Yes, but I doubt I would make it through El-Al's scrutiny (even though I'm no terrorist). Since I doubt you fit the profile, you see nothing wrong with profiling. I find it amazing that we are willing to give up our rights so quickly in the name of safety. What happened to "give me liberty or give me death" and "all men are created equal," or are we no longer that kind of America?

Reid was profiled, or at least somehow identified as suspicious...recall he flew a day later than he was ticketed for. Why? Because he missed his original flight due to an interrogation in a back room after a security agent at the gate thought he merited extra attention.

You can purchase the items you need in the airport and use them before you get on a flight. It is not ideal or convenient but better than nothing.

All too true. I flew FC on a 319 last night, and my seat was absolutely vile. There was an empty spinzel bag on the seat, and both my seat and the seat next to it were FULL of crumbs. There was also gum stuck on my seat.

I see a great World Club opportunity. Stock the bathrooms with the banned necessities for traveller's between-flight use. They could probably get enough sealed product from the security bins that they wouldn't have to buy anything. Proper "use at your own risk " caveats, of course.

But MRs are a good example, and a good measure, of worst-case scenario flying: multi-segment, "what if my flight is cancelled and I have to overnight", "I have 4 segments to go to get to where I'm going" flying. It's normal to book a 3-seg or 4-seg trip to save money (for me, it was direct for $600, or 3-segment for $200, one trip), and if I have to buy toiletries every time I land, and dispose of them every time I take off, that's just rediculous. Are MRs an extreme example of flying? Absolutely? But MRer's are used to "extreme flying", and are a wonderful resource for what can (and will) go wrong, during a trip.

It's not that I have an issue with what they're taking away... I have an issue (in a way) with how hard it is to get those items back. If I check my luggage for a 3-segment flight, that's up to 8 (or even 12) hours I'll be without my non-prescription medicines. Anyone ever see "Serenity", where the crew has to check their weapons before entering the bar? If this continues, I see a day when we have 3 classes of items... those we check at the check-in, those we carry-on, and those we check at the gate. Imagine a scene where we all put our stuff into something that looks like an apartment mail-box, we all take our keys, and they wheel it onto the plane. Then they wheel it off, insert our keys, and get our items back. The funny thing is, two days ago, this would have sounded absurb. Today, it sounds like a valid solution to a new problem.

Steve B.

Kinda-sorta relevant...

I'm something of a health-Nazi and often pack a sandwich to take with me on the plane, as well as carrying on a protein bar or two. Gotta avoid airport food if at all possible. Has anyone tried this since yesterday? Obviously neither a sandwich or a Zone bar is a liquid/gel...just wondering if the TSA folks are following the strict guidelines or are interpreting.

The TSA...strict-constructionists or interpretive readers?

I've been trying to find out the same, but about a sandwich bought airside at the airport, to have with a free drink in flight. Does it become a problem if it has a spread, and do the gate inspectors go through the sandwich to check that? Not too appealing, even if it's with gloved hands.

Behavioral profiling - FAR more effective than any racial/religious/ethnic profiling regime could ever be, and virtually guaranteed to pass constitutional muster too.

El Al wouldn't be so foolhardy as to implement a profiling system based primarily or largely based on race/ethnicity/religion - that's why their profiling system generally works.

Before I embark on my profiling rant: When you look at the arrests in London yesterday, note that these guys were not detained by airport screeners who were profiling. They were caught as the result of real intelligence and police work which was probably coupling behavioral profiling with highly targetted surveillance. I have a whole slew of issues with the erosion of liberties and ineffectiveness of tangental security measures, but I'll try to keep this narrowly on topic.

Racial profiling is stupid because it is easily defeated. There is no benefit to racial profiling if you're trying to stop someone from bringing a bomb onto a plane. If everyone knows that you're going to focus your efforts on searching Middle Eastern males, then a terrorist group can and will recruit someone who isn't to bring the bomb on board. Random checks, or checking everyone that comes through, are the two best ways to set up security checkpoints. This has been proven time and time again in repeated studies and in our own experience in the war on drugs. Profiling that we implemented for drug smugglers gave the smugglers an easy way to make it less likely to be stopped, resulting in fewer arrests than a delibrately random pattern of searching.

