Since its launch in 2001, the Transportation Security Agency has attracted the ire of the Internet like no other government agency. I think it's probably safe to say that everyone who types stuff into a form of some sort and presses a "Post" or "Publish" button—and this covers not just forum posters and bloggers but the whole spectrum of new media—has had something to say about the TSA at some point in their writing career. I myself indulge frequently (see this post), and as near as I can tell from the feedback I get, the audience for anti-TSA ranting grows by an order of magnitude with each new travel inconvenience that the agency imposes.

But the TSA is no longer going to take the flames lying down. The agency has decided to take the PR fight to the enemy by launching its own blog called "Evolution of Security." The blog's tag-line is "Terrorists evolve. Threats evolve. Security must stay ahead. You play a part." I personally hate the name and the tagline, since I believe that threats, terrorists, and security were all created in their present form about 10,000 years ago... though I guess it is possible that terrorists can micro-evolve while still remaining terrorists.

The blog's first post has 131 comments so far, almost all of which fall into one of two categories: TSA employees who got the internal memo about the blog launch and dropped by to post positive things, and citizens who are really mad about the liquids screening policy. My suspicion is that this post is probably indicative of the kinds of comments that we'll see on the blog from here on out—"Evolution of Security" will be a place where TSA employees hear from irate travelers about the same three or four issues, over and over and over again, no matter what the original post topic.

It's also possible that this is exactly the point of the blog; it could be a kind of Internet safety valve where the TSA's critics can go to vent. I suggest that this may be the case because the site's very short blogroll includes links to a number of sites that are extremely critical of the agency's policies. Bruce Schneier, for instance, gets a shoutout, despite the fact that he's the Internet's number one critic of the TSA's "security theater" approach to defending the skies.

I suppose it's possible that this "flypaper strategy"—i.e., we'll fight all our critics here on this blog so that we don't have to fight them elsewhere—makes more sense on the Internet than it does in the war on terror, but I'm not seeing it. Or maybe the TSA really does just want to hear what we all have to say about security, so that they can take our feedback into account... okay, I'm sorry, I can't suggest that with a straight face.



Never Forget

Let me welcome the TSA to the world of blogging by throwing a question their way and seeing if they reply. After all, you're not really a blogger if you're not mixing it up with other bloggers in the fast-paced game of snark and counter-snark. So here's my question:

My experience in airport security line conversations over the years is that everyone who takes a moment to turn three or four neurons' worth of attention to the much-hated liquids policy comes to exactly the same conclusion: if it takes, say, 20 ounces of bomb juice to blow up an airplane, then you can just send two terrorists with 10 ounces of bomb juice each on board, and they can combine their bomb juice to make a 20-ounce bomb. So why the seemingly idiotic limits on the amount of liquids in my carry-on bag? And why, if I'm in the security line with a bottle of water or a cup of coffee, can't I just drink some of it to demonstrate that it is not, in fact, bomb juice?

In an e-mail back-and-forth (via Threat Level) with Bruce Schneier, Kip Hawley, the head of the TSA and one of the agency's new bloggers, ducked this question again and again with answers that amounted to a long-winded way of saying "Just trust us; we know things that you don't about chemical bombs." But handwaving about how you can't go into specifics is a copout, because presumably bomb-making terrorist already know the specifics. So the only folks you're keeping in the dark are frustrated travelers who just want to why their common-sense take on this scenario is so wrong.

So I would like to put this same question to Mr. Hawley again, this time from one blogger to another. Precisely what is to prevent multiple bomb juice-packing terrorists from combining their individually packed bomb juices into a single bomb? Can you enlighten us?