Daryl Campbell

And it really just amounts to libertarian bona fides about privatization is great.

It saves money.

It creates a better solution.

And kind of the devil is in the details with that sort of thing.

You could get a good security company, but you might not.

And so it's not this magic bullet that's going to solve everyone's problems with the TSA.

So in 1998, let's say, which is I think the first memory that I have of flying...

I went to the airport and you could actually go up to the gate and meet people without a boarding pass, but you still had to pass through a medical detector.

You still had to put your purse or your backpack or whatever through a scanner, but it was pretty non-invasive, pretty low touch.

Really the goal was to prevent the kind of armed hijackings that were common prior

to 9-11, which is where people would take a plane and fly it to Cuba or that sort of thing.

So everybody wasn't really doing it to the same standard.

So infamously, the private security company in Boston's Logan Airport let some of the 9-11 hijackers on board with knives and with things that they really weren't supposed to have or they didn't think to look at that might have been caught in other areas of the country.

So the TSA came in, they federalized everything, and more importantly, they federalized the standards.

Yeah.

You'll also recall that we had zero 9-11s before 9-11, so under the previous security regime.

Touche.

So that's not the best data point.

But they actually do have these what they call red team challenges where they send federal officers with fake weapons and fake bombs through there.

Most recently, the ones that have been publicized didn't make the DHS and TSA look great.