Sorry to forget about mentioning the cargo hold ... I have been a broken phonograph on this issue, which is currently ignored, except for the Known Shipper farce.

Regarding passports, if someone at a checkpoint is jabbering away in a foreign language, I submit that such a passenger is more deserving of a secondary search than an obvious American speaking an American dialect of English. Using the Israeli method of asking a few questions to gauge the reaction of the passenger would also assist in determining which passengers may require additional screening.

I often hear American citizens talking amongst themselves in foreign languages in the check-in lines for int'l flights. Typically the parents are naturalized (foreign born) citizens travelling with their native U.S. born children. Remember, the true strength of American comes from the fact that we are the greatest melting pot, the most diverse mix of people, in the history of the world. Harassing, er, I mean ssss'ing someone just because they speak another language just adds to the international impression of American arrogance and xenophobia, which adds to anti-American sentiment world wide, and is one way we help create petri dishes where those who hate the U.S. can thrive.

Weren't the U.K. tube bombers British subjects? If they grew up in the U.K., attending school there, profiling by accent or passport would miss them.

As to profiling Muslims, how do you tell a Bosnian Muslim from a Bosnian Christian from a Bosnian Jew from a Croatian or a Serb or a Greek, Albanian, Italian, Bulgarian or Spaniard? By how they look? Or do you propose that everyone carry ID's stating their ethnic background? At what point do we stop being a free country and become a police state?

Just to confuse the discussion, the majority of suicide bombers world wide in the past dozen years were not Muslims- the biggest single group were members of the Tamil Tigers.

Then who should get SSSScreening - native born Americans speaking English or people speaking a foreign language? Intrusive searches of Americans for no reason is a quicker way to get to a police state than foreigners receiving such searches. Remember, I do not think anyone should have SSSS on his/her boarding pass getting that person a search for no reason. As Bart says, either the screening is done right the first time or else the SSSS does not add anything to security.

Regarding the Tamil Tigers, if they were in the U.S., they would not speak American English, so my suggestions would flag them for extra attention. This would not be a negative situation. We are fortunate that this group has concentrated on other targets.

This seems to be one of the most difficult aspects of fighting terrorism. Not all Muslims are Middle Eastern. But for those that feel that there is not a Middle Eastern connection in the U.S., reference Steven Emerson, the producer of Jihad in America on PBS. His research shows more than 30 radical Middle Eastern groups operating in America. There's the Islamic Association for Palenstine in Richardson, Texas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad base in Tampa, Florida and FBI confirmed terrorist command groups in California, Nevada, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey. We should also remember the Charlotte, North Carolina Hezbollah cell that was running black market cigarettes to Michigan. The proceeds from this racket were sent to Vancouver, then Lebanon to support Hezbollah operations. While we cannot look at someone going through a checkpoint and determine whether or not they are a radical Muslim bent on the destruction of the western influence, we also cannot relax and hope that the worst is over and that we can go back to life pre 1990's. The Jihad has been called, and nothing short of total success for the radicals, or total annihilation of them will stop it. Welcome to the newest wave of religious cleansing. It is amazing how many people have died throughout history in the name of God. It's not the first time, nor will it be the last. It's just our turn in the grinder.

This is exactly what needs to be done. Unfortunantly, everytime it is suggested the moronic, out of touch with reality, PC-crowd screams bloody murder

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I was referring to the SSSS and secondary mainly. Isn't there a more targeted way to directly resolve the alarm rather than doing the whole secondary?

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Part of why I keep pushing back on this is because people keep saying "group X should be subject to more scrutiny," then I say, "how do we know if someone is part of group X?" And they refuse to answer.

Above, people are saying we should "profile" based on religion, which I guess would mean that everyone would have to carry around some sort of religious membership ID card.

Here, you're saying we should do it based on country of citizenship. OK. So does that mean everyone should be required to carry a passport to travel?

And if they don't say anything? Or if they speak in English? Remeber, the 9/11 terrorists attended flight school and lived in the US for quite some time. I'm sure they spoke English. And what if Americans speak in a foreign language? This doesn't sound like it would work.

This would be more effective than the profiling suggestions made above in this thread, I agree. But is it worth the cost? It would also be incredibly expensive, and the questioning tends to be pretty intrusive (if it's going to be effective).

We're talking about billions to hire and train the people to do questioning, and tens, maybe hundreds of billions in lost passenger time each year waiting to be questioned. Are we ready to give up privacy and incur these costs? I doubt it. People already complain about waiting 10-30 minutes to get through the checkpoint. Questioning everybody for an average of 5 minutes, times 670MM annual pax = 56 million hours of time used. But that's just the amount of time people would spend talking to the TSA. If there are 10 people in front of you to talk to the agent, you'll have to wait 50 minutes before you get your 5 minutes of interrogation.

And we'd have to what, double, maybe triple the size of the TSA staff to have enough agents to handle the pax questioning?

The biggest issue with "Israeli style security" is that handling a couple dozen El Al planeloads of people each day (40 El Al flights vs. 35,000 US flights) is not a big deal. Scaling up from El Al's ~ 3 million passengers per year to the US's 670+ million passengers per year, on the other hand, is a big deal.

BTW, PatrickHenry1775 you complained above about a "police state." You don't think that having to undergo an interrogation before being allowed to travel in this country counts as a "police state?"

To address the profiling aspect:

My BF and I travel together often, but as a pasty skinned red-headed female I never get second guessed. However, my BF fits the 'visual' profile, because he has dark hair, a darker olive/tan complexion, and sometimes sports a beard (or a five o'clock shadow that looks close enough). He will almost ALWAYS be pulled aside for a second, or third, or fourth screening, just because he looks Arab (he's 4th generation Jewish American, amongst the other 75% which is German, French, English and the rest of the melting pot).

Does it inconvenience us? Perhaps. Do we resent it? Yes, probably at times. Do we make a big deal out of it? No. It's frustrating, but not the end of the world. Yep, it's BS...but I guess we've been through it enough to expect it, accept it, and know there isn't much we can do to change it, other than to have me carry our bags through security to lessen the time it takes.

Not quite true:

"November 15, 1979

American Airlines Flight 444

A mail bomb is sent from a post office in Chicago, and placed aboard an American Airlines flight bound for Washington, D.C. The bomb, equipped with a barometer to measure altitude, explodes as the plane reaches 34,500 feet."

Sounds like a terrorist attack upon US commercial aviation to me...

Sounds like some folks in this thread are suggesting that america institutes domestic passports. I think that is a really bad step for america and it's citizens -the soviets did this a long time ago to their citizens and there is absolutely nothing good that can come out of it.

In my travels i've seen domestic passports in third world countries used to oppress one group or another. This is not something that any democracy that cares for its citizens should do.

As someone else pointed out, looking at someone won't tell the truth either; how do you tell the difference between a palestinian and a israeli for instance? Or an american and a person from checnya? and the chechnyans are all muslims (remember beslan anyone?).

I think the idea of profiling based on ethnic origin is a bad one which seems to be advocated mostly by people who aren't in the class subjected to extra scrutiny.

And when it's all said and done, the profiling will be carried out by the same bureaucracy which conducts the current screening and shoe carnival and who also was responsible for the federal response to Katrina. Throw a few billion more at them, you think that'll help them get it right? We can debate the theory of profiling till the cows come home, but the jump from theory to acceptable, efficient and effective practice is nigh unto insurmountable.

It scales geometrically, not arithmetically, so we'd need to clone at least 50,000 more Barts and Bambis to make this work. New hires off the street just won't understand the process or the constitution.