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Most folks don't love security theater & everyone has had a bad time at a screening checkpoint. So, let's think for a second about hypothetical private-#TSA companies. I'd expect them to gravitate towards AI-assigned individual risk ratings to minimize the cost of hiring & training people to interact with travelers. To create ratings, I'd expect them to demand & consolidate invasive pools of our biometrics, web browsing, commenting, purchasing, movements & private lives. Just don't call it a "social credit score" You can bet they'll pivot to trying to monetize their data. 2026: We're a terminal security company 2029: We're a person rating company Would these ratings make their way into other parts of our lives & things we want to visit? And who exactly would stand up for us when the ratings are wrong? Or our data is shipped to foreign buyers. Who holds #PrivateTSA companies accountable? The US doesn't have strong #privacy protections... I'm also not optimistic about private sector security companies' ability to stop breaches. History backs me up here. But I do expect that private-TSA companies could use lobbying to limit oversight & accountability. That's been the history of other privacy-invasive tech companies. So, as an airline security privatization conversation kicks off, remember that it can't just be "current thing is bad" but needs to consider what kind of future we're inviting in. image

Replies (18)

1) The TSA is about 20 years old, eliminating them only means going back about 20 years. They didn’t need your chat history or biometrics 25 years ago they don’t need it now. 2) No data besides biometrics are required to authenticate the person is who they say they are from your list. If that’s your approach. From there it’s a bag screening. Chat history and other data you are supposing they would try to collect for “risk of bringing a bomb on a flight” without screening every bag is, not going to work, it wouldn’t work now if they tried it with the TSA. 3) most of the The things people dislike from the TSA are things that airport security in the rest of the world doesn’t do. Leave your belt on, shoes on, etc, not be microwave scanned, etc it’s just an unnecessary level in the rest of the world, so probably an unnecessary degree for us too. Reverting to private security back to 1999 or modern UK/ France is achievable now without algorithms or pervasive data gathering. If you are going to screen every bag, and you will, then you don’t actually need to know anything about the passenger before the screening, you just need to go through their stuff (Xray, bomb dogs etc)
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↩ replying to npub1pncg...qlgr
I hear what you are saying, and agree that this kind of advanced data collection probably is not necessary. My view is: don't underestimate the power of these industries. Consider that there's a difference between what kind of invasiveness might be needed.... and what will be instantly sought & probably granted. Getting concrete. The cheaper bids on contracts will probably be because they rely heavily on more automated approaches... And to make that work, they are going to want data.
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↩ replying to jsr
Would it be fair to say the true game is to surrender the data of the citizens to a lobbyist that has the infrastructure of digital capture in place already? Oh I don't know, Facebook or Palantir, perhaps? Or may be always hungry fElon pursuing total control? All this "wouldn't it be nice to dismantle TSA" is just smoke and mirrors in preparation for a private capture, read the oligarchy.
↩ replying to npub1ce29...rk0s
Not so simple or obvious in a free market, or a free society that doesn't depend on big daddy government for protection from everything. Private airlines will be incentivized to keep their planes safe. How many customers, jets, and employees do they want to lose to terrorists? How many CAN they lose before they are out of business? The winners will be those airlines that can keep their planes safe and do it politely and cheaply. I trust the free market can do that; we already know governments cannot.
Horrible take. The state has no incentive to make the process better for the consumer. You’ve created a number of straw men arguments to suggest that the state can do it better. Why wouldn’t the tsa also resort to the methods described? The tsa is violating the 4th amendment with every passenger. Flying is a govt controlled industry that’s inevitably getting worse over time. There is no longer any innovation and the incentive system is broken.
TSA as it stands today is a downward spiral of handholding grown adults disguised as protection. The utter dehumanization felt at airports is akin to cattle being farmed to slaughter, then released on good behavior. “Strip down, put your hands up, and shut up” sounds more like a totalitarian principle than a preventative measure for a few bad actors. Definitely needs to be a topic of discussion, but the solution can’t just be to privatize and move on.
lol airport security was always private until relatively recently, and still is in other countries, and it has always worked fine. da TSA is an orwellian nightmare nobody likes created to solve nonexistent problems. the ignorance of dese basic facts is even more orwellian and creepy... either dat or u ppl are just really young and didn't think dis thru. OH YA N DID I MENTION FUK U N FUK DA GVT???????