Up, Up and Away, with TSA: Longtime readers know that I have not been a TSA basher. It's very common among pundits and editorialists to mercilessly hammer TSA as anything from a useless annoyance to a pack of fascist lapdogs. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, folks I know who fly frequently seem less likely to be so negative. As for me, I simply don't know if TSA is effective or not. Certainly, there has been no major airline terrorism in the U.S. in the past few years; that should count for something. On the other hand, there's a reason Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc is referred to as a common fallacy.

Recently a TSA admin named Kip Hawley submitted to a five part interview with a fellow named Bruce Schneider, who is apparently a big critic of TSA. The interview was civil (although many of the comments from readers are not) and rather informative. My impressions:

• The point of screening is not to catch everyone with a contraband item. That's acknowledged as impossible. So if someone sneaks something through, that is not indicative of a failure of the process. The point is to make it risky enough that it is not worthwhile to attempt anything.
• Much is made of how the many of the current security policies are ineffective. Shoe removal and limiting carry-on liquids foremost among them. The TSA admin tries to justify them and doesn't do to well. I agree that those are pretty ineffective measures but the fact of the matter is that we have no one to blame for them but ourselves. When that bridge collapsed in Minneapolis they hadn't even pulled the bodies out before people were casting around for someone to blame, and by extension, someone to sue. Can you imagine if they stopped checking shoes and some plane got shoe bombed? How many people complaining about it being ineffective would change their tune and start casting around for someone to blame? How big would the lawsuits be? We'd need a tax increase just to cover the government payments to the survivor's families. This is the bed we've made with litigation. Not TSA's fault.
• I didn't know this, but TSA does not maintain the no-fly list. No one is ever stopped at security because they are on the no-fly list. If you got a boarding pass you are not on the no-fly list. People are stopped at security either because an agent has a suspicion or they are selected by a mathematically random process for extra screening. Also, there are apparently some very reliable methods for identifying guilty parties through their behavior. (I'm should professional poker players have known this for years.) I'm curious as to what they are.
• TSA abuses of authority do happen. Of course, anytime anyone has authority, there is the potential for abuse. A cop had a fight with his wife so he writes you up even though you were only going 7 mph over the limit. A health inspector wakes up constipated and so your restaurant is shut down for a week. That kind of thing happens all the time, the question is whether it is more common when TSA is involved. I don't know the answer and I don't know that anyone else does either.

Bottom line, as usual, is that there is more to the story than the knee-jerk rants you read.