Why I Opt Out of TSA Screening

To the TSA supervisor at Denver International Airport who recently told me "we are interested in you": yes, I asked to fly as a selectee without providing ID. I've done so before. It took eight TSA officers, airline representatives, and police about 45 minutes to determine I posed no threat, and I was repeatedly asked questions I was under no legal obligation to answer. When I asked whether I was legally required to respond with my address and phone number, that line of questioning abruptly ended.

I'm not a terrorist and have no interest in harming anyone. My disagreement with the screening system rests on a straightforward calculation: the process cannot reliably detect probable threats, yet it imposes disproportionate social and monetary costs — long wait times, missed flights, lost items, and for many, a deeply invasive loss of personal dignity. The question is whether those costs are justified by the system's actual effect on preventing catastrophic events. I believe they are not.

A Reactive, Not Anticipatory, Strategy

The TSA's screening approach is fundamentally reactive. Shoe removal began only after Richard Reid's 2001 attempt to ignite his footwear. Liquid restrictions came after the 2006 UK bombing plot. Toner cartridge screening followed the thwarted cargo plane bombs. The system is continually playing catch-up, and each new defense addresses only the last attack vector — leaving previously unexploited avenues open.

Specific technical failures compound the problem:

  • The pat-down is not aggressive enough to detect concealed weapons, particularly for passengers with significant body fat who could hide items in areas screeners don't check. The only explanation for this laxity is a concern for public sensibilities, but at the cost of effectiveness.
  • X-ray screeners routinely miss restricted items and even fail bomb drills, as the TSA itself has acknowledged. Many passengers have accidentally carried scissors, knives, and liquids through security undetected.
  • Metal detectors — still the primary defense at many airports — cannot detect ceramic, glass, or weakly paramagnetic metals like titanium. Ceramic blades are readily available at any cooking store.
  • Terahertz scanners have a penetration depth of only a few centimeters at best; they cannot see objects concealed in body cavities or implanted within the body.
  • Backscatter X-ray systems with deeper penetration cannot distinguish between medical implants and weapons, and the screening software only flags anomalies for physical inspection.

Systemic Vulnerabilities

Two structural weaknesses undermine the entire security apparatus. First, passengers transferring between flights are not universally re-screened, meaning the whole US air system is only as safe as the weakest connecting airport. Second, not every screening method is applied to every passenger, and the methods used can be deliberately altered by passenger choice — declining AIT, timing entry security during high-load periods, or selecting a particular point of entry creates entire threat classes that pass through unchecked.

Even if every method were applied consistently at every airport, internally concealed weakly-magnetic weapons would still evade detection. And while terrorism gets the headlines, the statistical risk remains remarkably low: an order of magnitude more people die from mechanical failure or pilot error than from terrorism. Meanwhile, queuing hundreds or thousands of people in tightly packed groups before screening creates a soft target in itself.

Some legitimate items simply cannot be screened reasonably. Motorized wheelchairs pack around 100 amp-hours at 12 volts — roughly 4.32 × 10⁶ joules, comparable to a kilogram of TNT. Meanwhile, security personnel, pilots, and cargo are held to much lower screening standards than passengers.

How whistleblowers are treated suggests the agency priorities are skewed. Robert Cravens, who reported hundreds of pounds of improperly stored flammable material, and Chris Liu, who posted video of security breaches to YouTube, faced retaliation rather than gratitude. One TSA Human Resources statement noted, "because it is illegal to retaliate at the TSA there is no need to maintain an office for complaints" — a curious position given the evidence.

These shortcomings are obvious, and I suspect DHS and TSA teams have raised precisely these concerns internally. The fact they haven't been addressed suggests the conclusions were buried by bureaucracy or ideological resistance.

Toward Real Risk Management

Eliminating airport security isn't the answer. The $8.1 billion annual budget should be spent addressing likely threats, not just the attacks we've already seen. A truly secure system requires comprehensive, layered risk management:

  • Behavioral assessment. Israel, where terrorist attacks are a tragic routine, uses questioning, close observation, and soft intelligence-gathering to identify threats before they reach the checkpoint.
  • Physical hardening. Reinforced cockpit doors, failsafe flight controls, and capability for rapid fighter interception make hijacking far more difficult.
  • Better training. Screeners should recognize more than the demo bombs used in drills. Deeper screening and stringent background checks for trusted employees are essential.
  • Technological failsafes. Modern aircraft can already take off, fly, and land under computer control. It is entirely feasible — and likely under development — to build planes that cannot be hijacked into structures. In a crisis, pilots could enable a failsafe landing mode: no manual override, the aircraft diverts to the nearest airport and touches down automatically. Even if such a mode proved ten times more likely to cause a crash than manual control, it would still improve on the near-certain loss from hijacking — and would eliminate the hostage value of passengers entirely.
  • Cultural engagement. Since 9/11, passengers have shown they understand their stake in a hijacking. Encouraging people to confront attackers — tackling a passenger who lights his shoes on fire, shouting a warning when someone brandishes a weapon — is a proven, low-cost defense.

The present system allocates massive resources to the specific attack modes already attempted, while glaring vulnerabilities persist elsewhere. I will continue to opt out of voluntary screening procedures and decline to answer questions I'm not legally required to answer, in the hope that honest risk assessment eventually replaces reactive theater.