TSA Policies Become Slightly Less Stupid
The TSA ends its stupidest rule ever after 20 years of pointlessness: The Transportation Security Administration has started to phase out its rule requiring travelers to take off their shoes before going through security after, oh, just 20 years of forcing everyone to show off their ugly toenails in public. Per The New York Times, “the agency has not officially announced this change and did not confirm the new policy, which appears to be taking effect at airports across the country.” The report relies on an anonymous source but is apparently corroborated by the recent accounts of travelers. Caleb Harmon-Marshall, a former TSA officer, first reported the soft launch of this policy via his travel newsletter.
“Why now?” Harmon-Marshall asks. “I think it’s politics, not security. A handful of lawmakers have recently ramped up criticism of the TSA, with some even floating the idea of dismantling the agency altogether. From complaints about long lines to inconsistent screening experiences, the pressure has been mounting. And this shoe change? It feels like a direct response to that pressure.” It appears to be happening first at major airports, then trickling down to all of them.
The policy was put in place because of Richard Reid, a British-born criminal who had been radicalized and trained by Al Qaeda, who boarded American Airlines Flight 63 between Paris and Miami in December 2001 wearing shoes full of explosives. The bombs did not go off; keen flight attendants noticed his suspicious behavior—including lighting matches on the plane—and tackled him, sustaining bite wounds; passengers and crew members helped to prevent Reid from detonating the bombs, with an off-duty doctor even tranquilizing him for the duration of the flight. The plane emergency-landed in Boston, where Reid was apprehended by law enforcement. He was later sentenced to three life terms plus 110 years in prison without parole. And so, because of this true psycho, the rule was born five years later, in 2006, which itself defies logic. The TSA has, to date, never caught anyone with bombs hidden in their shoes. (And many people accept it as a foregone conclusion that the Reid shoe bombs would have downed the plane, when that’s not necessarily true.)
I wonder if one unintended consequence of this policy change will be fewer people signing up and paying for PreCheck, which allows preapproved people to keep their shoes on (and their laptops in their bags, and a few other tweaks to the process).
But the shoe-removal policy is far from universal, as international travelers routinely notice. “You don’t take your shoes off anywhere but in the U.S.—not in Israel, in Amsterdam, in London,” aviation security expert Yossi Sheffi told The Washington Post back in 2011. “We all know why we do it here, but this seems to be a make-everybody-feel-good thing rather than a necessity.” Still, it’s a good thing for the TSA to begin to roll back some of its pointless, ineffective security theater, especially if the policies haven’t been proven useful at actually catching would-be bombers over the years.
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