APA president advises pilots against using new body scanners

[Ibis]

Just a matter of time

Airport security breach as naked body scanner images leaked online | Mail Online

[Romeo E.T.]

a personal blog by a woman who refused the scanner, and also didn't want her private parts to be "patted" down

http://johnnyedge.********.com/2010/...y-between.html

[Earl]

TSA Boss: New Pat-Downs Are More Invasive

The head of the Transportation Security Administration is acknowledging that the new pat-downs are more invasive than what travelers were used to in the past.

TSA administrator John Pistole says he has received the new pat-down, as has his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Some travelers complain that the new inspections target sensitive body areas. Pistole says he understands those privacy concerns, but says the government must provide the best possible security for air travelers.

Pistole was testifying before a Senate committee about TSA policies and procedures. The hearing was scheduled before the recent outrage about airport security
pat-downs.

[Earl]

Religion Offers No Break on Airport Screening, TSA Says - FoxNews.com
Religion Offers No Break on Airport Screening, TSA Says
WASHINGTON -- The Transportation Security Administration says airline passengers won't get out of body imaging screening or pat-downs based on their religious beliefs.

TSA chief John Pistole told the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday that passengers who refuse to go through a full-body scanner machine and reject a pat-down won't be allowed to board, even if they turned down the in-depth screening for religious reasons.

"That person is not going to get on an airplane," Pistole said in response to a question from Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., on whether the TSA would provide exemptions for passengers whose religious beliefs do not allow them to go through a physically revealing body scan or be touched by screeners.

Civil rights groups contend the more intensive screening violates civil liberties including freedom of religion, the right to privacy and the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches.

The issue is getting new attention after a man posted an item online saying he was thrown out of the San Diego airport for rejecting a full-body scan and pat-down groin check and instead insisting on passing through a metal detector.

Pistole acknowledged the incident was drawing wide attention but told the committee an officer involved was "very cool, calm, professional" in dealing with the passenger.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center is among several civil liberties groups suing the TSA in federal court to stop use of the full-body scanners. Their lawsuit says the machines are overly intrusive and violate civil rights, and that it is questionable whether they can detect powdered explosives such as those used by a passenger in last year's attempted Christmas airliner bombing. They also question whether the machines pose a health risk.

"There's a very strong sense right now that the public attitude on the airport body scanner program has swung dramatically," said Marc Rotenberg, director of EPIC. There is growing opposition from civil rights groups, religious organizations, libertarians, airline passengers and pilots, he said.

EPIC is urging air travelers to take part in a national opt-out day the day before Thanksgiving, refusing to go through the full-body detectors and insisting that any pat-down they receive as a result take place in full view of other passengers.

Several senators asked Pistole to address public criticism of the body-imaging machines and more intrusive pat-downs the agency is using. Pistole said the tougher screening is necessary, and that the FDA has found the imaging machines to be safe. Going through the whole-body scanning machine is similar to getting about three minutes of the radiation that passengers receive at 30,000 feet on a typical flight, he said.

Pistole said his agency was working to address pilot and flight attendant concerns about the screening.

[Earl]

ttp://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/11/17/forget-body-scans-pat-downs-lets-busy-profiling/
Forget Body Scans and Pat Downs -- Let's Get Busy Profiling
Why don’t we start profiling for terrorists and stop trying to put everyone from toddlers to granny through the same security procedures at airports? We’re wasting money, time and the people’s patience in an effort to be politically correct. In the end, it’s not keeping us any safer; if anything it’s making us less safe since it’s diverting resources that could otherwise be used on better intelligence gathering, or developing screening devices for cargo on commercial and civilian aircraft, or checking containers before they enter U.S. ports.

Ultimately, though, the debate over whether to use the new scanners or not isn’t a choice between privacy and security – because we’re not getting security where we need it – we’re reacting to the last type of terrorist threat, not the current one or the next one.

Supposedly, these body scanners may, or may not(!) prevent the next underwear bomber, but again, let’s use some common sense – Al Qaeda has moved on! They’re putting bombs in UPS packages that make their way from cargo planes to passenger planes. They're plotting to place bombs inside bodies – the human bodies of suicide bombers, or of corpses or even animals – which will then be detonated remotely once in plane is in flight. Full body scanners are useless against those threats!

