Anyone think that this shows a different side to things?
kusa story

From the story:
If the screeners involved had heard some sort of law-enforcement bulletin about the robbery and linked that information to suspicious behavior by a suspicious pax with lots of cash, then ^. That's good observation skills.

If the screeners involved had no information about any crime being committed or other suspicious behavior but just assumed that anyone carrying lots of cash should be turned over to the police, then .

Doesn't sound like a direct security risk to me.

But this will just increase the volume for idiotic SSSScreenings on one-way tickets. Today I'm flying from PDX and my first leg is on Horizon. Guess what? The predictable, idiotic SSSS. When I shook my head at the counter, the agent picked up on it and cheerfully explained WHY I got the SSSSpecial treatment.

I must be a bank robber.

I get what studentff is saying about responding to a bulletin, but I'm not sure that even that would make me support the TSA searching people for stuff not related to security. They're not law enforcement officers like the police and the FBI, and shouldn't be conducting those kinds of searches.

Agreed mostly. I don't think they should search for it but if they see something the police have broadcast, they can report it just like private citizens should if they see someone matching the description of a robber walking through the terminal with cash dripping out of a suspicious duffel bag.

A good result yielded from a bad process does not mean we should praise the process. The role of the TSA screener must be focused only on preventing the introduction of restricted items onto aircraft or sterile areas of the airport. Period. It should not be widened to include searches for drugs, cash, illegal aliens, wanted felons, etc...we do not want out airports turned into virtual borders.

It's great to catch bank robbers - but it's not acceptable to me to give up any freedoms, privacy or accept government monitoring in order to make it easier to catch bank robbers. That's really how our Founding Fathers designed our society to work - sometimes it has to be accepted that some bank robbers (or murders, rapists, etc.) will get away with their crime because it's more important to protect the integrity of our system and the freedoms of our way of life than use any means necessary to catch every criminal.

If the screener heard a public police bulletin and recognized the wanted person and reported them as a private citizen, I agree there is nothing wrong with that - it's just good citizenship. As stated in another post, if the screener had no knowledge of the crime and purposely examined the person and their baggage for non-security related suspicious items because they wanted to 'play cop' or claim some reward and just got lucky, that is out of their scope and that behavior must be stopped.

I posted this on the NW forum and I wanted it to be read here since many screener types probably don't read that forum. I believe in praise when it is warranted:

"Most professional secondary I've ever had. Female screener helping wanted to run my shoes or swab them and the male screener said "they don't meet the profile and the machine didn't beep."

I don't understand the "Elite" security line, though. I'm GOLD on NW, which means I can get in the NW side of the terminal quicker. But since I'm flying on a Horizon flight (bought through NW with a NW codeshare) and have to go to terminal A/B/C I CAN'T use the elite security line. The line was only 5-7 minutes long, but I was told that it was up to 32 minutes at some point today. It's spring break, and I have no idea if that number was actually true."

TSA doesn't control the elite line, so I don't have much to say there.

Very well said. ^

According to the Rocky Mountain News story, it looks like the cash was the only reason to question/detain further.

Throughout this forum I read comments that we should spend less time looking at shoes and doing secondaries and instead talk to the passengers to see if there is anything out of order (ala El Al).

Then when the screeners do it, they are critized for going over the limit.

OK then - which is it? Should they search stuff or should they look at behaviors?

Just Curious

Likely, we'll never know how much cash or what the "suspicious items" were. Give me the facts, then I'll render an opinion.

The article tells me that the "interview" happened after searching the bag and finding the cash, a.k.a. "a secondary."

What is the threshhold of cash that a passenger would carry, to mandate the secondary, and to warrant an interview?

Saw this in the RMN article:

So, I guess we can assume the guy was SSSSd because of the one-way ticket, which is probably why the vigilant screener found the cash.

I've got mixed feelings, too. If the airport police had a tip-off that the bad guys were heading to the airport and got the word out with some sort of physical description, etc, OK: Using the TSA to help catch the bad guys is OK.

But, if the didn't know a thing and went what many of us believe is out of bounds for an airport "prohibited items" search, no, this wasn't OK.

From what the article described, this bad guy didn't appear to be the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, either.

Heck, airport security has been used for decades as convenient chokepoints to catch bad guys. But, it has been the result of good police work. If we've got zealots at checkpoints looking for cash, pot, porn, bootleg CDs, and anything else they deem criminal -- and there's enough evidence on FT to suggest that -- I wonder how many times they have BLOWN cases where the cops were tailing a guy wanting to get to the Big Cheese?

There tend to be many schools of thought here. One school is that screening should do nothing more than and x-ray and WTMD and stop nothing but guns, bombs, knives and other obvious single-usage weapons that are a threat to the aircraft. Such folks tend not to like it when TSA turns pax in for cash, drugs, or other activity that may be suspicious but is not a threat to the aircraft. (Personally I despise how carrying cash can be deemed suspicious and law-enforcement can seize cash with little/no due process. I personally don't carry much cash but I should have the choice to do so if I want.) An example from this school of thought would be people who wouldn't mind sitting next to a known terrorist (even Osama himself) as long as effective security made sure he had no weapons.

Another school of thought would like security to do more behavioral profiling of passengers, ask questions to determine character/intention, etc. rather than focusing exclusively on baggage. They would argue that bad people are the theat, not the bad items. For example, a law-abiding pax with a giant knife is no threat to the aircraft if he doesn't plan to commit a crime.

Both have a good point. But there's probably not a whole lot of overlap between these two schools except that both have complaints about how things are done now.

As an aside, in spite of occasional complaints about impractical posters calling for the end of all screening, there really doesn't seem to be much of a "no screening whatsoever" school here.