Nick Pell to discuss what it is the TSA are actually doing.

What would you say it is you do around here?

Do they keep us safe or are they maybe making the world an even more dangerous place?

Nick, how's it going, man?

I'm not flying today, so there's that.

Yeah, you're not really much of a travel guy?

I used to travel a lot, but these days, if I can't get there by car, I'm just not going to go.

And part of that, frankly, a big part of it is that I just don't want to deal with the TSA.

You're not alone there.

I'm mostly just a normal guy who's been told repeatedly that the TSA is the only thing standing between us and a total disaster falling from the skies on a regular basis.

And I have to say, I do find them to be a bit of a pain, but I tolerate them for the same reasons everyone else has.

So I'd be pretty stoked to find out that they're this totally unnecessary thing that we could potentially maybe even get rid of.

Yeah, remember when the world was a hellish nightmare of aviation attacks prior to 2001 when the TSA was formed?

You remember that, right?

The world was not like that before 2001.

Correct.

And in general, this country lost a lot in terms of our personal freedoms on September 12th.

And the TSA to me is a really good emblem of everything that we lost on September 12th.

And so that's why I wanted to talk about it because I just don't see the case for it.

And I think that people will be surprised to hear some of the things that we're going to talk about with the TSA.

Yeah, I'm old enough to be able to say that it was definitely a huge change in terms of the overall flying experience.

You used to be able to roll up to the airport maybe like 30 minutes before your flight and you just walk through the metal detectors or whatever it was back then and you'd make it with a little luck.

Now you're planning to get there three hours in advance.

You're checking your watch the whole time.

You're hoping all the security lanes are open, that it's not shoes off day or whatever they do when they change the rules all the time.

That's one thing I will say that I would never understand and that I know is definitely not a point in the TSA's favor.

You'll go to the airport one day and they'll say, hey, we got to have your laptop out.

And you go, okay, even though I'm pre-checked, yeah, you've always had to have it out.

And I'm like, I know that's not true, but whatever.

I'm not going to argue with this dude.

So I take the laptop out and then I'll fly through that same airport three days later and then I'll take my laptop out and they'll go, what are you doing?

You don't need to take that out.

What do you mean?

What am I doing?

Or my favorite is when one person in the beginning of the line is, you need your laptop out.

You need to make sure that this is off.

Take your jacket off.

So you take your jacket and your laptop out.

Then the person who's at the scanner is like, put your jacket on.

Put your laptop back in your bag.

And you're like, you guys need to have a powwow.

They're telling everybody opposite stuff in the same line on the same day.

This happens all the time.

It's not just week to week or month to month or a different airport.

It seems like these guys don't even know the rules.

I love how polite you make them sound too, because it's like this one guy saying to you, hey, man, put your laptop back in your bag.

No, it's like just this one guy shouting, take your laptop out and put your bag, you know, like it's just shouting instruction like you're on a cattle car.

It's crazy how much flying has changed in this like dramatic, you know, people who don't remember what it was like just straight up will not believe you that it used to be so easy.

Like my girlfriend's 10 years younger than me and just cannot believe that it's like that you used to just be able to, oh, here I am 10 minutes before my flight.

Hop on.

It's unbelievable.

I flew to Israel in 2000 and I remember they had crazy security screening.

And that was the first time I ever had to do anything other than just wander through a metal detector or maybe open my bag so somebody could look in it.

That's it.

So I've got this kind of one silver bullet argument that I think very easily and simply explains that the TSA just isn't necessary.

Great.

Another super short episode of Skeptical Sunday.

So if the TSA had ever prevented a major attack or hijacking, you would know about it.

And I don't mean you informed man of the world, Jordan Harvinger.

I mean everybody listening to this because

We would never hear the end of it.

They would never shut up about it.

And it would be all that the news talked about for a solid month.

Okay, but what about the shoe bomber?

We all know that guy.

Didn't they get him and the guy trying to set off a bomb in his undies?

Those guys are real winners.

Whenever you look at the mug shots of these guys, you're just like, yeah, oh, yeah, big surprise.

It was this particular creepy looking dude.

But didn't they get those guys?

Those are high-profile cases.

They did not get those guys.

Both those guys made it through security.

Passengers got those guys.

They were on the plane.

That's why it was big news.

They were already on the plane.

Yeah.

They're already on the plane.

Passengers got them.

All right.

I stand corrected on that.

I vaguely remember one of these dipshits was on a flight to Detroit trying to light his shoes or his underwear with matches.

And I was just like, man, you didn't bring his zipo or something, dude.

They're not setting their best, are they?

They are definitely not.

That's pretty crazy, though.

I bet if we asked 100 people on the street who stopped the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber, they would say the TSA.

I guess I just memory hold that.

That's what I thought happened until literally just now.

Yeah, it's a Mandela effect.

Yes.

That's the popular perception that those were the days when the TSA earned their keep.

But no, it's like you see a guy sitting next to you on the plane trying to light his underwear on fire.

You're going to take notice of it.

And they made it through security.

It wasn't that the passengers caught them hanging out in the lobby.

They were on the plane.

Yeah.

One thing I've noticed over the last few years are signs about guns that the TSA has intercepted from passengers.

I'm talking about.

They're everywhere now.

And I think, man, this many people are trying to take guns on airplanes?

Jesus.

On the one hand, I'm glad they're getting all these guns, I guess.

On the other hand, it seems a little ridiculous that there are this many people trying to bring guns on planes in the first place.

So what about those?

I mean, I'm guessing they don't just make this up so they can go through your bag and check out your underwear.

So what's with all the guns that they're so proud of grabbing?

Yeah, so this is the big success story that the TSA likes to tout on their website and that and some kind of nebulous nonsense about cybersecurity training, which I have no idea how cybersecurity is going to keep us safe on a plane unless they're fighting Chinese hackers trying to take over the actual plane, which I very much doubt is the case.

God, that's a whole.

