Children as tools of terror
 

While it seems a fair number of people are outraged by the patdown of the 6 year old, there are at least a few that believe it's justified "because of the world we live in." "If a terrorist knew his child would not be searched, he could use the child to smuggle his WMDs"

Suppose terrorists did use children as tools of terror. Why wouldn't they just pack the kid's school bag full of dynamite and use a detonator with a timer? Busload of 50-100 children turns into a big crater in the middle of the road. No worries about hiding it in the kids underpants or BDO's or K9's or ID checks, just a simple device using proven techniques?

But not the target that TSA is attempting to secure.

Again, TSA is trying to ensure that WEIs don't make it aboard a commercial aircraft. If you packed a child's backpack full of dynamite and asked the child to carry it aboard an aircraft, almost certainly the dynamite would be detected by the ordinary X-ray examination performed on (virtually) all carry-ons.

On the other hand, as has been demonstrated, items carried on one's person have a better chance of passing through a checkpoint undetected. Balancing the societal interest in keeping explosives off aircraft against the societal interest in personal privacy is, of course, a matter of debate.

Have no fear, the TSA has a watchful eye on school buses. :rolleyes:

More mission creep; the TSA will keep school busses safe For The Children™

Better yet, why not just recruit a suicide bomber to walk into the baggage claim area of LAS on a Friday night around, oh, 8 PM. He or she doesn't have to be screened to enter that area, and if you have ever been in the LAS baggage claim around 8 PM on a Friday, it is wall to wall people. You could easily take out a hell of a lot more people there than you could on a plane. You also have the added bonus of never being screened before you enter the area.

I think you are missing the point. A terrorists goal is to impose terror. All the efforts the TSA puts forth assume they will target an aircraft no matter if other more simple means are available.

If a terrorist was going to use his child as a mule to cause terror, why would he bother trying to get that child on an airplane when he could simply put him on a schoolbus?

So that is a reason to assult all kids?

So all other kids are going to have problems because one child might be forced to carry explosives?

Doesnt even make any kind of sence.

We are going to have a world full of molested and scared kids . Later grown ups.

Sure we should be aware. But not molest people. Amnd have hands on our privates out of the blue.

There is also going to be a lot of grown ups with issues.

Privates are for a reason privates.

I dont share mine with anybody except they are "invited". And I do think that is how most people think.

Why are we still debating this terrorist concept? The only terrorists in airports are the ones funded by the government. NOBODY WILL SUCCESSFULLY HIJACK A PLANE IN AMERICA AGAIN.

Terrorist did inflict some terror on 9/11 and TSA seems both happy and eager to carry on the mission of the terrorist into perpetuity..

And that's as it should be.

TSA isn't charged with fighting all forms of terror. TSA is charged with fighting terror specifically targeted at Transportation systems. There are other federal agencies who are tasked with fighting other forms of terrorism.

Charged with, sure. Actually fighting? They certainly seem more interested in marijuana-laced peanut butter and skinny girls in thin shirts than in anything that might potentially present a threat to the aircraft.

The problem with the picture is that they're performing the grope-downs on kids who couldn't conceivably hide enough materiel to present an actual threat to the plane.

I disagree. A child`s back is about 1 square foot. A square foot of sheet explosive can do a lot of damage.

This is an excellent point. Frankly school buses in general make excellent targets. I don't know how they do things now, but where I live the town used to park all the school buses in one big parking lot at night. The lot wasn't fenced or guarded. It would be comparatively trivial to pop magnetic remote controlled bombs to the undercarriages of 20+ school buses and time the explosions simultaneously around the time that the buses would be mostly full of children. For maximum effect you could do that in 100s of American cities at the same time, although the more cities you do the greater the risk of getting caught planting the bombs. Can you imagine the effect on the American psyche after 250 school buses filled with children from all over the country just blew up one morning?

Riiiiiight.

...and the much-vaunted backscatter scanners can't detect RDX or PETN.

...and "sheet explosive attacks" on US-originated flights have been attempted... how many times? Let's see... nothing into nothing... carry the nothing... divide by nothing..

That'd be zero.

Probably because while a square foot of sheet explosive might be able to "do a lot of damage," it's still unlikely to take the plane down. Might have a couple of passengers and a flight attendant or two pass out when they don't get their masks on fast enough, though.

It's simply not a credible threat.

^^^^^
bolding mine

a federal agency that unilaterally decides how much it wants to take of your person, how much to feel of your person, how much to see of your person, is an agency operating in enmity towards you because has broken the civil compact existing between government and the governed (the people) and instead asserts its raw power over you. The TSA has in principle seized everything from you when it seizes ownership over your privates for no cause and strip searches you for no cause.

Yep.

This is very serious. We must get a judicial or legislative solution ASAP. I repeat: this is very serious.

Hence, my original point: there needs to be a debate about how to balance the societal good of safety on public transportation against the societal goods of personal privacy and personal liberty. For the most part, that debate isn't happening --- at least, in the places that matter.

I'm not a chemist, or a structural engineer, so ... I'm going to pass on this one. But if TSA is concerned about bottles exceeding 100ml in size as a "threat" to aircraft, it certainly seems like a relatively small quantity of a substance could do serious damage.

Of course, whether such a threat is worth conducting the War on Liquids, the Shoe Carnival, and so on, is an open question (at least to this observer).