Al Qaeda’s pattern has been to constantly adapt their offense, and force us into spending valuable resources on defense. While we’re busy focusing on preventing the last attack, they’ve moved on to the next one.

Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked aircraft on Sept 11, 2001. We’ve now got locked cockpit doors and we prohibit box cutters on airplanes. They put bombs in checked luggage; we now match every checked bag to a passenger. They put bombs on passengers – in their shoes, in their carry ons, in their underwear; we now take off our shoes, open our lap tops, and put everything through metal detectors. Body scanners and pat downs are our latest security effort.

But, let me say it again, the terrorists have moved on – the UPS packages sent last month were a dry run for their next move – to put bombs in cargo that is then loaded onto civilian or cargo aircraft and detonated to blow up over major population centers.

There's a saying in the military that generals always prepare to fight the last war, well apparently so do Homeland Security officials. Let’s use some common sense and start looking for terrorists, not frisking toddlers. And let’s put our resources into protecting all of us from the next attack, not the last one.

[protectthehornet]

so...isn't it time to start wearing a cup? (and for you europeans, I mean the hard plastic shell protecting one's privates during athletic contests)

[protectthehornet]

of course finding a cup big enough for some pilots might be tough

[500N]

"so...isn't it time to start wearing a cup? (and for you europeans, I mean the hard plastic shell protecting one's privates during athletic contests)"

It's called a box.

I wonder what the TSA would think when they touched it.
Probably panic stations.

[indamiddle]

how would they cop a large banana? a male descendant of john holmes going commando?
evacuate an airport?

[innkeeper68]

body scan choices

i would opt for the pat down panty search until there is a reliable, non government study released to prove there are no long term affects of this device for those who repeatedly go through it each day of work.

while opting for the more erotic version of sexy security screening, you can have a little "fun" messing and denigrating the TSA hump performing the task. i have already tried a wickedly spicy bowl of chili a few hours before departure and emitting the most fabulous fart JUST as the screener is almost squatting patting down my crotch and legs.

i have tried the perfect good cop-bad cop response: good cop being with a sincere look "eewww, sorry dude". bad cop being "who's the bitch now?".

i do plan very soon to actually enjoy the crotch rub to the point of rolling my eyes back, let my knees wobble a little and in an orgasmic tone tell the screener " what purrrrrfect hands you have, my phone is_________, call me sweet thang"

[CONF iture]

If this doesn’t change, I see what has happened to the American people is we have accepted the notion that we should be treated like cattle. Make us safe, make us secure, put us in the barbed wire, feed us, fatten us up, and then they’ll eat us. And we are a bunch of cattle and we have to wake up and say we’ve had it ... It’s time for the American people to stand up and shrug off the shackles of our government at TSA at the airport.

[Halfnut]

http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/...gi?article=397

NAPOLITANO: THE BALL’S IN MY COURT NOW

by Ann Coulter

November 17, 2010

After the 9/11 attacks, when 19 Muslim terrorists -- 15 from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates and one each from Egypt and Lebanon, 14 with "al" in their names -- took over commercial aircraft with box-cutters, the government banned sharp objects from planes.

Airport security began confiscating little old ladies' knitting needles and breaking the mouse-sized nail files off of passengers' nail clippers. Surprisingly, no decrease in the number of hijacking attempts by little old ladies and manicurists was noted.

After another Muslim terrorist, Richard Reid, AKA Tariq Raja, AKA Abdel Rahim, AKA Abdul Raheem, AKA Abu Ibrahim, AKA Sammy Cohen (which was only his eHarmony alias), tried to blow up a commercial aircraft with explosive-laden sneakers, the government prohibited more than 3 ounces of liquid from being carried on airplanes.

All passengers were required to take off their shoes for special security screening, which did not thwart a single terrorist attack, but made airport security checkpoints a lot smellier.

After Muslim terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria tried to detonate explosive material in his underwear over Detroit last Christmas, the government began requiring nude body scans at airports.

The machines, which cannot detect chemicals or plastic, would not have caught the diaper bomber. So, again, no hijackers were stopped, but being able to see passengers in the nude boosted the morale of airport security personnel by 22 percent.