I hope the TSA is not on that.

I hope there's a different department than the guy who's looking at women's feet in the security line.

I don't need that guy

on the cybersecurity front.

My God.

Okay.

You see these signs at the airport, but there's zero news stories, precisely zero, about hardened al-Qaeda and ISIS agents who are being stopped, the firearm, getting onto a plane.

I think that al-Qaeda and ISIS probably have the bare minimum intelligence to know that they're not going to get on a plane with a Blue Steel 44 Magnum.

So what do you think is more likely that the TSA is stopping hardened terrorists or for that matter, even isolated nut jobs, or that some boomer forgot to leave his gun in the car before he went through airport security?

You know what?

That does sound a lot more likely.

I see your point.

There are never news stories about the TSA stopping would-be terrorists with guns.

And I suppose that Grandpa Joe forgets to leave his gun in the truck, gets arrested.

Not great copy for the six o'clock news because it's just some old dude with one of those canes with multiple bottom touch points on it, and he's forgot he's strapped that morning.

And somebody who carries every day is really easy enough to do.

Yeah, I would imagine.

It's like having weed in your purse, and then you take a Boy Scout troop to a police station, and the dog smells your purse and you're like, oh, I've got weed in here.

That's something that really happened to a friend of mine.

And they arrested her.

That's a different podcast.

Embarrassing.

I included a bunch of stories in the show notes from the news about this, and they're kind of all damning in the sense that there's never any mention of terrorism or threat to the airplane.

It's just, oh, this guy had a gun in his carry-on when he went through security.

If the TSA thought that they could boast about stopping a potential skyjacking from these guys carrying guns, they would do it.

Just speculating also, this is a total gun guy thing, which I know you're not.

It's also anecdotal, but the gun guys out there will probably get this.

Every single time I see one of these signs at the airport security line about, look at this gun we stopped.

It's some caliber of gun that nobody under the age of 70 carries.

Like terrorists are not carrying 45 ACP and 40 Smith and Wesson chambered guns.

And neither is anyone else who can't remember the Truman administration.

These are rounds that the elderly use.

Yeah, this is Grandpa Joe forgot that he had a gun in his back.

That's funny that there's like last season guns for like, oh, I would never, I wouldn't be caught dead carrying that lame-o thing.

And it's grandpa's like, what are you talking about?

This is blow a man's head clean off.

Like, I'm going to have to take your word for it on that one.

So, assuming this is true, and again, I have zero reason to doubt you.

Do you not want them stopping even these people from getting onto airplanes with guns?

Even if it is just some old dude who was, like I said, strapped on his way to Fort Lauderdale?

I mean, I think I kind of want them, especially stopping this guy.

Yeah.

Sits down and it goes off in his pants.

That's just as bad in many ways.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a lot of really good reasons to keep guns off planes, but.

This is like the one place that I'm super fried with being a gun-free zone.

Assuming a flight gets hijacked with box cutters or guns or angry goblins or anything, the last thing on earth anyone in that cabin needs is some dude taking a shot with his personal carry 45

ACP.

Yeah, in a pressurized cabin, that just seems like it's going to make a bad situation so much worse.

Most guys who have guns barely train.

Yeah, it's insanely dangerous.

Yeah, that scares me as well.

The sky marshals who actually carry on planes do, I assume, tons of training for close quarters combat.

So if you're against there being guns on airplanes and the TSA is catching guns isn't that kind of the end of your case that the TSA is a bad thing the sky marshals allegedly have to like excel at close quarter combat with a gun but

you couldn't get a gun on a plane prior to 9-11 I mean maybe in the 70s when you could smoke while you looked at a chest x-ray with your doctor in the hospital I was watching die hard over Christmas.

It is a Christmas movie.

Prove me wrong.

And one of the opening scenes is the guy next to him is like, oh, you nervous for the flight?

And he's like, yeah, blah, blah, blah.

And then he gets up and as he's taking his stuff out of the overhead bin, the guy sees the gun in the holster and he's like, it's okay, relax.

I'm a cop.

As if like some NYPD guy can just, yeah, it's cool.

I'm just going to bring my gun on this airplane.

Maybe you could back then.

Like, oh, I'm a cop.

Well, in that case, bring your revolver onto the plane.

Why not?

The before times were crazy.

Yeah.

For anybody who doesn't remember them.

That's right.

Before 9-11, you had to go through a metal detector.

Unless people are carrying completely plastic 3D printed guns with completely plastic 3D printed ammo.

Is that the thing that does or doesn't exist?

3D printed ammo.

That's plastic.

3D printed ammo exists.

And honestly, I bet that, you know, they got those weird like explosive detection devices.

Yeah, the little swabby thing?

Yeah.

I genuinely have no idea, but it wouldn't trip a metal detector anyway.

So, yeah, 3D printed ammo is absolutely a thing.

That's scary.

Kind of.

Unless someone has one of these kinds of weapons and that kind of ammunition, the metal detectors is going to to stop them.

The Israelis still lean super heavy on metal detectors to keep the planes safe.

They have not had a single hijacking since before either you or I were born.

And there's really little more than metal detectors securing the airports in Israel.

So when you say that the Israelis are keeping airports safe with little more than metal detectors, I'm dying to know what the little more is because I feel like that term's doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Like I said, I've flown to Israel several times and there's a crap load of undercover, not so undercover security.

They interview you.

They'll unpack your stuff and ask you about it.

I mean, that's pretty thorough.

I know a guy who was detained by Israeli airport security for having a Pap Buchanan book in his bag.

Vaguely know who that name is.

I'm shocked an Israeli security officer knew who that was.

They detained him for over an hour.

about the Pap Buchanan book.

So, yeah, they stop people quite frequently in Israeli airports.

I I mean, they're not messing around in Israel.

So,

you're right.

It is little more than a metal detector.

Okay, yeah, that's doing a fair bit of lifting.

But I love telling people about how the Israelis handle airport security because I'm a big fan of how they do it.

