[geeks] FS: iPhone 4 (16G black CDMA)

[Shannon]

On 19-Dec-2011 14:54, Mouse wrote:
>> Sometimes i think the only reason we're still allowed to fly at all
>> is that both the people staffing TSA checkpoints and the people
>> writing the TSA's regulations are neither very bright, nor very
>> imaginative.
> 
> Oh, I think the real reason is that the people making the regulations
> want to continue to fly themselves ("I'm too busy to drive/train/etc"),
> but there aren't enough of them to keep airlines commercially viable
> without the fleet of cattle in the cattle-car portions of the planes.
> 
> The rest, including all the sceurity theatre, is PR efforts.

One of the problems here is that this is heavily tied into Homeland
Security.

One of the great failures of the the terrorist attacks against the USA
in 2001 was communication between agencies. This was used to shove
Homeland Security's creation through in only about 30 days.

I know people in Naval Intelligence and other services, and I get mixed
messages from them.

Some of them say that HS has definitely helped stop the problems with
institutional myopia and refusal to cooperate. Data flows now like it
was supposed to before, because someone is making it happen. I would
agree that we needed to fix that.

Of course my response to them is: Yes, but do we need an agency with
170K employees to do that? Couldn't a far smaller team, maybe one built
from members of several agencies do the same job without creating a
cabinet position and a huge bureaucracy?

Their response is often: Probably, but I don't think it would have
happened otherwise.

I know from talking to my friends in that arena (and I did some work
their myself) that information exchange and refusal to cooperate was a
very real problem and it is better now. I just don't agree that HS was
the way to solve that problem, at least not in its current state.

Also its a gross increase in executive power to make the head of HS a
cabinet position. The executive has been gaining way too much power in
straight up violation of the Constitution for awhile now.

I'm actually starting to see some people in HS start to concede that
maybe the TSA needs to be privatized.

One problem with all of this is the difficulty of verifying how
successful it is. On the one hand you want to know since after all
taxpayers are paying for it and subject to some of its negatives.

On the other hand, disclosure of the details of current operations can
get people killed.

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