After explosives were inserted in two ink cartridges and placed on a plane headed to the United States from the Muslim nation of Yemen, the government banned printer cartridges from all domestic flights, resulting in no improvement in airport security, while requiring ink cartridges who traveled to take Amtrak.

So when the next Muslim terrorist, probably named Abdul Ahmed al Shehri, places explosives in his anal cavity, what is the government going to require then? (If you're looking for a good investment opportunity, might I suggest rubber gloves?)

Last year, a Muslim attempting to murder Prince Mohammed bin Nayef of Saudi Arabia blew himself up with a bomb stuck up his anus. Fortunately, this didn't happen near an airport, or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano would now be requiring full body cavity searches to fly.

You can't stop a terrorist attack by searching for the explosives any more than you can stop crime by taking away everyone's guns.

In the 1970s, liberal ideas on crime swept the country. Gun owners were treated like criminals while actual criminals were coddled and released. If only we treated criminals with dignity and respect and showed them the system was fair, liberals told us, criminals would reward us with good behavior.

As is now well known, crime exploded in the '70s. It took decades of conservative law-and-order policies to get crime back to near-1950s levels.

It's similarly pointless to treat all Americans as if they're potential terrorists while trying to find and confiscate anything that could be used as a weapon. We can't search all passengers for explosives because Muslims stick explosives up their anuses. (Talk about jobs Americans just won't do.)

You have to search for the terrorists.

Fortunately, that's the one advantage we have in this war. In a lucky stroke, all the terrorists are swarthy, foreign-born, Muslim males. (Think: "Guys Madonna would date.")

This would give us a major leg up -- if only the country weren't insane.

Is there any question that we'd be looking for Swedes if the 9/11 terrorists, the shoe bomber, the diaper bomber and the printer cartridge bomber had all been Swedish? If the Irish Republican Army were bombing our planes, wouldn't we be looking for people with Irish surnames and an Irish appearance?

Only because the terrorists are Muslims do we pretend not to notice who keeps trying to blow up our planes.

It would be harder to find Swedes or Irish boarding commercial airliners in the U.S. than Muslims. Swarthy foreigners stand out like a sore thumb in an airport. The American domestic flying population is remarkably homogenous. An airport is not a Sears department store.

Only about a third of all Americans flew even once in the last year, and only 7 percent took more than four round trips. The majority of airline passengers are middle-aged, middle-class, white businessmen with about a million frequent flier miles. I'd wager that more than 90 percent of domestic air travelers were born in the U.S.

If the government did nothing more than have a five-minute conversation with the one passenger per flight born outside the U.S., you'd need 90 percent fewer Transportation Security Administration agents and airlines would be far safer than they are now.

Instead, Napolitano just keeps ordering more invasive searches of all passengers, without exception -- except members of Congress and government officials, who get VIP treatment, so they never know what she's doing to the rest of us.

Two weeks ago, Napolitano ordered TSA agents to start groping women's breasts and all passengers' genitalia -- children, nuns and rape victims, everyone except government officials and members of Congress. (Which is weird because Dennis Kucinich would like it.)

"Please have your genitalia out and ready to be fondled when you approach the security checkpoint."

This is the punishment for refusing the nude body scan for passengers who don't want to appear nude on live video or are worried about the skin cancer risk of the machines -- risks acknowledged by the very Johns Hopkins study touted by the government.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that we need to keep the government as far away from airport security as possible, and not only because Janet Napolitano did her graduate work in North Korea.

[Halfnut]

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/ar...-little-bother

Back to The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother
The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother

December 30, 2009

Cathal Kelly

While North America's airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification.

That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience.

"It is mindboggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago," said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He's worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world.

"Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don't take s--- from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, 'We're not going to do this. You're going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport."

That, in a nutshell is "Israelification" - a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death.

Fliers urged to opt out of airport security en masse

Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel's largest hub, Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?

"The first thing you do is to look at who is coming into your airport," said Sela.

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

"Two benign questions. The questions aren't important. The way people act when they answer them is," Sela said.

Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of "distress" — behavioural profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.

