Boggie Dog

Then the airlines should be doing ID checks not TSA. TSA functions should limited to passenger screening and not one thing more. Airline revenue protection is certainly not something that TSA should be a party too.

chollie

I don't recall hearing about anyone taking over a plane with a mis-matched ID and BP in hand.

Carl Johnson

Yes?

Chang and Eng Bunker used to do it all the time. They would trade IDs, and each would impersonate the other, and then when the plane was airborne they would take advantage of the confusion to take over the plane and fly it to some resort destination.

chollie

I wonder if the Red Team tests are strictly about contraband or if they ever try to pass the TDC with bad docs?

WillCAD

Sorry chollie, I have to call you out on your BS here.

You know as well as I do that TSA's primary focus is and has been for years to force all travelers to Respect Their Authoritah! A strong secondary focus is on making the Big Catch that gets them written up in the newsletter and web site, through the interdiction of water bottles and lightsabers. Drugs, kiddie porn, and cash interdiction are a common tertiary focus.

The reason the ID/BP check was put into place initially was to reduce screening times by limiting the number of people screened to ticketed passengers only. To prove you're a ticketed passenger, you have to show a valid BP, and to prevent someone from printing extra copies of the same valid BP on their home printer and passing them out like party favors, it's required to show ID to prove you're the person to whom the BP was issued. For this purpose - reduction of people screened to ticketed pax only - the TDC does serve a reasonably useful purpose.

Of course, there is a general public misconception that an ID check somehow equals a security measure. I think some people actually believe that TDCs have a list of every terr'ist in the world memorized, and that terr'ists use their own ID to transit checkpoints, thus ensuring that they will be caught by the eagle-eyed TDC and prevented from carrying out another attack that will make 9/11 look like amateur hour. This ridiculous belief system is what drives the ID checks around the airport. Incidents in recent years of stow-aways who got through TDCs with fraudulent or expired BPs in other peoples' names were played up in the media as 'security breaches', even though for once TSA was actually correct when they stated that the stow-aways went through the same physical screening as everyone else and posed no more threat than any other pax.

So although I am not in favor of eliminating the ID/BP check, simply because I don't want to eliminate the restriction of ticketed pax only in the sterile area, I do agree with you that the ID check is not a security measure and should never be viewed or treated as such. I just don't want the security lines overloaded with families of twenty saying good-bye to gramma and grampa as they embark on their whirlwind vacations to Barstow or Grand Rapids.

Since the TDC is not a security function, however, perhaps it should be taken over by the airlines. Perhaps privatizing the function, managing it through the local airport authorities while paying for it through airline revenue, would be a better solution than the current TSA version. I dunno. No easy answers to this one.

goalie

Oh, c'mon-give the screeners some credit! They did get 3 right

catocony

Almost 15 years after 9/11, and paranoia is still in the drivers seat. Not even in his wildest dreams did Bin Laden think that the attacks would have such a huge and lasting effect on US society.

petaluma1

Here's a perfect example:

https://twitter.com/AskTSA/status/726825511574470656

Usual Suspect

This explains the weird random secondary screening on the evening of April 29th. First time in the US where I was in the PreCheck line, walked through the metal detector, no metal alarm, then told I was randomly selected for the xray machine. I worked on nuclear materials at an earlier age and don't care about the radiation dosage, nor do I care who sees my junk. I was wearing my usual business clothing, which had been through the scanners a few times in Canada and the UK without issue. This time at MSP however, it alerted on my sleeves, not sure why, I don't wear a watch, haven't in years, so it is just skin and clothes. They did the pat down and wand, didn't find anything, and the swabs were negative. I was asked to take off my sport coat, the TSO placed it in a bin and they ran it through the xray machine for carry-ons. No surprise to me, they found nothing. Normally you get the pat down and maybe the wand, but they went all out on a false positive. Now that I saw the article I understand the new and improved (cough, cough) random screening. It was nothing more than a waste of 10 minutes I will never get back.

WillCAD

X-ray whole body images are no longer in use at US airports. The units currently in use are Millimeter Wave (MMW) units, which use microwaves, a non-ionizing form of radiation.

Also, those units are now all equipped with Automated Target Recognition software (ATR), and there are no images displayed on monitors any more. Instead, an indicator lights up on a stick-figure panel, which looks like this:


The MMW alarms on all sorts of harmless stuff - sweat, thick folds of cloth, etc. If it alarmed on your sleeves, maybe it was the thickness of the cuffs that caused the alarm, or maybe even the buttons.

Usual Suspect

I just found it strange that it has only done this at MSP and I have worn the same shirt/jacket before and had no issues at LAX, YYL, and CHI to name a few, it is favorite combo to wear. I am guessing they changed the machines to be more sensitive after the last failed inspections, which I will also stick my neck out and say probably won't improve their rating either. They also had 2 at every screen watching the luggage go by, which probably means TSA thinks if 1 misses it 90% of the time, 2 must be better, but I have yet to see any conclusive testing evidence of that either.

WillCAD

MMW isn't like a metal detector; they don't have a "sensitivity" dial that can be turned up to make them more sensitive.

They use microwaves in a way similar to an x-ray; the microwaves pass through clothing, but bounce off of denser things like human skin.

The software in them evaluates the signals that bounce back from each square inch of the victim, er perp, er traveler's body, and based on the strength and frequency of the return (and probably a lot of other stuff I don't know anything about), it decides whether the signal bounced off of skin, or off of something other than skin. If something other, it alerts.

The software that evaluates the bounced signals was originally used to map them to the pixels of a digital image, much like a digital camera does with the light that strikes its sensor. But now, instead of creating an image, the machine routes the scan return data to the ATR software, which looks at it and decides whether it was a skin bounce or a non-skin bounce. I don't know whether there are different versions of ATR in use at the airports around the country, but my guess is that some airports will have more recent versions than others, and the more recent the version, the more accurate it should be.

There are many reasons why you may have gotten that false alarm, even including if your wrists were wet because you just washed your hands. If the sleeves fell in just the right orientation as you held your arms up, that might have affected the outcome, as well. Or the machine could be out of calibration, which is entirely possible given the poor record of maintenance that TSA has with it's equipment.

Essentially, there is no way to definitively narrow down the reason for the false alarm, but don't let a single data point fool you into thinking there is a trend - if that combination of shirt and jacket worked in the AIT at 3 out of 4 airports, then you'll probably be fine in 3/4 of the US airports you might transit. On the other hand, if you start getting alerts consistently when wearing that combo, try taking the jacket off. This will mean fewer layers of cloth for the MMW to pass through for the scan, and less likelihood of the machine alarming on something insignificant like an extra layer of clothing.

Boggie Dog

There is some calibration required for WBI. Don't know if that impacts sensitivity or not. Improper calibration was on of the reasons cited for Red Team Test failures at MSP.

chollie

It sounded like the MSP machine failed to alarm, so the pax didn't get an 'anomaly resolution' grope of the area.

That's clearly not the fault of the TSO manning the machine (ie, a 'screening' fault), but it is the fault of whoever is tasked with regularly calibrating the machine.

I don't recall hearing this possibility discussed. It's not good when the machine alarms on a bald man's bare head, but it's really not good when the machine does not alarm on an actual piece of contraband because it was badly calibrated.

Boggie Dog

The WBI's have alarmed on my bare neck and arm. I have had bare skin patted down by TSA's braintrust. I put little faith in these machines.