According to the results of recent undercover tests, TSA airport security measures are hugely ineffective:

An internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration revealed security failures at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports, where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials, ABC News has learned.

The series of tests were conducted by Homeland Security Red Teams who pose as passengers, setting out to beat the system.

According to officials briefed on the results of a recent Homeland Security Inspector General’s report, TSA agents failed 67 out of 70 tests, with Red Team members repeatedly able to get potential weapons through checkpoints.

I wonder if these tests were ever run before 9/11. I wonder what they would have revealed. It’s hard to believe that airport security measures could have been much worse than 95% faulty before the advent of the TSA. If anything, it seems that things might be worse now, in spite of the all the extra hoops harmless passengers have to jump through in order to get on a plane.

It should come as no surprise that I think the TSA, and the DHS for that matter, are largely ineffective wastes of public money that do nothing more than make us all feel a greater sense of security without significantly increasing our actual national security.

The same could be said for the NSA data collection. They can’t point to one specific case where bulk collection was necessary for the prevention of terrorism, yet pretty much every Senator but Rand Paul was crying about how the expiration of the Patriot Act put our national security in danger.

When will we learn? We have been giving up our freedoms little by little for decades in order to gain an illusory feeling of security. And here we come to find out, we now have neither. Almost like what Benjamin Franklin said:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.