I'm kind of a big fan of how the Israelis do a lot of things.

You can extrapolate from that what you will, but they have bomb-sniffing dogs and such.

in these airports.

But the main thing is the Israelis' political correctness didn't make it to Israel.

And among other things, if they see a guy who looks like he's an ISIS and they have no other evidence, they're going to stop him and talk to him.

Okay, but back to your point, presumably a guy who is in ISIS is not going to look or try not to look like a superficial guy who looks like he's an ISIS, that kind of character when he shows up trying to fly to Tel Aviv with a bomb in his suitcase or whatever.

You know what?

You're correct.

And the Israelis know this, which is why they're going to spend probably 20 seconds on this guy who looks like he's an ISIS before they let him go and let him go on about his day.

Because, yeah, the ISIS agent is not showing up in an ISIS t-shirt at the airport.

They're going to stop this guy and go, where are you going?

And he's going to say, I'm going to Dubai.

And they're going to say, cool, on your way.

What the Israelis have done, though, is basically turn a whole wing of the IDF into human bomb-sniffing dogs.

So humans obviously can't snip out bombs, but we can make other value judgments that dogs cannot.

So I get the point of having people on the ground who can make more educated or sophisticated judgments than a dog who's just smelling if there's explosive material or not.

And even then, the dogs, I think, are just smelling bombs of the type they've been trained to find.

Humans can make judgments on the fly based on not only intelligence, of course, but on wisdom, experience.

You're bringing this weird chemical that's not a bomb itself.

That's weird.

Why are you doing that?

And then some other person has another one and you can do the math on that.

Like their security must be, obviously, it's trained so well because they have had a shocking level of success i would imagine in interdicting these and because they haven't had that many hijackings since what the 70s or something like that i don't even know they haven't had any since the 70s and they used to get hijackings all the time that's right and that's why they were like no we're just not going to have hijackings in israel anymore this is how we're going to do it so there's a look that they're looking for They're not just arresting Arab-looking guys with big beards for the crime of being a Muslim at the airport.

I did read some evidence that you're more likely to be detained if you're Arab, but it doesn't really serve their purposes to be interrogating every Arab guy who shows up at the Tel Aviv airport.

You look at a guy and he fits a certain profile that's the current known profile of a terrorist, and you stop him and you talk to him.

And so there's much more to it than just like, oh, this guy looks like a terrorist.

What do you think a terrorist looks like when they show up at an airport to bomb a plane out of the sky?

I don't know.

Gary Busey in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts and a New York Yankees hat.

I have no idea.

They might look like that'd be pretty decent cover, but one thing that they found, at least at some point, was that the guy's probably got a freshly shaved beard.

Ah, okay.

He probably has a tan line where his beard used to be because he's been working on the same beard since he was 14 years old.

I don't, man, I just don't know if I have good beard genetics, tan liner.

I want to look less ISIS-y, so I got to shave this, but I've had this beard for 13 years already, so it's just a little bit lighter down there.

And maybe I keep stroking my chin, even though there's nothing there.

Yeah, they're probably looking for all kinds of stuff like that.

Yeah, they've got a bunch of profiles.

Masad is like the best intelligence service in the world, so they kind of know like what these guys are using for cover.

The Israelis are not stupid, and they've got much more skin in the game here

than we do in the United States.

They're not using the same kind of politically neutral playbook that the TSA does.

That's the playbook that says you have to search a nun, which the TSA has done.

And the Israelis, they don't play these games over there where they're like, oh, look, the woman in the nun outfit, you know, this 80-year-old woman in a nun outfit, she could be an undercover ISIS agent.

They're not doing that there.

Searching the nuns sounds like a euphemism for something else that isn't appropriate for this podcast.

I meant it literally, and the reference is going to be in the show notes so you can check it.

But that's exactly the point.

Can ISIS dress up as 80-year-old nuns?

I guess.

It's possible, but there's no evidence that that's what they're doing.

That's their deep cover.

So in the United States, the TSA pretends like Grandma Moses standing in line at the security line is just as much of a threat.

as the guy with the beard to his navel wearing a shirt that says death to America.

Probably neither of them are a threat.

But it's absurd to pretend that anyone could be a terrorist.

I don't know.

Like, these two pictures are the same.

I can't tell the difference between these two and which may be more threatening.

And I'm speaking in caricatures here, but I'm doing it for a reason.

Yeah, it seems like they're allowed to profile and we're sort of not supposed to do that.

So we have to pretend that we're not doing that by searching people, even if it's inefficient and doesn't make any sense.

All right, so you're speaking in caricatures.

What reason is that?

What point do you think that illustrates?

Assuming that you're trying trying to make a point, you're not just being inflammatory for its own sake, which I don't think is the case here.

Not today, anyway.

I think that there's a truth that underlies the caricature.

As you just said, the TSA's training prevents them from acknowledging in any substantive way, the nun standing in the security line and the man dressed like a Taliban warlord, that these are different threat profiles.

They can't acknowledge that.

They can't profile in that way.

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Now, back to Skeptical Sunday.

You also said that you don't think that the guy who quote-unquote looks like he's in the Taliban is an actual Taliban member or is a threat or whatever.

So, what good is it if we stop that guy?

The guy who looks like an extra from Rambo 3 probably is not actually in the Taliban, but what he might be is some self-radicalized weirdo who found his calling on YouTube.

So go talk to him.

Ask him some questions.

It's going to become clear real fast that he's probably just some Saudi dad on vacation.

The Israelis also know that the guy who looks like he just dropped out of central casting for a movie about the 9-11 hijackers last night in Saudi Arabia,

this is probably not a terrorist because, yeah, they're going to hide it.

Yeah, it's funny you say that because a lot of those guys did look just kind of like middle school shop teachers or random Arab dads from Dearborn, Michigan.

It just looked like my neighbors growing up.

Not the guys I would pick out of a lineup to be terrorists.

