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Originally Posted by PatrickHenry1775
BTW, check this link regarding the Jordanian government denying that one of the suicide bombers was a woman. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9979747/
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051113/...rdan_explosion |
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RACIST profiling: destined for failure ... and proven to not work.
"Key" bomb-making trainer working for Al-Qaeda-affiliated individuals: "closely-shaved, red-haired, mid-50s Caucasian male with freckles", "trained by [specified "western"] intelligence agency and special military unit". |
Originally Posted by Bart
What do you define as secondary screening? If you're talking about the SSSS-mandated screening, I agree with you. If you're talking about the secondary screening that occurs ONLY to resolve alarms at the WTMD or items that cannot be cleared by x-ray, then I disagree with you. By the way, how should such cases be resolved in your view? As for reasonable suspicion, court judgments have beaten this little horse to death: security screening is not the same as a search for evidence. But you know this already; you just refuse to acknowledge case precedence, which makes it difficult to hold a reasonable discussion/debate with you.
You ignore the other hazards posed to aviation that are not terrorist-related. How do you propose to prevent the accidental introduction of hazardous material aboard aircraft without screening all individuals? How do you prevent the use of weapons by people who do not necessarily intend to commit terrorist acts but certainly commit acts of violence? I'm talking about air rage passengers, people who may blow up an airplane simply for insurance purposes, disgruntled airline employees, and a variety of other potential acts of violence that are just as dangerous as acts of terrorism, the difference being that they are not specifically conducted for a terrorist cause. As for people who are specifically identified as members of actual terrorist groups, to paraphrase the comedian Gallagher: use DELTA....Don't Even Let Them Aboard. There is no reason to allow someone aboard who is known to be associated with a terrorist group. This is an area where the FBI should be free to step in and investigate the matter further BEFORE they board, meaning to DENY them from boarding until the matter is resolved. Regarding case precedence, please cite for me the United States Supreme Court opinion that holds that passengers are deemed to consent to a search and seizure of their persons and belongings even without reasonable suspicion of involvement in criminal activity at an airport. If you can find such case law, then I will accept that passengers do not have Fourth Amendment rights, per the U.S. Supreme Court. I would add that if there is such case law, it would be from the same court that held that Negroes were property (Dred Scott), that separate but equal was constitutional despite the language of the Fourteenth Amendment (Plessy v. Ferguson), and internment of American citizens of Japanese descent was constitutional (Korematsu). Only one institution on Earth is infallible, and I do not think airport checkpoints are a matter of faith for the Church on which the Pope speaks ex cathedra. Before 9/11, what did the government or airlines do to prevent incidents involving hazardous materials, air rage, blowing up airplanes for insurance purposes, and the variety of other potential acts of violence just as dangerous as acts of terrorism? Even more to the point, how many such acts occurred before 9/11? Even more to the point, what is the government and airlines doing now to prevent such acts? Air rage cannot be prevented by TSA or anything short of forcibly restricting passengers to their seats (okay, sedate every passenger while on the airliner.) Failing to screen cargo is a formula for allowing airliners to be blown up for insurance or terroristic reasons. Any trained individual could use a belt, sharpened pencil, broken wine bottle, or even bare hands to injure or kill someone on an airliner. How is such an act just as dangerous as terrorism? Such an act would be a common assault, absent other factors such as a demand to be flown to a destination other than the one scheduled. Are we going to structure the airline industry to prevent such random acts that are not terrorism? What other facets of American life should be similarly screened? Grocery stores? Sporting events? Symphony performances? Malls? Risk management vs. risk avoidance, right. I humbly submit that the main risk factor relating to terrorism against U.S. interests is strongly correlated with Islamic extremists. |
Originally Posted by HeathrowGuy
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... TSA screening methodology in place today likely would not have prevented this attack. TSA focuses almost exclusively on (some) passengers, ignoring cargo and ground personnel. SSSS screening does nothing to guard against cargo bombs, or for that matter those who are most likely to be suicide bombers. |
Why does it matter whether they intend to be "suicide bombers"? Presumably the TSA is concerned with the possibility that a terrorist will take a bomb through the checkpoint, set it up near a gate, leave, and detonate it remotely or through a timer. That's why we always hear warnings against leaving bags unattended.
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Originally Posted by Bart
We both agree that mandatory secondary screening, as indicated by SSSS on the boarding pass, is unnecessary and adds nothing to security.