So constitutional and legal concerns aside, racial profiling is simply ineffective. If you move beyond that and want to profile for Muslims, you have a whole new set of problems: What does a Muslim extremist look like? Even disconting recent converts, in addition to the Arab countries, they could come from major Muslim populations in Pakistan, India, Indonesia, China, "black" Africa (with a lot of physical diversity), "not black" Afica (quite a bit of physical diversity there too) "white" southeastern Europe (you never saw a fair-haired, blue-eyed Bosnian or Turk?). So how do you profile a potential Muslim extremist? Check everyone who could potentially be Muslim? Just to cover the major groups of Muslims in the world, that's everyone who's Middle Eastern or even generically Mediterranean, North African, Black, White, Southeast Asian, Central Asian, East Asian and South Asian. Good luck with that. You either have to search everyone, or risk missing a smartly-recruited paleface terrorist in a business suit because you're busy hassling some Sikh guy.

As to your "blond housewife" comment:
"On the morning of April 17 at Heathrow Airport in London, Israeli security guards outside of El Al airlines found semtex explosives in a bag of Anne Murphy, a pregnant Irishwoman attempting to fly with 375 fellow passengers to Tel Aviv. In addition, a functioning calculator in the bag was found to be a timed triggering device. She was apparently unaware of the contents, and had been given the bag by her fianc� Nizar Hindawi, a Jordanian. He had sent her on the flight for the purpose of meeting his parents before marriage. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindawi_Affair

Profiling doesn't work and it makes us less safe -- not more safe.

peace,
~Ben~

I, too, disagree that profiling is the solution.

However, Ben's comments bring up another thought I want to rant about - the Registered Traveler Program is the DUMBEST thing I have ever heard.

Terrorists are not just Muslim or tan skinned...so why give potential terrorists shorter security lines? All the $100 registered traveler program gets you is access to the elite line most of us on here already have. You still need to take your computer out, shoes off, etc. It gains you NOTHING and makes the rest of us who fly all the time stand in longer lines. All so the government can run a background check on you for $100.

I wish this program was officially killed before it even started. I'm happy to see most airports not signing up for it. This program just emphasizes how dumb our government is in believing that only Muslims are terrorists.

-RM

Well, taking grandma's denture creme away doesn't make us any safer, either. And it is a hell of a lot less efficient.

Of the hundreds of thousands of confiscated objects stacked up at US airports in the past 30 hours -- Coke bottles, Colgate tubes, Bausch & Lomb bottles -- how many do you think were in any way nefarious or threatening. I would bet a week's pay the answer is: zero. How many thousands more do you think got onto planes undetected -- little tiny bottles in pockets, etc.? I bet plenty. This whole thing is insane.

It's heartbreaking to see how many American citizens eagerly endorse any and every invasive, costly, pointless "security" absurdity with a chirpy, "If it makes us safer, I'm all for it! Better safe than sorry!" Confiscating your Prell does not make you safer. Living like naked, compliant sheep does not make us safer.

People who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither. And we are scarily happy to surrender liberties these days -- but do you feel more secure today? Me neither.

Every security measure is an odds play. You concentrate efforts where they will do the most good. Every time a terror group makes a play, they fit a certain well-understood profile. There's your answer. Confiscate their Prell when they show up at the gate.

When a cadre of cross-stitching Nebraskan grandmas tries to blow up O'Hare, I will alter my thinking, but not before.

It does help that El-Al has 40-odd aircraft total in its fleet.

That's 1/10th the size of the NWA mainline stable!

El Al's security screening hasn't always stopped terrorists from flying on its planes. It's just those terrorists didn't care about hijacking or blowing up El Al's planes those days.

Intelligence agencies that are tightly monitoring individuals for days, weeks, months and even years get or focus on the wrong individuals often enough, so I don't see how a 15-minute to 240-minute excercise in mind-reading/body-reading at an airport would be effective over any large scale. All we'd get is a waste of resources and an increasingly counterproductive excercise.

Just because we've implemented a bunch of knee-jerk nonsense doesn't justify rolling out even more knee-jerk nonsense like harassing customers with even more questioning on the basis of data-mining and racist profiling (which is what it'll end up being). As is obvious from recent record, this will generate more false positives than anything -- namely, bigger haystacks in which to look for needles.

The sad testimony of the latest knee-jerk changes is that we are dealing with and will suffer the incompetence of governments because of historical and continued government incompetence.