They look like half the guys at my church.

You look at pictures of like...

The original Delta Forest operators from the 70s and the 80s.

They're not tatted up muscle freaks.

They just look like somebody's nerdy dad.

But the Israeli way of doing things comes in because they know that terrorists often don't look like caricatures of terrorists.

But what they do know is how terrorists act, no matter what they're dressed like.

So there's whatever, mannerisms, behaviors that either the guy who watched a couple of YouTube videos and decided to dress up like an ISIS warlord, or the guy who's an actual ISIS warlord who's dressed like a German tourist.

There's commonalities in how they would behave at an airport when they're going to do something very bad.

So instead of these invasive ball groping stations and going through everybody's bag like an undeclared bottle of baby formula,

it could be a bomb.

Israel has men and women who just walk around and they just randomly stop people and ask them questions because they know what terrorists act like when they get confronted by intelligence officers for a quick chat.

It's not the way that is a normie dad who gets stopped at Tel Aviv airport by an IDF agent grilling him about his travel plans going to be nervous?

Yes, he's going to be nervous in a very, very different way than the actual terrorist is.

And they know this.

They know the difference.

It's not a difficult thing to sniff out when you have the training in it.

For example, like they know the terrorist is almost certainly not a guy traveling with his wife and kids.

By the way, is it the IDF that protects Israeli commercial flights?

Did we look that up?

Did you check that out?

So there's a thing called the Israel Airport Authority, and it's not not part of the Israeli Defense Forces.

But the border crossings and the airports, the security there is overseen by the IAA, the Israel Airport Authority.

They cooperate closely with the IDF.

I believe that there is some IDF presence, but I'm just calling it the IDF because it's simple, it's easy, and everybody knows what it is.

And if I say IAA, people are going to Google it and find the Israeli Antiquities Authority and wonder why why I'm talking about the people who protect underwater treasures in the Dead Sea.

Israelis listening are probably going to say, actually, it's this or it's these three agencies.

So, yeah, I appreciate you keeping it simple.

Okay, so we have people at the airport chatting up people and asking them questions and taking them aside for more questions.

And I remember that when I flew to Israel, it was like almost exclusively really cute girls that were my age.

I was 20 at the time.

And they would come up and talk to you and you'd be like, yeah, I'm ready.

Ask me important stuff.

And they were not, of course, having it at all.

They were just all business because it's a really important job.

But I just remember all the guys were like, Dang, yeah, look at that.

And they were just like, Whatever, chump.

Do you have a bomb in your brave?

Why are you going?

What's that?

Then it's on to the next, you're dead to me.

Typical Israeli women.

But what is it about how the TSA does this versus how the Israelis do it that makes you so sure that they're going to catch terrorists before they get on a plane?

So the TSA actually does something similar, but they're really bad at it because what they have instead of freshly shorn beard is this approved list of body language that they're allowed to consider suspicious that is designed to make sure that nobody is offended and they don't get sued for unlawfully detaining somebody for the wrong reasons if nothing's going on.

Do you have any examples of that?

It's really dumb stuff, like clearing your throat or looking at the floor.

You're not allowed to just say, I just don't like the look of this guy.

So I'm going to ask him a few questions because

this is America.

Nothing can ever be that simple.

And God knows what percentage of the legal profession is currently dedicated to suing people for exercising common sense.

But the government tried to hide what they're looking for.

The United States government, they're always trying to hide their list of like, this is a tell that he's a terrorist, but they're really bad at doing this.

And so the lists come out with some degree of regularity if you know where to look.

Once the body language list comes out, though, the terrorists, like, they just need to learn how to not do that.

Like CIA agents learn not to lean on things because that's a thing Americans do, or so I've been told.

Yeah, I actually checked on this because you're not the first person to mention it.

It depends on what culture the operator is trained to go into.

So if you're trained for...

a certain culture that where people don't lean on things, they're trained you not to do it.

But otherwise, they'd just leave it.

Anyway, I had to even pry that information out of a former operator friend, so I guess I probably shouldn't say more than that.

Regardless, the body language is literally the worst way you can spot a liar or somebody with bad intent.

That's not hyperbole, which I'm prone to.

It's just not a good way to tell if somebody is lying.

The Israelis are not looking for people who are acting weird, quote unquote, based on a set of predetermined, politically correct criteria.

They're just looking for people who fit the profile.

And then they see people who fit the profile.

They start conversations with them.

They make decisions on the fly.

Those girls that you were talking about before, you know, they're part of the chain because you're acting weird.

And you're not acting weird in the way that a normal guy does when I start asking him questions.

You're acting weird in the way that a terrorist does.

I'm acting weird because I'm terrible with women.

But once you isolate that, he's just a normal dork, not a terrorist dork.

Moving on.

Yeah, exactly.

Like they know the difference between, oh, I'm nervous because I'm getting grilled by an intelligence agent and, like, I'm nervous because there's a bomb in my

it's a very different type of nervous going on.

And I think that the proof is in the pudding here.

They just don't have terrorist attacks at Israeli airports or hijackings of Israeli airplanes.

And if that means somebody has to spend half an hour talking to a security guard, I'm fine with it.

But the TSA also has a good track record.

There hasn't been an attack using airplanes since 9-11.

You think that's proof enough that they're keeping us safe?

I I don't know.

I mean, is that because the TSA is just this crack operation that stops all the terrorists?

Or is it because the terrorists know well enough to not use an airplane again?

I think that the people who pulled off 9-11,

which for the record, I think, were Saudi terrorists and not Jewish space lasers or something weird.

I think the people who spent a decade studying Delta Force in Afghanistan to pull off the 9-11 attacks are probably smart enough to know, ah, they're not going to be able to use an airplane again.

There's too many eyes on it.

We also know the answer to this question about is it that the TSA is really good or what?

Because the TSA has its own auditors who go into an airport with different stuff in their backpacks.

It could be harmless hunks of metal.