This is the problem with the TSA. They apparently have no ability to do risk analysis. Every day there is an infinitesimally small chance that you might be hit by a small meteor anywhere on the planet, but we don't walk around cowering in fear, with shield over our heads at all times. There's several orders of magnitude less of a of chance that a 6 year old girl has some newly invented form of non-detectable explosive attached to her body as there is of a meteor randomly striking someone on any given day, yet the TSA continues to operate as if this is a likely event that might occur at any airport in the country. What makes their approach even more baffling is that they use the 'random' method of enhanced screening. So your looking for evidence of event to occur that had an 0.00000000000001% chance of actually occurring, but then you turn around an multiple those odds by only
screening people at random(every 100, every 1000) that you've now decreased your changes of success by so much that it is far less likely that you would prevent a terrorist from succeeding than you are of actually catching one(ie. see the obscene failure rate of their own internal investigators slipping through weapons). But hey, you have to do something, don't you?

Google is your friend. Don't take my word for it, do some research on what actual security professionals think of the 3-1-1 rule - and other nonsensical rules the TSA uses.

The title of this thread is wrong.

It should be "TSA as Tools of Terror"

Not what I was arguing. You said

I said that kids could hide enough material to pose a threat, I did not say they were a threat.

So you believe that a square foot of sheet explosive could take down an aircraft?

You don`t?

No, I don't. It's possible, but I don't believe it's likely at all.

Not when an aircraft like Aloha Airlines 243 can still land with only one fatality.

I know that a well-placed marshmallow can bring down a plane, but the possibility doesn't keep me up at night.

The probability is beyond minute.

These silly fears don't justify 4th amendment violations. Routine 4th amendment violations mandated by a federal agency do keep me up at night.

Terrorism willfully perpetrated by our federal government is far more serious than any other threat, foreign or domestic.

I am not saying that it is an imminent threat at all, just a possibility. Much like winning the loto.

You're not one of those people who buys at least ten lotto tickets for every draw because you *might* win, are you?

Many things are possible. Most of them are possible and yet so improbable as to not even worry about, like the possibility that a six-year-old wearing a thin shirt is going to be carrying a square foot of sheet explosive on a flight originating in the United States.

If the odds worry you, you should also be carrying an armored umbrella to make sure you're not killed by a stray meteorite.

Are you mocking my retirement plan?
Furthermore, it appears I need to re-foil my hat since you can obviously read my mind. :P

But seriously, I don't think it would happen. I am just saying that it could happen. Nothing more.

Of course, it could happen.

The real question is whether or not the amount of money, time, human resources and infringement on the rights of people is worth trying to prevent something that could happen, especially when the something that could happen is so incredibly minute.

We are doing needle-in-a-haystack security and the terrorists are laughing their butts off looking at what we have become.

^^^^^

There is no question that the TSA is using children as tools of terror. There are saying, "Look at what we will do to an innocent 6 year old child without any hesitation. Imagine what we can do to you."
It's time to treat every punk pervert TSO like the terrorists they are.

The TSA isnt about security, its about training the public to be obediant.

Why is it so hard to get this point across to people? Honestly I'm shocked at the number of people who think it is a good thing this poor girl received the groping.

I used to think it was because people were clueless because they had just never seen it happen. The Kettle's fly once every couple of years, don't get patted down and think we're crying about nothing.

Then videos of children being aggressively groped surface and they see what is going on AND STILL SUPPORT IT???? Seriously? You have no problem with strangers sticking their hands in children's pants?

I think then it goes into the territory of "at least it aint me" (my family). Which isn't any better, actually. But truly the definition of herd mentality. The outliers get eaten, so let me just huddle up into the herd and be safe.

This is the same mentality that drives the pro-war crowd. It's not them or their children getting sent to some foreign country, putting their a** on the line. Want to end the 'War on Terror', reinstate the draft and remove the college exemption. You'll see us out of Iraq and Afghanistan as fast as they can bring'em home.

Read the supportive comments. There has been a concerted effort to develop a culture of fear in this country, coupled with an assurance that surrendering our rights and dignity is the only way to be safe.

It has been a wildly successful campaign.

If all you want to do is take out an airplane full of passengers, it would be much easier to recruit an airport or airline employee to plant a device. Children are too likely to go off mission ;).

The level of screening staff receives borders on the ludicrous - at the last four airports I have used, it appeared to be less than it was before the Gulf War...THE FIRST ONE!

That's actually kinda the point I was trying to make.

Clearly, TSA believes that extremely small quantitites of substances present a clear and present danger to commercial air travel. It is that fundamental belief that leads to both the 100ml limit on (most) liquids and the use of highly invasive screenings (whether AIT or "enhanced" pat-downs).

So, TSA's use of enhanced patdowns on children is completely consistent with its approach to securing commercial air travel. Whether that approach is appropriate is another question entirely.

I'm not certain that's the case.

Claiming that small quantities of substances present a threat seems to be a really good way to claim the authority to perform searches for those small quantities, further increasing the granularity of the "administrative search."

They don't have to believe it. They just have to claim it, and the sheeple follow along - including the sheeple in the blue shirts who're doing the actual dirty work.

I tend to think this is a case where Hanlon's Razor applies ... but your mileage may vary. :)

I typically apply Hanlon's Razor when there's no evidence of evil.

In this case, enough stupidium to qualify the TSA's actions for Hanlon's Razor would have collapsed into a black hole already.