Security Screening - What Works?

[BadgeBunny]

That's a mystery to me also,but,BB,what if he was a hot agent??

Oh ... THAT would be "different" ... If only they wore those mountie hats and sunglasses while they were working. Methinks there wouldn't be so many complaints! LOL It's all in how you present yourself ... haha!

For future reference.....I'm pretty well trained in that area.

So I have heard ...

Everyone here is such the expert on how poor of a job the TSA is doing. Why dont we hear some of your solutions? Allowing average citizens carry weapons on planes is not the answer. Passengers with guns would just equal terrorists with guns and gunfights at 30K feet inside a big metal tube full of 300 people with no cover is not the answer.

The problem is everyone complains "why am I treated like a criminals", however every time a "shoe/underwear bomber" makes the news the same people are out saying "why cant the government keep me safe?" or "we need better rules for air travel" It is too late to go back to "how it used to be" If you recall the 70's and 80's were packed with hijackings and bombings.

I could just see the posts now if we went with the Israel method. "Why is the government asking me where I am going? It is none of their business. " Since there are people who get offended when a Police Officer asks them where they are going during a traffic stop. Just my two cents. Back to my for the TSA threads.

I think the American Public is having difficulty coming to terms with the products of their liberalism now. Profiling is legally wrong in this country. However, searches, under certain circumstances, have been legally sanctioned for many years. The way I see it the TSA really didn't have a choice ... can you imagine the uproar that would have resulted if they had gone to the Israeli style of interrogation in lines across the country? It would make this mess look like a romper room naptime ...

Now that the flying public has been subjected to the results of the combination of liberal "outrage" over *name your affliction* and legal precedent maybe some of them will catch on to the trouble all that creates for common folks ... I doubt it but one can hope.

And, like I said in my earlier post, just about anyone anywhere can ask me where I am going and what I am doing ... You gotta get permission to put your hands on those ****ies though!

Yes they do.... It's called profiling. An 80 year old great grandma gets screened while people with known ties to terrorist walk through..

You ain't right ... well, you ARE "right" but you ain't "right"!! LOL

 

[POSITIVE DISCONTENT]

You ain't right ... well, you ARE "right" but you ain't "right"!! LOL

That is the sweetest thing anyone has said to me all day. Muah!

 

[redmax51]

That is the sweetest thing anyone has said to me all my life. Muah!

Fixed it for you and your welcome.

 

[BadgeBunny]

That is the sweetest thing anyone has said to me all day. Muah!

You know you are my favorite ...

Fixed it for you and your welcome.

OMG ... I spit coffee EVERYWHERE!! LOL Very nicely played, sir ... (sorry PD! LOL)

 

[poopgiggle]

There's too much focus on security at airports, IMO. That's just one attack vector out of many. Real security happens with intelligence and law enforcement; there's no rule that says terrorists have to attack airports, and we either go nuts (and broke) trying to defend all possible terrorist objectives or we get them at the source. The FBI has been doing a pretty good job, incidentally. Check out the guy in Oregon the busted. (EDIT And he wasn't attacking an airplane! Imagine that! The TSA wouldn't have done anything to catch that car bomb.)

Even if they WERE just attacking airports, if experienced law enforcement officers and intelligence operatives can't do their jobs, I don't think it's reasonable to expect some schmoe making $10/hour to pick up their slack. TSA employees are effectively drones following an algorithm, and that kind of security is normally pretty easily circumvented (ask me how I know!).

 

[Dale00]

There's too much focus on security at airports, IMO. That's just one attack vector out of many. Real security happens with intelligence and law enforcement; there's no rule that says terrorists have to attack airports, and we either go nuts (and broke) trying to defend all possible terrorist objectives or we get them at the source.

You are correct. Airport security is like the Maginot line, which France counted on to stop the Germans. Lots of other targets going totally defenseless.

