Boggie Dog

Have Pre through Managed Inclusion.

chollie

This is not going to go over well with some of the older folks I know, people who remember fighting and dying to make sure we were never a 'papers, please' country.

Boggie Dog

We are already there.

Internal checkpoints, airport checkpoints, local police checkpoints, and on and on. Who ever thought they might be questioned by a low level government employee asking where and why you might be traveling inside the country?

This is not the same country that I was raised in.

edit to add:

And let us not forget not being able to fly unless you have acceptable ID starting in January 2018.

https://www.tsa.gov/sites/default/fi..._factsheet.pdf

chollie

Well, if TSA is to be believed, there are plenty of vets who don't have a problem with TSA's practices because they work for TSA. Presumably they are not the ones having difficulty following (or making up) orders.

jkhuggins

I'll be the first to grant that TSA certainly seems to find all sorts of ways to expand its authority in and around airports.

Having said that ... technically, airport security operations are already "curb-to-gate" in many places. At an airport with curbside luggage check operations, the "secure travel environment" begins right at the curb with the airline personnel "securely" conveying checked bags to TSA for its screening procedures. No expansion of authority needed; security is already at the curb.

As I read the paragraph in the original article, it seemed more likely to me that the sentence was meant to emphasize "less invasive and more secure" rather than "curb-to-gate". But the words certainly do permit a less optimistic reading, for those inclined to believe it.

javabytes

Do you doubt TSA's ability to waste millions of dollars buying new ones?

BSBD

A hint of things to come - the annual Art Basel exhibit in Switzerland has announced that all attendees will have to pass through full-body scanners to get into the venue this year.

I can see this becoming the norm worldwide for large events and public spaces/transportation points.

petaluma1

Today, for the second time on Twitter, I read that TSA made someone take off sunglasses, glasses that were prescription. Why are they doing that? Is there FRT at checkpoints to surreptitiously photograph passengers?

cheltzel

I believe that FRT can be used regardless of the object of analysis wearing sunglasses or not.

WillCAD

At what point in the process did that happen? I can certainly see a TDC ordering, er, politely requesting, a traveler to remove their sunglasses or hat in order to match up the face with the photo on the ID. Not that I think they actually compare face to photo in any case other than when the face is obscured, but I could see it happening there.

Boggie Dog

Was that on one of the TSA twitter accounts?

Boggie Dog

TSA claims that they will not have people remove medical devices. Eyeglasses/Prescription Sunglasses are most definitely medical devices.

petaluma1

Yesterday's person had to remove them to go through the scanner; no mention of removing for ID check.

respawn

That just sounds like another case of a poorly trained TSA employee making up their own rules as they go along.

WillCAD

The general public may see the idea of "curb to gate secure environment" as great ("Hey, it means flying is totally safe!"), but they don't realize that all this idea does is to move the security perimeter farther away from the gate. Instead of the perimeter of the secure area starting at the c/p, it would start at the curb - which would mean that c/p's would have to be established at the curb to screen anyone entering the secure area, just as they screen anyone entering the secure area now.

Instead of screening queues inside the climate-controlled terminal building, we'd then have screening queues at the outdoor curbside. That would go over rather poorly in places like Buffalo in winter, or Phoenix in summer, or pretty much anywhere whenever it rains.

Of course, then you'd have calls for building a security annex at all airports (at a cost of billions, maybe trillions, of dollars), which would then move the screening farther from the terminal and allow drop-offs, etc. A security annex would operate similar to the off-site rental car facilities at airports like LAS and BWI, requiring shuttles of some kind - buses or trams - to get screened people into the terminal, and massively lengthening the path that checked bags take. Airline counters and other services would move into the security annex. Eventually, this concept would simply split all landside functions into one building and all airside functions into a separate building - which some airports like IAD, MCO, and DEN already do.

But completely rebuilding entire airport terminals to establish this physical separation is not only impractical due to the costs, but completely unnecessary.

TSA, on the other hand, probably sees this concept as an opportunity to extend their draconian "security" measures outside of the secure area into the landside areas under the guise of "keeping us safe", allowing them to harass non-passengers with impunity.