Originally Posted by PatrickHenry1775
A couple items in this post cry out for devil's advocate treatment:
1) "The catch here is that you are screened immediately and/or are not in the holding area with other passengers awaiting the full handwanding screening. Otherwise, you will have to undergo the full handwanding."
With all of the information technology available nowadays, if TSA does not act quickly enough, a "shoe selectee" is forced to undergo full screening? How about giving shoe selectees a card signifying just ETD rather than full secondary screening? Such a procedure would save both passenger and screeners' time.
Taking off your shoes would save everybody time.
I think screeners will respond more quickly. It's easier to only ETD shoes than to give the full Monty, so this alone is incentive enough for screeners. But the easiest thing is for you not to put yourself in that position to begin with. You already know what the so-called SSI standard is for shoes; if you're stubborn enough to keep them on and still protest about it, then that's a choice you'll have to deal with.
Originally Posted by PatrickHenry1775
2) "If you are a selectee, when we search your bags, all we have to do is take an ETD sample of the interior of your carry-on bags rather than conduct a whole bag search as we've been doing in the past."
I thought that one of the reasons for the bag rooting procedure was to look for non-metallic prohibited items, not just explosives. I guess the danger from such non-prohibited items just went away, similar to the danger from lighters suddenly increasing this past April.
As pointed out by
eyecue, that bag is already x-rayed. What you continue to ignore is that selectee bags are already screened once, and that
should be sufficient, just as it is for everyone else who is not a selectee. So it's not like we are ignoring any aspect of prohibited items. We are, in essence, doing a security overkill on explosives. While that's not necessarily a bad thing; I think it's still ineffecient.
Originally Posted by PatrickHenry1775
I am grateful for a shift toward risk management and expediting secondary searches, but one has to wonder about the geniuses who develop TSA policy.
You're not the only one wondering. However, I still see it as a step in the right direction. I think this still boils down to the type of people hired by TSA: those with extensive security backgrounds. Not necessarily a good thing because security folks tend to be strongly rooted in risk avoidance. They pay lip service to risk management but really don't understand what it means. I think former military personnel (military police, military intelligence, security police, etc) have a better understanding because it's a philosophy the military has followed for almost 20 years.
But I'm just a small cog in a big machine.