I mean, I read news articles that say the TSA fail to actually catch prohibited items like weapons or drugs most of the time… so what’s the point? Many people are calling this “Security Theater”… Does this “Security Theater” actually scare away a would-be terrorist?
You can test the catch rate of illegal or dangerous materials, but this is a measure more of the chance of catching someone once an attack is already prepared and being put into action. Basically, it just measures if its security theatre or not. To know if its effective at preventing attacks, we’d also need to know the number who wanted to attack and decided against it because TSA existed.