It could be weapons like guns and knives.

Sometimes it's a bomb.

broken down into its parts that you could put together quickly and blow up at a moment of your choosing when you're on the plane.

But there are airports that have a 95%

failure rate, 9-5,

5% success rate on these audits, some of these airports.

So that means like everything that they send through makes it to the other side of security.

And for people who doubt this, a friend of mine who definitely is not me used to do this, not as part of his job.

He literally just wanted to see if the TSA was any good at their job.

And he brought knives, pepper spray, sharp objects, dangerous chemicals, you name it, onto his flights and then would take a photo and post it anonymously to Twitter.

And that's the stuff that was deliberately brought through.

I know other people, again, not me, that have brought in things that are supposedly not allowed.

And you find it like three years later when you're flying through Japan.

You're like, oh, I did have three lighters at the bottom of my night kit that are full of lighter fluid.

Wow, that's where my knife went.

It's at the bottom of this thing.

I brought it to the jungle and I ended up carrying it on for 27 flights since then.

That happens all the time.

This is an anecdotal aside, but I'm a marketing copywriter for a company that sells tons of mall ninja, but grown-up type stuff, like tactical pens and tactical credit cards and stuff like this.

TSA is going to get that because they have this like intense training about the wannabe mercenaries are carrying this type of tactical pen now or this type of tactical credit card and don't let them on with it.

That I totally think they're going to spot because I feel like that's more where their eyes are focused.

And I know tons of people who've had TSA throw their tactical pen or whatever out.

But as far as sophisticated stuff that actual terrorists might use, they're just not able to stop this stuff.

So I'm not really sure where all these crazy failed audits are happening, but I suspect it's at smaller airports, like second and third tier cities.

I don't really think that this is probably

I'm just guessing.

I don't see this as as being like a New York, LA problem.

I think this is a like Flagstaff airport, Knoxville airport, no shade on either of those cities, both of whom I think are great, but it's a resource issue.

Like where the resources are lacking, they're going to get through more.

So that's my olive branch to the TSA is that the bigger airports, I suspect their audit rates are higher, but I don't know.

The bigger point is, though, bomb parts are making it through security because the entire premise of how to secure an airplane is flawed.

This is ultimately all security theater.

And I think that one thing that's kind of worth pointing out is that maybe we're damn lucky that Al-Qaeda or ISIS or whoever doesn't think that they can pull off another 9-11 because maybe they'd be able to do it because the guy's too busy throwing out your water or throwing out your tactical pan.

to catch these more sophisticated weapons that if there's a 95%

compliance failure somewhere, I'm guessing that al-Qaeda or whoever could figure out which airport has it, where they could get it through, et cetera, et cetera.

They didn't blunder their way into the World Trade Center towers.

Look, I'm not totally sure I'm ready to join in on your beating up on the TSA because I think they're probably trying their best.

I think you're probably right about a lot of the points that you're making, but wouldn't the issue be the higher-ups and management and the policy as opposed to the 24-year-old who just wants a job with benefits?

Oh, I believe you.

This is them trying their best, and that's the problem.

Fine, but what's then the problem with TSA?

I mean, the appearance of security has to have some kind of impact that keeps travelers safer.

We have some studies that suggest that the existence of the TSA kills people.

I don't mean to laugh, but it's such a counterintuitive thing, but it actually may mean that there's more deaths.

Wow.

Okay.

So how does that work?

Like they're just, if you have four ounces of liquid instead of three, you got to come back here and you get that no country for old men treatment with the pneumatic plug in the back of your head.

Captive bull.

Yeah.

That's right.

People don't fly because they don't want to deal with the TSA.

I don't fly because I don't want to deal with the TSA.

I drive, which is a more dangerous way of traveling than flying, which means more people die and those numbers add up.

I see.

Okay, so they drive instead of fly.

They end up dying in a car accident.

Now I get it.

So what do the numbers look like specifically for this?

We sadly only have one study on this, and it's old, but it was an additional 129

road fatalities over a three-month period which is a fully loaded 737 every three months i don't know let's assume that the actual number today is half that if you do the math

you're left with over 5 000 extra road fatalities since 2001 because people don't want to fly we could measure it in 9-11s Yeah, that's almost two 9-11s since 9-11.

That's pretty crazy and a pretty good example of unintended consequences.

But again, why get rid of the TSA?

We could be having a 9-11 every month or something with that.

Their failure-rated internal audits suggest otherwise.

This is the thing that came to me in the middle of this was like, real lucky that Al-Qaeda has given up on airplanes.

But there's also, why not keep them?

Because it's a spooky scarecrow outside of the airport.

It's $12 billion a year to keep them going.

Billion with a B.

It's a lot of rhinestones.

And to have people stand around and yell at you about whether or not it's shoes on or shoes off day and let phony bomb parts go through security when they're not touching up my junk.

If they're touching your nuts and it feels funny, it's not gay if it's TSA.

Just remember that.

Don't worry.

Thank you for joining us on Skeptical Sunday.

I've been saving that dad joke for a really long time with absolutely nowhere to put it.

And here we are.

There's also some pretty demonstrably bad things about the TSA that aren't just unintended consequences, that aren't theoretical deaths that we can extrapolate from one very limited old study.

I think lighting $12 billion a year on fire is kind of a big deal, but there's other stuff.

Okay, I hear you on the dollars and cent side.

That is a lot of money.

I'm a pretty practical guy.

And if there's just not evidence that they're earning their keep, then yes, maybe we need to try something else.

Maybe more of what the Israelis are doing.

But that sounds even more expensive, though.

That's actually something I thought of as well.

And you're not wrong.

It costs about 10 times as much per passenger, apparently, to do what they do in Israel.

But

it's not an apples-to-apples comparison because that's the budget for the entire security agency divided by the number of passengers.

Our number for the same metric of how much does it cost to process a passenger through security just counts as security at the airport, whereas theirs is the budget for the entire agency.