"The word 'profiling' is a political invention by people who don't want to do security," he said. "To us, it doesn't matter if he's black, white, young or old. It's just his behaviour. So what kind of privacy am I really stepping on when I'm doing this?"

Once you've parked your car or gotten off your bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.

Armed guards outside the terminal are trained to observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behaviour. At Ben Gurion's half-dozen entrances, another layer of security are watching. At this point, some travellers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer.

"This is to see that you don't have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious," said Sela.

You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

"The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds," said Sela.

Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has gotten this far.

At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area. Sela plays devil's advocate — what if you have escaped the attention of the first four layers of security, and now try to pass a bag with a bomb in it?

"I once put this question to Jacques Duchesneau (the former head of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority): say there is a bag with play-doh in it and two pens stuck in the play-doh. That is 'Bombs 101' to a screener. I asked Ducheneau, 'What would you do?' And he said, 'Evacuate the terminal.' And I said, 'Oh. My. God.'

"Take Pearson. Do you know how many people are in the terminal at all times? Many thousands. Let's say I'm (doing an evacuation) without panic — which will never happen. But let's say this is the case. How long will it take? Nobody thought about it. I said, 'Two days.'"

A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options.

First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away.

Second, all the screening areas contain 'bomb boxes'. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.

"This is a very small simple example of how we can simply stop a problem that would cripple one of your airports," Sela said.

Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at the only one which Ben-Gurion Airport shares with Pearson — the body and hand-luggage check.

"But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America," Sela said.

"First, it's fast — there's almost no line. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They're not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you," said Sela. "Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes ... and that's how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys."

That's the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.

This doesn't begin to cover the off-site security net that failed so spectacularly in targeting would-be Flight 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — intelligence. In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies.

"There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States," Sela said. "Absolutely none."

But even without the intelligence, Sela maintains, Abdulmutallab would not have gotten past Ben Gurion Airport's behavioural profilers.

So. Eight years after 9/11, why are we still so reactive, so un-Israelified?

Working hard to dampen his outrage, Sela first blames our leaders, and then ourselves.

"We have a saying in Hebrew that it's much easier to look for a lost key under the light, than to look for the key where you actually lost it, because it's dark over there. That's exactly how (North American airport security officials) act," Sela said. "You can easily do what we do. You don't have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit — technology, training. But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept."

And rather than fear, he suggests that outrage would be a far more powerful spur to provoking that change.

"Do you know why Israelis are so calm? We have brutal terror attacks on our civilians and still, life in Israel is pretty good. The reason is that people trust their defence forces, their police, their response teams and the security agencies. They know they're doing a good job. You can't say the same thing about Americans and Canadians. They don't trust anybody," Sela said. "But they say, 'So far, so good'. Then if something happens, all hell breaks loose and you've spent eight hours in an airport. Which is ridiculous. Not justifiable

"But, what can you do? Americans and Canadians are nice people and they will do anything because they were told to do so and because they don't know any different."

[RockShock]

Just FYI

Just FYI folks, as I am a pax and not really into this stuff - but I found this on the Web today I thought might be worth sharing: TSA Screening Pilot Health - TSA Screening Scandal - Popular Mechanics

[ShotOne]

I know several people who have sampled Ben Gurion security, halfnut and none of them have ever been processed in the 25 minutes stated in your post. Their shortest wait was 3hrs 20 min of deeply intrusive questioning.

A plastic screen to protect against detonation of 100kgs of explosive a few metres away? After you! You'd almost think the article was written by someone from an Israeli security company looking for business...!

[FLCH]

Is there a hint that finally some common sense will prevail ?



U.S. Airline Pilots Will Be Exempted From Physical Checks, TSA Chief Says - Bloomberg

[Romeo E.T.]

seems as if even the armed forces are getting the "treatment"

Another TSA Outrage | RedState

[Romeo E.T.]

[jcjeant]

Hi,

Cancer surviving flight attendant forced to remove prosthetic br - WBTV 3 News, Weather, Sports, and Traffic for Charlotte, NC-

Well the next step is to sue TSA personnal as sexual offenders ...

[Human Factor]

Didn't "they" consider asbestos to be safe for 30 years? Oops....

Halfwits. Probably in government because no-one else would employ them.