According to this article, TSA screeners will now receive Amber Alerts and be instructed to look out for children in the Alerts. This is in addition to the alerts that FAMs supposedly now receive.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...r-alerts_x.htm

Anyone care to wager on how long it will be before the TSA screeners detain a parent or a family traveling with a child that the screener thinks might be in an alert?

It sure feels more and more like the TSA and its screeners are using the supposed ability to circumvent civil liberty protections as a means to become a generalized law-and-whatever-enforcement checkpoint on the citizens.

Frog. Water. Heat rising.

Figures. The poor family flying IND-MCO to see WDW will be detained for several hours because their five year old girl resembles the five year old girl abducted by their noncustodial parent earlier in the day in Chino, CA. After several hours of detention and questioning, they will finally be released with a "better safe than sorry" non-apology. "Think of the children."

The idiocy continues to pour forth from this agency.

Next up: TSA screeners will perform front-line audits on all passengers' federal (and state - why not?) tax returns. That won't slow things down, either. And a few tax cheats and criminals will be apprehended.

Excuse me while I find a wall to beat my head against.

They can't manage an orange alert. Why trust them with something more critical?

How much more are these folks going to have to look for? They are already supposed to be looking for bombs, guns, knives, breast milk, shampoo, tooth paste, quart-sized kippy bags, Boston Cream pies, hand grenades, Jell-O fruit salad, and now missing children???

Why not just give them all the post office wanted posters and have them check through those while we wait to be screened, or go ahead and fingerprint everyone at the WTMD and run the prints through AFIS?

They don't have enough to focus on already, particularly given their lack of anywhere close to perfect performance in tests, so they expand the scope to further enable the use of airports as a law enforcement fishing expedition/dragnet.

An agency can't get simpler things down right and needs positive PR, then they "think of the children" in this way.

"Screeners "meet so many children every day, they may actually notice something that's out of character with a child."

Like a kid who is nervous because it is their first flight and they saw the flames from a plane crash last week on TV? I forgot, all screeners have a PhD in Child Psychology, too, in addition to the long list of other job skills.

How many planes have been hijacked by non custodial kids? Just wondering.

It'd be interesting to see if the population of TSA employees with more than three years of continuous service includes a higher proportion of sex perverts than say office building rent-a-cops who have had three years of continuous service there.

Certain jobs attract certain types of people more than other jobs. For example, The Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 gives people working in law enforcement on sexual perversion matters civil and criminal immunity from things perceived as arising out of the performance of their responsibilities and functions. It also gives the federal government and jurisdictions immunity. Guess what kind of sick people who aren't caught yet will gravitate to those jobs if they can help it, once they know about the "immunity" cover.

There are so many better targets.

They can't secure a paper bag, let alone an airport.

Is there ANY chance you guys will ever put away your tunnel vision blind hate for TSA and see the good in ANYTHING? Amber alerts aren't supposed to require a PhD in Child Psych as one poster put it. They are to allow the average citizen to help find a missing child. I think showing them to airport security makes PERFECT sense, as would bus drivers, taxi cab drivers and other people at places where a kidnapper would go with the child to get away. This seems like a logical plan. And if they stop one kid from being murdered it will have been worth it! Amber alerts only work effectively if they are seen! But why would I expect this group to think about the people it is meant to save when they can use it as another excuse to rip on TSA.....please return to your spewing!!!1

Lehava: If TSA screeners are as effective at finding missing children as they are at finding terrorists, every child in America has just been put in grave danger of being found.

What's next, a "Child Watch List" so every child whose name is remotely like that of a missing child is detained for "questioning and investigation?"

Airline and government apologist ranting is always amusing. But that's about it, since it's not news, not informative and certainly not surprising.

Carry on "better safe than sorry" crowd, for everything at "the TSA is hunky-dory".

The TSA has been so very capable, at things simple and complicated, of engaging in effective ways, that there's no reason to expect anything different from the TSA here either.

Watch for more false alarms which won't get much of the media limelight .... while the "think of the children" "saved" at airports will get a lot of it.

With all due respect, as noble as the Amber Alert system is - the TSA screeners are there to secure the sterile area and our aircraft from items and persons germaine to aviation security. Let's put aside the issue of liberties for a moment.

As of now, the TSA screening force has demonstrated a threat detection failure rate well in excess of 50% - as high as 80%. This means they are not even coming close to fulfilling their mission. One of the myriad number of reasons they are not screening effectively is the number of different things they are looking for - many of which were never threats to aviation security in the first place or whose current threat risk has been reduced.

We need these people to focus 100% on their mission and not get sidetracked by other attentions. Meanwhile, the mission itself needs a total and drastic overhaul.

How about we make Amber Alerts available to everyone at airports, bus and train stations as well as the electronic signs on many urban highways and give everyone the option of paying attention and looking out for a missing child - and not add this action to the list of duties and tasks being performed by a group that has yet to pass muster on its most basic responsibilities.

Very simple -- TSA and the Kabucki Security Corps don't need any added responsibility at our expense.