so, the terrorists win...

[martha]

Originally Posted by Headache in a Suitcase

the right to fly is not covered by the constitution. nobody's rights are being infringed. they're not coming to your house and grabbing your balls.

.

Fucking Forth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

[Moonlit_Angel]

Yeah, that "don't touch my junk" guy was clearly trying to get a situation going, which is dumb and not a way to go about it. But I have to agree with many of the others on this issue. I am all for security and safety measures at airports, that's fine. You've got big crowds, there have been incidents, there's nothing wrong whatsoever with having a means in place to make sure everyone gets to and from their destinations safely.

This measure just seems awfully extreme, though. I don't feel comfortable with a stranger getting that invasive with their searches for me. Sorry. I just don't. I find it unsettling and creepy. Beyond that, you know this could well lead to harassment lawsuits, legitimate or false, and some people could take these jobs to use it as an excuse to be all pervy (sort of like how some people became security guards to peep at girls in dressing rooms at department stores that had cameras in place for security reasons), and there's just all sorts of problems that this will cause. I just don't get how they expect this will solve anything.

Angela

[coolian2]

Originally Posted by Moonlit_Angel

Yeah, that "don't touch my junk" guy was clearly trying to get a situation going, which is dumb and not a way to go about it.

given he looked up which airports have the machines and saw san diego wasn't on the official tsa list, i find it hard to believe he was really, really trying to get a reaction, but he probably isn't upset about making it into an issue.

and good for him, too.

[KhanadaRhodes]

Originally Posted by corianderstem

One Hundred Naked Citizens: One Hundred Leaked Body Scans

So these are pretty blurry. But that's an older model. And the point is that the TSA was all "no, we can't save these, don't worry!"

And then it was all "Okay, we can save them for, but for just a short period of time."

What's it now? "Oops, our bad."

Yeah, you can't identify the person, but that's kind of beside the point. Why should we believe anything the TSA tells us these days?

yeah, exactly. i was suspicious from the beginning when they said the images can't be saved. of course they can fucking be saved. if a copier machine can save an image of every single thing printed, scanned, and copied on it then so can an digital x-ray machine computer thing.

i'm certainly all for catching the bad guys, but like others have said, this whole thing just makes me feel so weird and uncomfortable. your average tsa employee is not the sharpest tool in the shed (just one example i can think of is some not understanding some countries write dates as dd/mm/yyyy and if the first number you see is something bigger than 12 than gee maybe it's the fucking date written first, not the month so stop automatically assuming it's some fake id) and certainly doesn't care about anything other than being paid. a little kindness can go a long way and i sure hope when i have to deal with this crap when i come back to the states that i don't get some pissy agent who gets all butthurt and mad if i say "actually, you know, i don't want to be x-rayed."

[MrsSpringsteen]

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has issued a travel warning to Muslim airline passengers on U.S. aircraft in response to the Transportation Safety Administration’s "enhanced pat down" policy that went into effect in late October.

CAIR said Muslims who object to full-body scans for religious reasons should know their rights if they are required to undergo a pat-down, including asking for the procedure to be done in a private place. In addition, CAIR offered a “special recommendation” for Muslim women who wear a hijab, telling them they should tell the TSA officer that they may be searched only around the head and neck.

In the “special recommendations for Muslim women who wear hijab,” it states: “Before you are patted down, you should remind the TSA officer that they are only supposed to pat down the area in question, in this scenario, your head and neck. They SHOULD NOT subject you to a full-body or partial-body pat-down.”

It also states: “Instead of the pat-down, you can always request to pat down your own scarf, including head and neck area, and have the officers perform a chemical swipe of your hands.”

In February, the Figh Council of North America, a group of Islamic scholars, issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, that full-body scanners violate Islamic law.

“It is a violation of clear Islamic teaching that men or women be seen naked by other men and women,” the ruling states. “Islam highly emphasizes haya (modesty) and considers it part of the faith. The Qu’ran has commanded the believers, both men and women, to cover their private parts.”

CAIR endorsed the fatwa, according to a Feb. 21 article in the Detroit Free Press.




WASHINGTON AP -- 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.

[BVS]

You mean the conservative talk shows have it wrong again?

Well I at least like their consistency

Always wrong...

[MrsSpringsteen]

From what I have read one tip is to not wear baggy clothing-that will get you the pat down, sometimes even if you go through the scanner. Some people claim they will even put hands down your pants if they're baggy.

Even if you go through the scan they can still select you for a pat down, no matter what you're wearing.

[Headache in a Suitcase]

Originally Posted by martha

Fucking Forth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

but how does this apply to getting on a private airliner? something you choose to do?

they have metal detectors and searches at every school in new york city... should we get rid of them, because the majority of the people who pass through them aren't criminals? i have my bag searched when i go to the gym... should i sue them? how about we have an airline that has no security. would you fly it?

i still don't see how this violates anything in the 4th amendment, fucking or otherwise.

[deep]

There's no bright line to indicate where our quest for security becomes intolerably invasive of our privacy, but we're still pretty sure the TSA hasn't yet crossed it. Although the pat-downs are seriously embarrassing, they're also usually voluntary — to avoid them, you just have to go through the scanner. And fears about the scanners have been overblown.