In addition the current airport procedures appear unconstitutional and ineffective:

In a 2006 opinion for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, then-Judge Samuel Alito stressed that screening procedures must be both "minimally intrusive" and "effective" - in other words, they must be "well-tailored to protect personal privacy," and they must deliver on their promise of discovering serious threats. Alito upheld the practices at an airport checkpoint where passengers were first screened with walk-through magnetometers and then, if they set off an alarm, with hand-held wands. He wrote that airport searches are reasonable if they escalate "in invasiveness only after a lower level of screening disclose a reason to conduct a more probing search."

As currently used in U.S. airports, the new full-body scanners fail all of Alito's tests....

In January, the European Commission's information commissioner criticized the scanners' "privacy-invasive potential" and their unproven effectiveness. And tests have shown that the machines are not good at detecting low-density powder explosives: A member of Britain's Parliament who evaluated the scanners in his former capacity as a defense technology company director concluded that they wouldn't have stopped the bomber who concealed the chemical powder PETN in his underwear last Christmas.

So there's good reason to believe that the machines are not effective in detecting the weapons they're purportedly designed to identify. For U.S. courts, that's yet another consideration that could make them constitutionally unreasonable.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/24/AR2010112404510.html

 

[poopgiggle]

Also I'm really glad that the term "security theater" has entered general public discourse.

 

[DDriller]

Saw this on another site.

Here's a solution to all the controversy over full-body scanners at the airports:
All we need to do is develop a booth that you can step into that will NOT X-ray you, but WILL detonate any explosive device you may have hidden on or in your body. The explosion will be contained within the sealed booth. This would be a win-win for everyone. There would be none of this crap about racial profiling and the device would eliminate long and expensive trials. This is so simple that it's brilliant.

I can see it now: you're in the airport terminal and you hear a muffled explosion. Shortly thereafter an announcement comes over the PA system, Clean Up in Booth 1, and "Attention standby passengers, we now have a seat available on flight number...."

 

[Dale00]

John Farnam's take on the screening situation - ineffective security theater and abusive of our rights and dignity.

Dignity, Decency, and Privacy

26 Nov 10

Dignity, Decency, and Privacy

In the immediate aftermath of 911, the GWB Administration posted National Guardsmen, in full battle-dress, at major airports. They paraded around with their rifles and pistols in full view, ostensibly to "send a message" that, as a nation, we were really serious.

Fat chance!

It was quickly revealed/leaked that rifles and pistols so prominently displayed were all unloaded! Not only were they unloaded, but all magazines, also prominently displayed, were empty, and there was, in fact, no live ammunition anywhere in the area. None of those weapons were even remotely capable of being fired.

So, it was all a sham, an empty pseudo-exhibit, so distrustful were commanders of their own people, and so skeptical were they of their own small-arms training!

Patriotic National Guardsmen were thus obligated to participate in this disgusting fraud. A few objected and even pointed out the patent illogic of carrying empty weapons while "on duty," but, of course, their righteous protests never saw the light of day.

Today, under the BHO Administration, we're being treated to something similar:

In airports, innocent American citizens, in America, are being humiliatingly stripped of what little human dignity we have left, in public. When they object, or even cry out in pain, they are bullied and threatened with prison and financial ruin. The same fate awaits TSA employees who suspect they, too, are participating in a fraud. As Americans, we are apparently no longer are entitled to decency, nor human dignity, in any form, nor are our most private body parts off-limits to whimsical government view and intrusion.

Dignity, decency, and privacy are three things that distinguish citizens from "subjects." In America, we've always celebrated the difference between the two. Apparently, no more!

I hope that at least part of Western Civilization is about to re-embrace sanity.

We clearly aren't!

/John

http://www.defense-training.com/ Click on Quips, Quotes and Lessons

 

[Nraman]

I know it may have some "benefits" but what when do we say no?

What we need is to change tactics. Our current tactics are reactions to the threat. We have to be always right and they just have to succeed once in a while. A losing game.
What we need to do is eliminate the threat. We know why they do it, we know that they are willing to die for their cause which means "we will bring them to justice" is meaningless BS. You don't threaten an enemy willing to die with court action. You threaten him with the destruction of what he does not want destroyed.
Simple really.