It also assumes the same rate of engagement.

So it assumes that TSA cops are going to be stopping as many suspects as the Israelis.

And I'm skeptical that's true, given that the Israelis live in a perpetual war zone.

And if that's the budget for the whole agency, Israeli commercial airliners have laser systems that stop surface-to-air missiles.

They have all kinds of essentially military-grade protective stuff on the plane that your Turkish Airlines flight or your United Airlines flight from JFK to LAX is not equipping because they've got to fly over places that want to shoot those planes down.

They have those just on like regular old LL planes that I'm going to take from wherever to wherever.

They do.

Yeah, they do.

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Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday.

All Israeli commercial jets are fitted with laser defense systems, which are known as directed infrared countermeasures, manufactured by the Tel Aviv contractor Elbit systems.

They were made standard following a 2002 attack on an Israeli passenger plane as it took off from Kenya's Mombasa airport.

Luckily, the two shoulder-fired missiles al-Qaeda-affiliated militants fired at the airline's Boeing 757 missed due to malfunctions, but for Israel's government, it was a wake-up call to protect civilian aircraft against such wildly proliferated weapons.

Essentially, what we shot at them was man-portable air defense system man pads.

So you maybe have heard of those.

They're known as something else now.

But yeah, there's laser countermeasures on LL flights.

And God knows what else is on there.

This is just the publicly available stuff.

There's other anti-missile tech.

Oh, there's something else called C-Music, which includes an electro-optical missile warning system, a jamming turret, and a laser generator.

The moment a missile is fired, the pod detects the weapon via its IR signature.

An infrared laser swivels immediately toward the missile, and its thermal cameras track the missile's flight.

There's more to it, but essentially, it points a super powerful beam at the missile's infrared seeker, which is otherwise locked onto the plane's exhaust, and the beam dazzles it, gives it the razzle-dazzle.

And then the missile erroneously readjusts its trajectory, and you land safely in Zurich, hopefully not knowing that there was a surface-to-air missile following the plane at one point during the flight while you were watching reruns of the wire.

Yeah, there's more onboard like bulletproof cockpit doors and stuff like that.

And there's the airport security we're talking about now as well.

But yeah, there's stuff on that plane that adds to the price of your average commercial airliner, I'm sure.

Yeah, I'm dying to know what it costs to take a flight.

Do you even fly from one end of Israel to another?

It's such a small country.

You can fly from one end of Israel to another, but it's probably like 12-minute flight.

It's like flying from LA to San Diego.

No, it's not quite that small.

Can you fly from one end of New Jersey to the other?

Probably.

Not on a jet liner like that.

These are their international ones.

This is when you've hopped a flight from Tel Aviv to Haifa, and I'm like, there's probably like you could drive there in 10 minutes.

I have no idea.

Yeah, it's a couple hours, I'm sure, but yeah, I'm sure if you fly there, it's one of those planes with 20 seats in it or something like that.

I don't think that has a laser countermeasures system on it.

I think they're just hoping that nobody in Israel has a man pad that they're going to use on a plane.

Okay, so it's not an apples to apples comparison with the security in the U.S.

and in Israel.

And I can see this being a lot more expensive, like you said, depending on the cost, being a case of accepting the inconvenience of the TSA for the lower bottom line.

So maybe we call the money a wash on this particular point because we'd have to speculate and guess too much.

Yeah, there's too many like unknowns to really draw a comparison between the two, but you ever been robbed by Israeli airport security?

So I haven't been robbed by Israeli airport security, but I've been robbed by the TSA actually more than once.

And everyone listening is going, me too.

Yeah, that's a thing.

I've had my money taken out of my money clip definitely because they handled it.

My money was just gone.

And I was like, where's my money?

And they're like, what are you talking about?

There was no money in there.

And I'm like, funny you would notice that because if you didn't take it, you would just be like, what?

I don't know.

What are you talking about?

You wouldn't say there was no money in there.

And then another time I decided I was going to hold my money because I didn't want to get robbed again.

And they were like, you have to put it in the dog bowl.

And I was like, no.

And they're like, fine, then you can't fly.

And I was like, screw it.

So I put it in the dog bowl.

And then I kept my eye on that guy.

And someone else took the money.

And then I had to go back and get my money clip after they inspected my stuff, which they gave me back empty.

And then, of course, when I said, hey, this had money in it, they were like, you can file a complaint for him, but nobody saw any money in it.

And I was like, of course you saw money in it, which is why you took the money out and made me put it in the dog bowl.

Yeah.

No, I've been robbed by TSA, which is also why when people are like, what's Jordan's problem with the TSA?

The problem is they owe me $165

plus interest.

Man, dude, I thought you were walking around with a $10,000 roll the the way that you tell this story.

No, even if they stole $20.

You're this salty over $160.

I'm salty that I got robbed by the government in addition to paying taxes.

Look, I will pay you this.

Why are you also robbing me?

That I don't appreciate.

So, yes, I'm on one for the TSA for that specific reason.

You being mad about $160 and me not caring is why you're rich and I'm not.

That's the only reason.

That is literally the only reason.

Yeah, so people get robbed by the TSA all the time.

Everybody has their story about the thing the TSA stole from them.

In 2023, they shut down a whole theft ring in Miami that was just straight looting people's bags at security.

Again, it's one of these old studies, but in 2012, ABC found that 400 TSA employees had been fired for theft.

Wow.

Okay, they caught these people.

Presumably they were fired for stealing and potentially prosecuted.

Yes, but

everyone listening is thinking of the time that the TSA robbed them.

They probably didn't catch all the people that were stealing in Miami.

Yeah, it's conjectured.

I'm following your point.

I don't think it's unfair to say that this is kind of like cockroaches.

If you see one, there's likely thousands somewhere else that you don't see.

I will also say, in their defense, TSA has called me to give me back stuff that I've left, like lights and expensive items that they could have maybe taken and didn't.

So I know that they're not all thieves.