We disagree on how to resolve alarms caused at the WTMD. You believe there should be a way to pin-point it to a certain area. I support the current policy of re-screening the entire body, this time with a hand-wand, and detecting/resolving each and every metal item. To me, this is a thorough follow-up to the initial screening process that eliminates any doubt that a person was concealing something on his or her body. A targeted or limited secondary screening is based on a guess of what probably caused the alarm. Perhaps we may someday have technology which allows us to pinpoint areas more accurately; however, our society gets hung up over the fact that this may result in images of naked bodies on some computer screen. Kind of hard to get to where we need to be with such Puritanical attitudes. I disagree that things can't be targeted in secondary. If my shoes meet the profile, but I didn't alarm the WTMD, swab my shoes. Look me over to see if I appear to have any suspiscious bulges on me. If I alarm the WTMD, wand me. If there's something that can't be resolved by the wand, then pat that SPECIFIC area. Again, pat down a specific area if an unusual bulge is seen. This stuff is done with bags all the time (except with SSSS when you pretty much have to dump everything). When I alarmed at SFO because of a battery, they stopped searching once they found the battery. They didn't dump my bag. Pat downs could be a lot more limited than they are now. Especially when you get one just because you dared not to take off the shoes. The imagers have nothing to do with a Puritanical attitude. More often than not, the ACLU is far from Puritanical (NAMBLA anyone?). It's just that the government has no damn reason to view someone's naked body on the screen, especially for a routine check. Do you guys REALLY need to see someone's pubes on screen to make sure they're not a threat? Do a wireframe or solid image that doesn't show any feature yet can show any contraband. What's so hard about that? Super |
Originally Posted by Big Mo
Why does it matter whether they intend to be "suicide bombers"? Presumably the TSA is concerned with the possibility that a terrorist will take a bomb through the checkpoint, set it up near a gate, leave, and detonate it remotely or through a timer. That's why we always hear warnings against leaving bags unattended.
*side note* this is post 1984. Ironic that I hit it in the TS/S forum. :D |
Originally Posted by Superguy
If TSA security was as good as it claimed, those things should never get inside an airport. Which would mean those "special" announcements aren't needed.
*side note* this is post 1984. Ironic that I hit it in the TS/S forum. :D |
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Originally Posted by Bart
That's the policy. The only catch is that we have to swab you immediately and not allow you to mix in with other passengers awaiting secondary screening. Still, this is do-able and should be done at airports across the country.
PWM got it right. After my wife's bad experience with the shoe carnival at DCA, she refused to take her shoes off and get the secondary. She was quite relieved when it was just a quick swab and she was done. IAD, on the other hand, completely botched it. At 615, they had a half hour wait, and the line wasn't even that long. When I complained for getting the full treatment because of my shoes and mentioned the new procedure, he said that having someone doing that would have slowed the line EVEN MORE. Now how can something that speeds up the line by not having to do secondaries slow things up? Agreed again. And again, that's the policy. The only disagreement I have with the policy is the upper-torso pat-down that is supposed to be done after the hand-wanding. I think this should be a judgment call based on the thickness of the clothing. In other words, if you're wearing a T-shirt or dress shirt, it would be pretty obvious if you were concealing anything underneath. If you're wearing a sweatshirt or layers of clothing on the upper torso, then would it make sense to pat down the upper torso for concealed explosives. Unfortunately, current TSA procedures don't allow us this flexibility. What should happen, according to procedure, is that they search until they find the item spotted in the x-ray, and then re-run the bag in the x-ray to ensure there's nothing else rather than do a complete bag search. The screener also has the option of doing a complete bag search, but that should be for small, relatively simple bags where it would make more sense to search the bag completely rather than x-ray it again (some bags are lightly packed and others are crammed with all sorts of stuff). Well, you already know my view about the shoe screening policy. I think we can scale it down to a random sampling rather than a mandatory screening on top of the ETD-sampling as discussed above. We disagree. If I'm going to rely on technology that scans someone's body, then looking at a cartoon representation of that person's body doesn't cut it. Has nothing to do with seeing someone's pubes or other body features; has everything to do with making sure that the image I see on the screen is that of the person being scanned. There's probably a technology possible that reasonably meets both of our concerns half way. The objections to the current technology is Puritanical. I don't give a damn about the ACLU or NAMBLA. Our society is ridiculously silly when it comes to the slightest possibility of someone viewing nude or semi-nude bodies under any circumstances, even at the doctor's office. In this regard, the Europeans are much more enlightened and practical about these matters. LEO's can only do strip searches in certain circumstances. As TSA has no LE authority, I think it's stepping beyond their scope to conduct a strip search, whether real or virtual. Super |
Originally Posted by bambi47
I think we're pretty good at picking up things. In my opinion, the announcements are because there a people in the airport that bypass security everyday. Most of the airline employees such as mechanics, baggage handlers, gate agents etc, plus the airport employees that bypass security daily, maintenance, construction workers, etc. These people have access to doors that we don't and use them rather than go through security and there's nothing we can do about it. I've seen airline employees going in a door where you have to swipe your badge and they bring 4 or 5 people in with them that there is no record of. That is where someone will likely bring in something prohibited. They could bring in a bomb, put it in a trash can or whatever and leave. No one would know they were even there.
