First, I think you have to assume that the TSA will always fail and visibly so. If we assume the best, the goal of setting up an organization like that is to increase the barrier to such an attack, not to be the organization that directly prevents it.
This being said, I don't think we can assume the best here. I think it's easier rather than harder to get prohibited items onto airplanes than it was pre-9/11 and that's the real metric of success. Use of shiny new machines without a thorough review of weak spots and clear efforts to compensate is a recipe for bad security.
I don't think it's just a matter of government refusing to allow its ideas to fail. It's also a product of two more major antipatterns here, which is "Never use the tried and true when you could be using the new and shiny instead" and "security is a product, not a process."
This being said, I don't think we can assume the best here. I think it's easier rather than harder to get prohibited items onto airplanes than it was pre-9/11 and that's the real metric of success. Use of shiny new machines without a thorough review of weak spots and clear efforts to compensate is a recipe for bad security.
I don't think it's just a matter of government refusing to allow its ideas to fail. It's also a product of two more major antipatterns here, which is "Never use the tried and true when you could be using the new and shiny instead" and "security is a product, not a process."