I know it's a few bad apples, but the rest of that phrase is spoils the whole bunch.

Yeah, yeah fair enough there's also all the there's just a litany of sexual assault allegations against the tsa oh yeah i didn't think about that i stopped looking because there were just so many that it was like i can't talk about all of these it's like this would be the whole show this is another thing that kind of got memory hold but there was this whole scandal at the denver airport where the screeners were using those full-body things that take basically take a naked picture of you and they were using it to set up situations where they could grope dudes'

junk and not in like the normal way that they grope your junk.

That's a lot of work to grab some dude's crotch when you could probably

think there's probably a lot of easier ways that you could get away with grabbing some dude's crotch if that's what you were really into.

You didn't have to set up this whole thing at the airport.

I also super vaguely remember that going on, and I remember thinking it was weird then too.

Yeah, so there was a former TSA agent wrote something for Time magazine magazine about it and called it business as usual.

And again, I had to stop looking for like TSA assault somebody because there were just so many of them.

There was a whistleblower in front of a house investigation committee in 2018 who said they were almost all dirty.

Agents have manipulated passengers into exposing themselves.

I'll do that for free.

I don't care.

You don't have to manipulate me.

Just ask nicely.

I remember there was a story like ages ago, and I didn't document this, so maybe I'm just totally making it up, but there was like a whole thing about they basically like manipulated some woman into showing her nipple rings to the agents.

Multiple people complain about sexual violence with rough and unnecessary violent inspections of genital areas during the screenings.

There was the LA Chargers defensive lineman who claimed about being sexually assaulted by that was one of the more famous accusations because he was Chargers lineman.

Jeez.

So that's all pretty horrifying.

And honestly, it's one of my worst nightmares.

It's annoying every time I have to go through security.

I've definitely felt, did you need to get all up in there and personal and then like make a senide comment while going through security?

My major concern here, though, is that if I'm dealing with that as a guy, what's happening to women?

who deal with this kind of stuff at your local 7-Eleven, let alone at the airport where they're supposed to be given a pat down?

Because as a guy, I can shrug it off and be like, what an a-hole.

But as as a woman, I feel like this must be so much worse.

There's actually a thing that I really hate about the whole thing as a parent.

And that's that I really don't like

that it normalizes that a stranger can touch you to my kid.

So there's that as well.

That's really where I'm like ready to punch an agent is when they start getting all up in my kid.

But the kind of commonality here is that it's just outrageous that this is a thing that we have to put up with for exercising a basic human right like traveling.

And this rabbit hole gets grosser because the TSA has argued in court that their agents should not be prosecuted criminally for rape of travelers.

Wow.

I don't doubt that this is true, but you got to have more details on this.

Can you kind of unpack this a bit and give everyone listening the full story?

Because I don't understand.

Most people are thinking, how do you get raped while you're putting your bag in a scanner?

Yeah, and that's fair.

So we'll do the details on that.

It was in 2019, and a woman claimed that a TSA agent inserted his finger into her vagina.

That is rape in all 50 states.

No, that is, I don't know anybody reasonable that would be like, oh, come on.

No, that's terrible.

Yeah.

They demanded a pat down in a secluded room.

And these are actually like really common complaints from women with the TSA.

But this particular one got taken further because she lost her job, because she refused to ever fly again, because she had PTSD from this.

Well, yeah, that sounds really messed up.

People are probably imagining like he's just searching her and then they get, boop.

No, I don't think that's not how any of this works.

That's not why you and I know about this.

Exactly.

You know?

No, this is really messed up.

I do not blame her for not wanting to go through that again for work.

Yeah, it's absolutely disgusting.

What happened with her?

I'm not looking for some kind of excuse about why this is okay, of course, just to be clear.

I'm wondering what the whole story is.

I only can assume it gets worse from here.

So

she goes through the full body scanner.

She gets taken out of line.

She gets sexually assaulted by the TSA agent.

And big shock, she doesn't want to go back to an airport ever again.

But the federal government does not dispute that any of this happened.

Okay.

All right.

Nothing about what I told you do they dispute.

What they argued in federal court is that federal courts do not have a right to hear torts against the TSA, that the TSA enjoys some kind of sovereign immunity that includes sexually assaulting passengers.

Without getting into like jurisdiction type stuff, if the TSA is a federal agency, then federal courts should have a right to hear torts against.

You can sue the FBI.

And you're telling me you can't sue the TSA?

I don't want to be insulting.

They're not FBI agents.

Oh, my God.

This is just par for the course when dealing with the government, though, right?

Like they can get you for anything they want.

By the way, you can sue the whole United States government.

You can do that.

Yes.

I'm sure there's a guy like a half a mile from me who's perpetually filing suit against the federal government.

Of course there is.

This is crazy.

The government, they can get you for anything they want, but when they mess up, oops, sorry, oh, and by the way, the court doesn't have a right to even hear this.

So let's throw this whole thing out and pretend like it never happened.

That's really disgusting.

Yeah, that's gross.

Yeah, if private security handled the airports, I don't think it's unreasonable to think there would be a contingency lawyer.

There'd be ads on TV.

You might be entitled to financial compensation if you, too, have had your you-know-what scanned in a way that was unfairly.

I mean, I've basically gotten karate chopped in the junk by these guys.

And I don't know if I'm entitled to compensation, but I do want my $165 back, you bastards.

This would be big business for contingency lawyers.

Yeah, it'd be better call saw all day against the TSA.

That's right.

If it was a private company and you could actually get money out of them and they didn't have the weight of the federal government bearing down on you if you dare to speak up about getting assaulted and given PTSD because of a sexual assault at the airport.

And the thing, too, is maybe I'm naive here, but I think that massive cash settlements and the prospect of a thousand more of them actually does change behavior on the part of large, large, mostly unaccountable corporations.

It does.

There's going to be some kind of penalty there.

Well, that's why McDonald's coffee isn't 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit anymore because the infamous coffee case.

