The Transportation Security Administration (TSA)

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Current day airline safety often encroaches on civil liberties, the agents who screen passengers significantly encroaches on an individual’s time and privacy that the passenger feels dissuaded from attempting to fly at all. Deterring innocent passengers from flying is a horrible consequence of the current safety standards for air travel. Ordinary citizens have a right to free travel without being subjected to automatically being assumed a threat by choosing to travel by air. The main culprit for enforcing such strict, yet unsuccessful, safety standards is the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The Administration was created as a post 9/11 policy to react to American citizen’s concern about the threat of airline terrorism. The creation…show more content…
The federal government’s absolute control over the TSA makes airline travel inefficient because adjusting the administration’s budget for more screeners, technology, and research is difficult and slow to develop. The security lines in airports are more often than not long and slow and there is no obvious solution that would make the TSA more efficient. Author Julia Zorthian of Time magazine claimed that the TSA blames passengers: “They carry on too many bags, which causes delays, and sometimes ignore small steps like having their IDs and boarding passes ready what would expedite the security process”. There is an unfortunate distribution of blame between the federal government and the consumers. The federal administration of airport security isn’t beneficial to either party; the federal government is responsible for drafting a budget of $7.4 Million dollars which adds to the national debt and the consumers are being subjected to inconvenient and intrusive screening processes (Zorthian 1). The TSA is a waste of government resources that could be spent in another sector of government operations that has been proven to be more effective at preventing terrorism plots. The major problems with the screening of airline passengers is that all passengers are assumed as a potential terrorist until proven innocent only by means of a physical inspection. Homeland…show more content…
Allowing for private investors to participate in the TSA would create an environment for innovative security structures. Investors would be incentivized to increase profits through airport checkpoints and would alleviate the federal government from funding the administration. The current workers for the TSA consists of 42,000 officers which isn’t enough to meet market demand (Zorthian). Each airport has various management complications to overcome and each location needs to rapidly adjust their workforce, to avoid being unproductive. If airport passenger screening is privatized the screening performance would most likely be enhanced by decreasing management issues and allowing for adaptable budgeting. Due to the mismanagement of the TSA the amount of disturbance that air travelers are subjected to is tremendous. Operational mismanagement has been a part of the TSA since its inception; which distracts the agency from operating at its full potential for increasing aviation security. During an audit of a large American international airport, screeners missed 45 of the 75 bomb materials that were packed into carry-ons (Thomas 2). The ineffectiveness of the administration creates a hostile relationship between the agents and the passengers. The conception of the TSA furthermore interfered with one’s fundamental right to privacy. Peter

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