Back to it? You've never left it.

You continue to insist that a random search is wrong because there is no probable cause. Xraying the bags and subjecting the passengers to the magnometer is also a search without probable cause.

Yeah, I know, "Hijackings are now impossible". Only an idiot would think that it's that simple. Only an idiot would think that it's that black and white.

To quote the Democrats, "It's the economy, stupid". When the economy is down, airlines lose big money. When the economy is strong, airlines make even bigger money. That's the way it's been for nearly a century now.

Want to really hurt the airlines? Let another major terrorist attack cause the loss of one of more US airliners. That WILL affect the industry like nothing else could.

No, security hassles will not effect my carreer at all.

[This message has been edited by LarryJ (edited 11-25-2002).]

Well, I don't know and don't want to know who you fly for, but with USAir, for example telling its pilots that no one with less than 15 years' experience is safe, I hope you've got tons of seniority. Of course that will mean squat if your carrier goes Chapter 7. Hey, you can trumpet "it's the economy, stupid" until you're blue in the face but I hope you've got your resume into all those pilot schools ahead of all the other TSA to the Last Day apologists.

And yes, genius, you can hijack a plane with a butter knife. But the probability of such an event happening is pathetically low that it is ZERO for all essential purposes. You want to waste resources on probabilities microscopically higher than zero, go right ahead. And keep dreaming that the Economy Fairy will show up and get people flying again. What's your plan if she doesn't show up by the time your company's out of cash because the "security" hassles contine to outpace the economy miracle we're all dreaming of? Going to loan them a few bucks to tide them over a little longer?

And I don't know whose posts you've been reading, but not once did I ever say a hijacking was impossible. What I have been saying all along is that the list of prohibited items is laughable (only an idiot would believe that someone is going to hijack a plane with a cricket bat) and that we waste resources focusing on them. Random screening needs to stop and we need to instead focus on credible threats.

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"Give me Liberty or give me Death." - Patrick Henry

[This message has been edited by Spiff (edited 11-25-2002).]

Spiff, if you are going to call people names, try to stay in your own league.

Larry is in a better position to know the finances of his employer than you are. Yet your attitude reeks of presumptive intellectual superiority, of which you are displaying little here. This just reinforces my hypothesis that extremists tend to just shout louder as their thin arguments dissolve before them.

Spiff, I'm sorry. You are out of step with the rest of the country, as is your band of fellow thinkers. In our free society, feel free... to shout from the sidelines. But until you apply some discipline to your arguments, on the sidelines you shall remain.

I think LarryJ is perfectly capable of parrying my sideways thrusts on his own, as I am of his. Thanks for your input though.

I am certain he knows his employer's finances better than I. But his thinking that the airline industry will arise from the ashes that the TSA is continuing to help reduce it defies logic. It's like having such confidence in the fire department showing up to put your house fire out that you wait for them inside. Meanwhile, the street urchins continue to lob molotov cocktails at your house from the backyard. The cops see your house on fire and the urchins with the firebombs, but elect instead to ticket your car for being illegally parked.

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"Give me Liberty or give me Death." - Patrick Henry

[This message has been edited by Spiff (edited 11-26-2002).]

I concur 100%. "It is those who have things to hide are afraid of scrutiny"

This isn't meant to be an ad hominem attack on you, drbala, but I think these four factors you propose as part of some sort of composite security score are downright ludicrous.

First, I have a Constitutional right to own a gun. The fact that it's registered makes me a better security risk because I'm upfront about it rather than concealing it illegally. (And yes, I've applied for a concealed weapons permit.)

Second, what the h*ll does my family background have to do with anything? One word: nothing! I am a sovereign, volitional, individual. So-called lineage has nothing to do with my behavior. And besides, who's to assess such a notion objectively?

Vehicle ownership? Excuse me, but I'm an urbanite. I don't need or want a car. See my second point above.

Finally, my religious practices -- or lack thereof, in my case -- not only are Constitutionally protected but also none of anyone's business.

Jeez.

Essxjay
You apparently have not understood my point. I am not saying that your constitutional rights are not to be respected They are indeed sacrosant. These are suggestions for discussion and may, I repeat, may form part of a scoring system with differnet weightage. Family background meant basically the number of children etc for scoring, vehicle ownership etc tries to establish a stable background and a higher score. Your point about guns is well taken. I expected your comments about religion; however you cannot get away from the stark fact that one religion alone (Probably militants only) has been responsible for most of the atrocities all over the world. How can the blanket of constitutional rights cover this ? Even if a person is the gentlest creature on earth if that person is part of that fanatical group, has to face adverse scores and extra screening as already being practised all over the world. I do not complain about the treatment I receive when I visit those countries which do not allow you entry if your passport contains an entry stamp for another country. I am sure to get flamed on this, but this is my 2 cents worth.

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[This message has been edited by drbala (edited 11-26-2002).]

Lots of Christian fanatics last time I checked. Firebombing cinemas, abortionists, even blacks, and denouncing Islam as a religion of terror, all the while preaching fire and brimstone to all who fail to submit. A pretty unstable bunch frankly. Very prone to indiscriminate crusading and aggressive use of aeroplanes. Basically, I would definitely run these people through security, five or six times, before letting them onboard and then preferably only blindfolded and handcuft.