All right, so how common is this kind of thing, this kind of extreme violation, sexual assault of a passenger by the TSA?

Because ball-touching jokes aside, this is way beyond the normal amount of up-close and personal examination that people more or less expect when they go to an airport.

So it's common enough that this woman's lawyer's career is basically this kind of case.

He stated in court before a judge that such occurrences were common and that when reported, police usually didn't even bother to take a report.

That's terrible.

So fine, let's say I agree with you.

I'm not completely convinced, but I'm open to the idea that there's a better way, and that better way might be private companies rather than the government for this particular type of security.

What are the chances of this actually happening?

Oh, am I ever so glad glad that you asked?

Mike Lee, the Republican senator from Utah, introduced a bill to get rid of the TSA in March of 2024.

I'm going to go ahead and guess it did not pass because I just went in for a grope the other day on my way to Istanbul from San Francisco.

Correct.

It did not pass.

So you've gone after the TSA, which I think is fair because you make a really solid case.

I'm going to make you play devil's advocate, though.

What do you think are some reasons for keeping the TSA as is?

Obviously, less sexual assault, but keeping the agency around.

This does get debated more than people are kind of aware.

I'm just hyper-aware of it because I have this private personal grudge against the TSA.

But the argument that usually gets trotted out that I think is the best one because all the safety ones are just nonsense, that it's going to make flight more expensive because the security costs are going to get passed along.

Okay.

Maybe they've got you there.

The airlines are not going to eat the cost of doing private security if they don't absolutely have to.

They're just going to raise prices.

Yes, I don't expect them to eat the cost of security.

So, what?

Passengers just have to pay more because you have a chip on your shoulder about getting searched at the airport and I want my $165 back?

Is that what's happening here?

You're like the paperboy from Better Off Dead, like $2.

The logical fallacy with this argument, though, is you're already paying for it in the form of taxes.

I suspect there's hidden costs baked into your ticket because of it.

There's that 9-11 tax that you see on every ticket you buy, the 9-11 fee when you buy an airline ticket.

I personally did 9-11 and I'm paying them back for it.

Government services aren't free.

They're funded by extracting wealth from productive citizens.

They're not free.

Okay.

Well, look, I think you make a good case, honestly.

I'm not sure that you're ever going to see a day when we don't have a TSA because the next attack would just be blamed on the person who cuts the agency.

But I appreciate you educating me and our listeners on why exactly they can reasonably be considered a waste of money.

But I have to know something.

So I know you're pretty hostile towards the government in general, but why the TSA?

I mean, I've got my like pet gripe because of my wallet getting raided twice, but why is this your arch nemesis agency of the federal government?

Yeah, it's not the CIA, it's not the IRS, it's the TSA.

Honestly, I think it impedes a very fundamental right to travel without getting groped or worse or robbed or whatever.

More than that, it's such a new agency.

It's like not even 25 years old.

There's tons of people who are alive who remember what flying was like before the TSA.

So it's not, we're going to get rid of, I don't even know, insert here and like, it's been around for 100 years and whatever.

The Federal Reserve.

We're going to get rid of the Federal Reserve.

There's not a single living human being who remembers life before the Federal Reserve.

There's two people talking right now who remember what life was like before the TSA.

And I don't know, it's this symbol, it's this emblem for me of everything that went wrong on September 12th, 2001.

All the freedom we lost.

And it's just staring at me in the face, grinning at me, screaming at me to take my shoes off every time I have to get on an airplane.

Even if I am not totally convinced, I got to admit you make some solid points here.

Studies show that people don't change their minds about things even when confronted with evidence.

Yeah, I don't believe that.

Anyway, thanks as always for taking us for a tour around the world of the TSA.

I'm really looking forward to the barrels full of hate mail that I'm going to get from TSA agents who've never robbed or raped anyone in the line of duty.

I know y'all exist.

I wish I ran into you more often.

And frankly, thank you for trying to keep us safer.

I know you have the best intentions.

And please don't take this episode of the show personally.

It never, ever is.

And I welcome feedback.

I want to hear why we might be wrong about some of this.

And if you know more about the cool tech that's on Israeli commercial airliners, I want to hear more about that too, because that stuff is wild.

Thank you all for listening.

Topic suggestions, feedback for Skeptical Sunday.

You can come right to me, Jordan, at jordanharbinger.com.

Show notes at jordanharbinger.com.

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And this show is created in association with Podcast One.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jay Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Our advice and opinions are our own.

And I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer.

Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show.

Remember, we rise by lifting others.

Share the show with those you love.

If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge that we doled out today.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

And we'll see you next time.

You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show about how hormonal birth control can affect a woman's personality and even influence who they pick as a partner.

Hormones affect the way that our brain does its daily business, and that includes things like attraction.

You know, there's a lot of research that shows that for both men and women, it's like the cues that we tend to find as sexy and beautiful in women are cues that are related to estrogen presence and fertility.

Our sex hormones are part of what creates the experience of being who we are, and all of it is helping to guide our behavior in ways that are actually really adaptive and functional.

Estrogen loves testosterone, and that's, you know, just kind of the way that it is.

How does taking the pill change women's sexual psychology, and how does that change their sexual behavior?

And I also think that there is a tendency to trivialize the types of side effects that we have from the pill.

Because when you look at some of the most frequently occurring side effects, it's things like depression, like a complete absence of sex drive.

I mean, it can really change behavior in ways that can not always be necessarily what we want.

They're not one size fits all and everybody's going to respond a little bit differently and so it's just important that you know that these things are possible so you know what to look out for them.

There is nothing that will derail a person's life more than an unplanned pregnancy and this is particularly true in our current environment where women aren't able to get safe legal abortions in many states.

I am for you having all the information that you need to be able to make the decision that's right for you because what is the right decision for you might not be the same decision that's right for me.

To hear more from Dr.

Sarah Hill about the problems with taking birth control, check out episode 280 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.