Spiff

Bonner County Daily Bee Editorial

"News that the U.S. Transportation Security Administration plans to ban cigarette lighters aboard commercial flights should spark some concern.

Not because of the potential impacts to nicotine-dependent travelers, but because it's a pretty ham-fisted and dated way of addressing terrorism.

To put it another way, it's so 2001.

Richard Reid tried to pull off his shoe bomb caper in December 2001, three months after the events of 9/11. Did TSA officials wake up just the other day and realize that somebody could smuggle a bomb aboard a plane?"

While this ban is Congressionally-directed, the overall stupidity of such a ban and a possible match ban is beyond common sense of any kind.

whirledtraveler

So are they still planning on dumping everyone's carryons? I was pretty surprised when I heard that. I can understand banning lighters, but you can ban lighters without proactively looking for them in every bag.

cathy9117

Lighters are easily seen by X-ray of a bag.

TWA4Ever

Last May, on a flight from SAN-DCA, I had an empty Zippo lighter in my checked - not carry-on - luggage. Not to go into the stories behind that lighter, but it was special to me.

Got home, opened my suitcase, and found a note from TSA. My lighter was taken (can't tell you how many flights I had taken carrying that thing).

Found out afterwards that the rules (at that time) stated that I could carry full butane lighters in my carry on. Also, that I could carry up to four (I think) books of matches. But not an empty Zippo in my checked luggage.

You have no idea how much safer I now feel.

studentff

A single bic lighter in the pocket does not set off the walk-through. I have gone through with a bic and no alarm within the last week.

Unless TSA jacks up the settings on the walk-through to be so sensitive that they trigger on pants zippers or does aggressive full-body patdowns on all passengers, they won't be able to prevent this means of entry for lighters.

The two senators that forced this butane lighter rule are idiots; Congress should not be in the business of banning specific items, though I do think they should be in the business of requiring that specific items be allowed when TSA goes overboard.

If TSA decides to unilaterally ban matches too (no legislative requirement for them to do so exists), it will reinforce TSA policy idiocy. TSA's only rational option is to give lip-service to the congressionally-mandated butane lighter ban, confiscate butane lighters when they see them, ignore all other lighters/matches, but otherwise pretty well ignore the issue.

bursa

Well-said, studentff! I could see a ban on torchlights (maybe) but lighters- any bad guy is going to walk through the metal detector with two or three in his (/her) pockets whereas all the confiscated lighters will be in good traveller's suitcase.

MSY-MSP

I mentioned this in another thread. I spoke with several the airport police officers at my local airport about the ban of lighters coming on Feb 15, 2004. They showed me an internal police memo that I probably shouldn’t have seen. It detailed the current thinking on the way this ban would be enforced, the penalties that will be expected, and the limitations of the current screening methods. The memo was organized more from the point of what the police should expect at the checkpoints, and not what TSA will actually do. However, based on my knowledge of how the two interact, I would put a great deal of faith in it. I will give a brief repeat of what I remember, none of which is restricted, and I discussed with them in public.

The memo stated the there were two pending proposals for what the rules will be. 1) No lighters and 2) No lighters or Matches. Then the memo went into the problems that will likely be forced upon the police as travelers passed through the checkpoint. Those problems in a nutshell are:

1) The sensitivity of the detectors is not currently set sufficiently high enough to detect the metal in a common lighter. If the sensitivity was set high enough to detect a common lighter, it would alarm on a larger percentage of passengers than can currently be handled. This sensitivity would cause alarms from watches, women’s jewelry, large amounts of dental work, the metal in jeans, and a variety of other permitted items that for various reasons the TSA has decided they do not want the WTMD to alarm for.
2) The ability of the screeners to accurately detect in the x-ray a single lighter among a variety of other images on the screener. The memo mentioned a test done in the past year, where the screeners at one checkpoint were given the task of identifying lighters in bags, and then all passengers leaving the checkpoint were asked if they smoked, and if they carried a lighter with them, by a non-TSA person. Needless to say the results, if correct don’t bode well for this type of accuracy.
3) If matches are banned as well, there is no non-intrusive time intensive method for detecting matches at a rate that is acceptable.

The memo then went on to detail the problems that officers should expect to see at the checkpoints.

1) significantly longer lines, leading to more passengers in the checkpoint lanes and more confrontations between passengers trying to make their flights. Local TSA estimates on line length increases. Current time averages are 60-120 passengers an hour per checkpoint. Estimates under lighter ban 20-40 an hour, under lighter and match ban 6-12 per hour (assuming b/n 5-10 min per pax)
2) Significantly more people in secondary, possibly to the point of forcing the temporary closing of checkpoints due to backlog.
3) More confrontations between screeners and passengers necessitating police involvement. BTW the memo indicated that if the confrontation becomes at all physical the police are going to be instructed to arrest the person on the spot.
4) Confrontations between other passengers as personal belongings are mixed between passengers during extensive bag searches. Memo indicated that table were to be set at the end of the screening lane where multiple complete bag searches would be done simultaneously.

The good news is that the police think the policy is stupid, and don't want it. The bad news lighters are banned by law so TSA has to enforce it to the same degree as they do knives and guns. Expect a lot of terminal dumps, especially in hubs or places with a high number of smokers in the population.

Japhydog

Has the TSA tested to see how many more ACTUAL weapons are missed when screeners have to worry about looking for lighters?

Moronic government.

studentff

Thanks for the details--very interesting.

It's a shame that, as indicated by the above, the writer of this police memo apparently thought the job of LEOs is to act as the armed enforcers/thugs for TSA rather than to protect both the innocent passengers and the TSA agents.

Peetah

If the match policy goes into effect, I'll remind myself to put books of matches in my carryon, pants, and coat. Then discard the matches in visible public areas AFTER I get plane side.

I recommend everyone else does this too. That'll slow things down very nicely.

A revolution every once in awhile IS a good thing.

TSASuper

Even from this side of the walkthrough, I am very curious at how this is going to come about. There really is no way to identify 100% of the lighters coming through. I just hope that there will be no panic attacks if one slips by.

red456

Let's look at this in this light: the more asinine policies and procedures the TSA institutes that make people stand in endliness lines, miss flights, etc., the sooner the revolution will occur.

FliesWay2Much

I've never had any smoking materials even close to my lips ever, but, I hope this creates an incredible train wreck at every checkpoint in the country. I hope every TV news outlet on the planet sends a remote crew to capture the chaos. I dare even Faux News to find a sheople to say "...anything for our safety..." on camera. I defy even the TSA talking heads to put a positive spin on it.

FWAAA

You mean like the panic attacks that occur every time a TPI is missed, causing the TSA to think a bag contains something and the TSA dumps the terminal (epidemic a few months ago at several airports in quick succession)?

Or the panic attacks that occur every time a bag slips thru despite being flagged for a secondary inspection?

Or the panic attacks that occur each time a screener and the LEO think they have made "the big catch" (e.g. electronics salesman's bag - thought to be a bomb)?

I see plenty of panic attacks on the way. Panic attacks are apparently the TSA SOP. Apparently the chapters on Common Sense Security Responses were inadvertently omitted from the SOP.

Should have named it the PSA (Panic Security Agency).

Dovster

I am not a very big TSA fan but in this particular case the agency is not at fault.

That "honor" belongs to Congress, and most specifically Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota who pushed to have the Bic ban included in the Intelligence bill.

As the allegedly honorable senators have shown that they, themselves, lack any semblance of intelligence, I urge all residents of Oregon and North Dakota to demonstrate some themselves by giving both these gentlemen retirement when they come up for re-election.