GUWonder

What do you expect to experience that was not already being done to others (if not to you too)? Are you planning to enter the airport via the landside arrivals area and hang out there without any itinerary in mind?

That MAD airport has already been hit by a blood-spilling terrorist attack and things are no crazier there now than they are in the US -- actually they remain less crazy than the TSA or TSA-wanted-and-approved.

Boggie Dog

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41238598...d_news-europe/

Duh!

RATM

Richard does have a point here. In Iraq or Afghanistan, there are plenty of peasants available to be chained to steering wheels while you threaten their family if they don't comply. A 9/11 style team would take an incredible amount of time, money, and dedication to develop.

I also agree with the excellent post that emphasized the "low ball" nature of the underwear/shoe attacks. They just needed a couple of simpletons to get caught. None of the planners cared if those bombs actually went off.

The lesson from this Russian incident is that checkpoint screening is next to irrelevant in counter terrorism. People are fine with some level of sane security, but we will never get there if people keep seeing airport security of any kind as a counter-terrorism organization.

Mr. Gel-pack

I put "land of opportunity" in scare quotes for the exceptionalists.

I think I agree with you. I think the suicidal terrorists are mostly home grown through broken dreams and think they're somehow making the world a better place by taking out the folks who they blame for breaking the dreams/unfulfilled expectations. It may seem like senseless violence to the rest of the world, but it has to somehow make more sense to the terrorist to push the button than to live for another day.

If all the good that an highly trained MD, or anyone, could do in the rest of their life could be overshadowed by a single attack on some community, what, of all the MD's opportunities, would be the best option?

battensea

I'll grant you IXL, although hard to imagine huge crowds of people waiting in sub-zero weather there to pick up passengers as it's not exactly a metropolis.

But SXR would be a stretch -- freezing and sub-zero aren't exactly the same thing. Sub-zero is extremely unusual in SXR.

(GUWonder, please empty out your message box.)

GUWonder

I've been in SXR when it's been freezing and sub-zero. It was obviously colder than most of the winter days there -- and thus unusual -- but freezing is still freezing, no less so when there's a wind chill factor.

Waiting outside is not even pleasant when its 35F with a relatively stronger wind and some non-snow precipitation. When it's 25F and high humidity, it's still not pleasant to wait outside in that part of India.

Fisher1949

Perhaps not the entire Israeli method, but a less localized (i.e. checkpoint) system that is risk focused and doesn't automatically assume that everyone is a criminal. As the msnbc article points out, the current method overlooks other obvious targets that are not aircraft oriented.

As has been said many times on this forum, TSA has been strictly reactionary rather than adopting strategies that anticipate developing threats.

alanR

In the US someone with a grudge against the world is able to walk into a shop and with a credit card buy his way to mass murder , they don't have to join a group, be radicalised or go to some Jihadi training camp.

MarkXS

Phuket, Thailand (HKT) does this. Bag screening right at the doorway to the terminal. Anything allowed in gets a long strip of bright tape that says "HKT Security Checked." Which still hasn't come off my bags almost three years later - no doubt a security feature to prevent stripping it off, and going back outside to put it on another bag.

Coralreef Lover

I have always argued that security checks should be done immediately upon entry into the airport as done in some other countries, notably in Asia, than the setup we have here. Here in the U.S. TSA has a system in place that rewards pilfering of luggage. If luggage is checked upfront then there is no purpose to go digging into luggage once it passes security in the immediate lobby area.

Maybe now TSA will agree (with people like me) that security should be done in the open where the passenger is with his luggage than in a remote area where agents or baggage handlers are tempted to pilfer from unlocked luggage.

GUWonder

DHS/TSA has already become "less localized" in proportion of its employees placement at the standard passenger screening checkpoint and the situation is no better now than it was before becoming "less localized".

DHS/TSA doesn't automatically assume that everyone is a criminal: airline, airport and airport concession employees and contractors get away with a lot (including in terms of crime) along with the TSA; and there is also a list of federal and state government employees and even some foreigners who get special treatment.

The calls for "Israelification" of airport security in the US and various other parts of the world is strictly reactionary too. And "Israelified" "security" is itself also the result of being strictly reactionary.

Is it to be presumed that your first paragraph's last sentence is about the TSA and excludes passengers going digging into luggage once it passes security in the immediate lobby area? [Passengers have plenty of reasons to dig into luggage even after it passes security in the immediate lobby area.]

Those places in Asia where baggage is checked immediately upon entry into the airport (and, for example, in some cases in South Asia, even long before entry into the airport building) haven't eliminated baggage thieves. And the institution of such measures has invited creation of dangerous choke-points -- just like the arrivals area where this Moscow tragedy occurred.

NWstu

Link

Let's not give the TSA any more reason to justify its existence and its over-reaching security theater.

GUWonder

If this incident happened in the US, DHS/TSA would have had our airports shut down for far longer and across much more of the country than the Russian government did after this happened at DME. [DME itself was largely back to normal functioning very quickly.] That's why I find it rather interesting that Medvedev is patting the TSA on the back while implicitly failing to recognize the differences in circumstances and even in approaches.

The TSA getting a pat on the back from the Russian establishment powers is a big joke, but Medvedev seems to have trouble with publicly admitting in a timely manner that this is less a failure of airport security than it is a failure of the FSB and other intelligence services. This posturing of his shouldn't surprise anyone as the FSB and its brethren are a more powerful monster than him , especially as Putin is still fully in the FSB camp. He's probably afraid of them, whether in office or not.

Has he even mentioned how the FSB continues to be obsessed by Caucasian region women and that is who the FSB was obsessing over at DME and SVO?

Medvedev fired the head of regional airport transport police and criticized transport police for being "passive" just before heading off to Switzerland for a social gathering of economic, political and social big whigs (amongst others) and who knows what else.

And the Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev -- an ethnic Tartar with the rank of a general who is another member of the FSB clique -- fired the chief of the division in charge of DME tranport police and two others assigned there.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110126/..._airport_blast

I'm betting that Russian dog and pony show will be borrowing a lot more from the TSA clowns and that the Russian circus will be going on the road.

polonius

Yes, exactly, this mentality is consistent with the GW Bush assertion that "we are fighting the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here". That may be an effective approach to someone who is willing to spend their life at home, cowering under the bed, but for those of us who want to get out in the world, shifting the violence from one part of the world to another is more or less meaningless.

GUWonder

.... and beside the shifting of violence -- if it even does that -- it actually may result in increased levels of violence than would be the case otherwise.