This is ludicrous in so many ways:
1) It's a loss of privacy for 99.9999...% of the community in order to try to catch the minute proportion who are terrorists.
2) Enormous cost
3) Enormous risk of data falling into wrong hands (just look what's happened with US SSNs)

The profiling that credit agencies and governments do already is understandable due to the type of "threat" they are trying to prevent. A relatively large proportion of people might fail to repay debts or fail to pay taxes if they could get away with not doing so, so maintainance of a database on everyone makes some sense. Keeping a database on everyone when the threat is the 1 in 10 million chance that someone is a terrorist is an astronomical waste of resources.

The money involved in this sort of silly scheme (and the TSA, for that matter) could be far better spent on the intelligence agencies. It's their job to find the terrorists and, IMHO, a well funded security agency is far more likely to be able to do it than any sorts of database that impacts on every single one of us.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Kremmen.

You've more or less exactly verbalized my thoughts on this matter, and probably better than I could have ever done.

I simply fail to see how anyone could logically debate against the points above.

Mook

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"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty."

-- Thomas Jefferson

Some of the comments here seem to be a pretty good example of how repeated afirmation of some shaky propositions can 'wear people down' and get them to advise just sitting back and enjoying the rape. I was interested to hear that tony has nothing to hide however. tony, could you let us have your bank balance please, and a preliminary statement of your medical state would be nice. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

I have little doubt that Tony would happily provide such information -- and much, much more! -- to any authority figure, because Tony trusts authority figures. (Correct me if I'm wrong, Tony.) He would not provide it to you, however, because you are just an ordinary guy -- like Tony, actually! What people like Tony forget is that authority figures are just ordinary guys, too. They are no more trustworthy than you, me or Tony.

Too much trust in government is not good. The Founding Fathers taught us that, but many modern people seem to have forgotten this lesson.

Bruce

The TSA has no dealings whatsoever with my airline's customers so how could they effect my airline's profitability?

My airline is currently profitable. We had a couple of quarters that showed a loss but we're now back into the black.

But what does my airline's financial health have to do with this? If I believe my position on this to be correct then the health of my airline, or the affect on my career, won't change it's correctness. As you suggesting that I should be so hypocritical as to base my opinions on what's best for the industry on what's best for me personally?

You continue to say that a hijacking will not succeed because the passengers will not allow it. That's ridiculously simplistic. The new conditions are known to the hijackers and they have always proved to be creative in their methods and thorough in their planning. Assuming that they can't develop a plan to overcome a lightly booked airplane of passengers is foolhardy and dangerous.

You've also forgotten the pre-9/11 goal of airport security--to prevent the loss of any of the passengers, or even the entire airplane, to a hijacking attempt. Passengers being killed, and additional airplanes being lost, in failed hijacking attempts are events that we still want to prevent.

What's your hangup with random checks? Random checks are used in all sorts of industries and applications where the initial QA method is known to be imperfect and 100% screening is not practical. Random checks are just a small part of a the total system.

[This message has been edited by LarryJ (edited 11-26-2002).]

The way random checks are being carried out is ridiculous and ineffective. For one thing, they aren't random at all. Anybody with half a brain can avoid them by merely waiting until someone ELSE has been selected, then scurrying through before that person's search is done.

"Randomly" selecting well-known people like Dan Quayle and Al Gore -- yes, it happened -- is preposterous and a total waste of the screeners' time and my tax money. These people were Vice Presidents of the United States, for crying out loud, just a heartbeat away from having their fingers on the nuclear trigger. Isn't it reasonable to give them a pass? Randomly selecting toddlers and old ladies isn't much better. Yeah, yeah, some toddlers might be terrorists. I'd be more concerned about getting struck by lightning, personally.

Finally, the searches themselves have become shockingly perfunctory. I've been selected a couple of times during the last month or so. On none of those occasions was my bag searched in a meaningful way. They unzip a couple of compartments and glance inside, but nobody is really looking for anything. This is a natural human reaction to spending your days searching bags and NEVER finding anything of significance. Eventually, you realize that it doesn't matter how good a job you do, because NOTHING bad is there! After all, the bag has already been x-rayed, and you know it! Perfunctory searches are just a waste of everyone's time and should be stopped.

Enough said?

Bruce

First of all, I'm pleased you will not get laid off. I don't want that to happen to anyone, including people whose security views I disagree with.

My contention is that no hijacking will succeed with most of the "weapons" listed on the prohibited items list. No one is going to hijack an airplane with pool cues. Not today, not tomorrow. By making our "security" include these non-credible items, we are unable to focus on real threats: guns, bombs, etc. In doing so, we have so many "weapons" to check for that many of them slip by our ace screeners. "Wow! Look at all this contraband! We better have random checks because our screeners can't possibly find it all!"

This un-American policy of random checks is something I have a huge problem with. I am not a widget coming off the assembly line with a quality score of XX%. I am a person who lives in a free society where random searches of a person and their belongings goes against the very principles upon which this society was based.

If we're going to spend billions preventing even one aircraft fatality, then we are truly a misguided society. People get killed every day and we're spending practically nothing to prevent it. Why should an airplane/airport be some kind of holy ground where bazillions of dollars are spent trying to prevent even one homicide when nothing is done elsewhere? I am all for sanely and rationally improving security to prevent credible threats of hijackings, but spending billions that could be spent elsewhere to prevent the most improbable of threats to a person (not a plane) is simply madness. And ineffectual. A martial artist can go loco kill someone on a plane anytime, any flight. No random searches, no profiling, no praying is going to be able to prevent that.



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"Give me Liberty or give me Death." - Patrick Henry