Images from the scanners are viewed in a separate room by an officer who never sees the passenger, whose face is automatically blurred. The TSA says the images cannot be saved, stored or printed, but privacy advocates are skeptical; the U.S. Marshals Service admitted saving 35,000 images from a full-body scanner at a Florida courtroom this summer. Having seen the less-than-titillating images produced by the scanners, we doubt that they'll show up on Internet porn sites anytime soon — or that even if they did, the subjects in them would be remotely recognizable.

Equally shrug-worthy are the complaints about safety. About half the machines being deployed use X-ray technology that exposes passengers to radiation, yet the amount is so tiny — it would take 5,000 trips through the scanner to equal the exposure of a single chest X-ray — that it's hard to take seriously as a health risk. Fliers are exposed to cosmic radiation during their flights that's many times the level of exposure from the scanners.

Body scanner or TSA pat-down: Pick your poison? - latimes.com


the ranters don't have any credibilty on these issues

they make about as much sense as the 'I want my Cuntry back! " crowd.

[Canadiens1131]

Originally Posted by deep

Body scanner or TSA pat-down: Pick your poison? - latimes.com


the ranters don't have any credibilty on these issues

they make about as much sense as the 'I want my Cuntry back! " crowd.

You're doing it wrong.

The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother
Cathal Kelly. Staff Reporter - Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744199---israelification-high-security-little-bother

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."

[bigjohn2441]

i fly armed, so i bypass all that TSA bullshit

[The_Pac_Mule]

I'm so lonely I buy airplane tickets just for the pat-down.

[yolland]

It's always amused me when people ranting about shoe checks or patdowns fume, "We're gonna wind up just like the Israeli airports!" when the truth is we've never followed their security approach, and are only moving further away from it all the time. It truly is amazing how reliable the oldest sincerity test in the book--the ability to withstand sustained eye contact--remains, despite the advent of screening technologies, bomb-sniffing dogs and so on. Still, I wonder if that approach translates equally well across all cultures--it's certainly been my experience as a traveler, for instance, that different cultures have strikingly different standards regarding how much eye contact is OK (and in which circumstances), and perhaps that *might* be an inhibiting factor in northern Europe and North America. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

[deep]

looking in the eyes

is that all it is?

or is it profiling? Israel does a lot of stuff Western Nations would not and should not want to do.

I have a feeling Jewish-Israeli get through the airport a little easier than the
Arab Israeli.

A quick search, I found these

I was once involved with an Israeli Arab. An Israeli Arab who was a pacifist, and well enough known that the idea of him being suspicious on any grounds other than ethnicity was absurd. Everyone told me I should just lie on those little forms where you have to say where you'll be staying, rather than writing down an Arab name. I didn't want to lie. The result was that every single time I entered the country, I had to go through long, long interrogations, including things like questions about our sex life, delightful extra body searches, etc.

CastorpI Yesterday 01:38 PM in reply to hilzoy

A friend of a friend is an Arab Israeli. When I met him he had just returned to Israel after doing an accounting course in the US. Israeli customs officials interrogated him forever and kept asking why he didn't stay in the US. Welcome home!

[yolland]

^ Like that doesn't happen here? Did you also try Googling for stories from Americans who are (or appear to be) of Middle Eastern or South Asian ancestry, who felt they were singled out by TSA on that basis? As I've mentioned previously, I'm quite certain it's happened to me, and I won't even start on things Arab and South Asian friends of mine have experienced here.

Yes, I'd take for granted that, statistically, it's indeed less likely that an Arab-Israeli will get through an Israeli airport quickly, compared to his or her Jewish counterpart. Regardless, that's not the basis of either their system or ours; it's the result of racism exploiting a leeway for judgment calls which you need to leave open. We're talking fundamental approaches here. Enhanced fairness and equality towards passengers is not the reason why they're deploying these full-body scans.

[martha]

Humorist Dave Barry And His TSA Pat-Down : NPR

[Canadiens1131]

I think there is a lot to learn from Israeli airport security. The emphasis on not inconveniencing the majority of passengers most of the time is an odd concept for the TSA it seems.

The TSA also seems to suffer from the "Underpaid Restaurant Kitchen Worker" syndrome, where people who are entrusted with a very serious job aren't paid enough / trained well enough / give enough of a shit.

[martha]

Originally Posted by Headache in a Suitcase

but how does this apply to getting on a private airliner? something you choose to do?

The TSA is a government agency, still subject to the Constitution.

I choose to do a lot of things, and the Constitution protects me, even when you may not think it does.

Originally Posted by Headache in a Suitcase

they have metal detectors and searches at every school in new york city... should we get rid of them, because the majority of the people who pass through them aren't criminals?

I have problems with them, yes.

[martha]

Originally Posted by yolland

^ Like that doesn't happen here? Did you also try Googling for stories from Americans who are (or appear to be) of Middle Eastern or South Asian ancestry, who felt they were singled out by TSA on that basis? As I've mentioned previously, I'm quite certain it's happened to me, and I won't even start on things Arab and South Asian friends of mine have experienced here.

Or American Indians.

[AliEnvy]

What I don't really understand is why the scanners are an advantage over metal detectors. If you beep through the metal detector they run a hand-held device over your body sans sexual assault.

If I were a frequent flyer (pilot, flight attendant, business flyer) or a celebrity (hmm naked pic on porn sites or creepy extra groping), I would be livid.