If the concern is worrying about those on the tarmac ... I agree. However, I find it disconcerting that we're more worried about pax bringing scissors and the like on board and having shoe carnivals when those who actually have physical access to the plane are ignored. That's a huge vulnerability, and I think the ball is being dropped there. |
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Originally Posted by Bart
Well, for what it's worth, I disagree with the use of the technology just on general principle. If we're at the point where we have to scan people with x-ray like devices that allow us to see under their clothing, then screening has gone too far. I am one of the skeptics who believes that reasonable pat-downs, as we've discussed, is still the better alternative to these "virtual strip searches" as you put it. I argued that society takes a ridiculous Puritanical view only from the standpoint that we (as a whole) tend to giggle like school boys (or girls) when it comes to issues as these. We're actually pretty inconsistent. On the one hand, we're a pretty promiscuous and shameless society, and on the other, we're quite conservative and bashful.
Just to digress a bit: a woman came through our checkpoint dressed in a rather provocative fashion. She had on a camisol which showed off her silicone-enhanced cleavage, and a pair of pants with the sides cut out that pretty much revealed that she was either not wearing any panties or had a pretty thin thong on. She was also a selectee and had to undergo the mandatory secondary screening. I heard my screener offer her the option of being screened in a private room, which she declined. And my screener also explained each step of the process, including demonstrating on herself how she was going to pat down any sensitive areas. It was a textbook screening. Afterwards, the woman seemed upset, and I asked her what was wrong. She said she never felt so humiliated in her life. I managed to explain that she did nothing wrong, and that we were mandated to screen her in this fashion because of the SSSS on her boarding pass. I escorted her aside and had her sit down someplace out of sight so she could regain her composure, and she thanked me for my kindness. Still, I must admit that I was left scratching my head at how she could feel "humiliated" given the daring way she was dressed. Could be a guy thing that we men will never understand, and I'm sure women will sympathize with her. My point here is how there's an apparent contradiction in how we're fairly open about the human body on the one hand and very secretive on the other. My opposition to the imagery technology is that screening, in my mind, should be thorough yet not to the point of being overly intrusive. It's called "screening" not "searching." I'm not a big fan of the upper-torso pat-down (except for the circumstances I mentioned previously) and I wish TSA would construct better private screening areas (meaning more than just a broom closet), with a few structures on the checkpoint itself that could reasonably accomodate private screening. I think the reason most people reject private area screening is because they know they're going to be crammed inside some broom closet that also serves as a storage area where screening is just impossible to do. Yet here is where we also come across another contradiction. If we were to scale back on some of the things we do, there would be another cry on these boards about how sloppy, haphazard or just lazy we are by not conducting a thorough screening. ;) Ok, I think we agree for the most part on this. I agree that it seems contradictory that the woman would respond in such a way when she's flaunting what she's got. And I agree that private screening needs to be done in an appropriate facility. Maybe something could be done with these puffers that could be darkened or something? That could give them a dual use. Then again, they might not be big enough fora person and a screener. I've seen them as I walked past checkpoints in SFO, but didn't see any in use at the time. Personally, I'm with you on the risk management aspect of things. We can never reduce the risk to 0 on anything ... but we can take steps to mitigate things. A good start is with plugging the bigger holes like cargo, then fine tuning from there. |
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