TSA's "Behavior Detection Officers" 281
Stanistani sends us to MSNBC for a dyspeptic Newsweek commentary on the TSA's latest attempt to make air travel safer: the rather ominously named "Behavior Detection Officers" now working in a dozen US airports, and slated to go nationwide in 2008. They are trained in the discipline of reading "micro-expressions." The editorialist calls that a pseudo-science, but in fact it's a well-understood skill that can be taught and learned. A cursory look at this TSA program might put one in mind of Orwell's "facecrime," and that's the road the Newsweek writer goes down. Yet some who bemoan the security theater historically run by the TSA point to the gold standard of airport security, Tel Aviv airport, and wonder why TSA officers can't act more like the Israelis. Bruce Schneier wrote recently about one reason why the Israeli security model isn't completely transplantable to these shores: scale. And here's Schneier's take on behavioral profiling from a year ago. That's what the BDOs will be trying for: scrutinizing intent instead of pocket knives. Let's just hope they don't get swamped with false positives.
Okay, and? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Okay, and? (Score:4, Insightful)
-b.
Re:Okay, and? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, well the only place I'm flying to right now (to/from Manila) it's impossible not to sweat a little. And if I'm a little bit tense in line, it's because I hate no-smoking
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That's one of the annoyances with the States -- you feel like an unruly little child all the time on public transport. At airports, on trains, whatever, you get those recorded voices that sound like your 3rd grade schoolteacher admonishing you not to do this or to do that. In Pol
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That's one of the annoyances with the States -- you feel like an unruly little child all the time on public transport.
I haven't noticed that on short runs, like city buses and commuter trains. I have heard they do that for Greyhound and Amtrak. Be serious! Are would-be terrorists going to torture themselves for their final days on a bus or a train, or travel in style in a rental car (a hotwired stolen car would work as well) a la a Jack Clancy novel?
If I'm riding a bus in Mindanao, I don't mind security stops. I've heard too many 1st person stories about captured buses and kidnapped people. I don't know what the AFP
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Happens all the time on the NYC commuter trains, not so much on city buses or the subway (or else the subway is loud enough to drown out the stupid announcements which no one listens to anyway).
On the commuter trains, you often heard this:
"If you see any suspicious activity, please call the New Jersey Transit Police at 800-TIPS-NJT. Please make sure to take your belongings and baggage with you when leaving the train (no shit, re
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As far as the "suspicious activity" bit, it's such a huge joke and nothing more than security theatre and fearmongering. If people called the cops every time there was a suspicious activity in New York, the cops would be running in circles and screaming in exasperation. Kind of hard to define "suspicious" when large segments of New York are the definition of "wierd" itself!
-b.
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Sounds a lot like what El Al does (Score:3, Interesting)
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The Israeli airline has been profiling passengers all sorts of ways for decades. This sounds a lot like one of the methods they employ.
The difference is that the Israeli airline agents interview you one-on-one for an hour or two during the process, which is a lot more reliable than judging someone based on one or two face glimpses. Also, there are no artificial setups such as having an agent pretend to be another passenger, which was one of the things described in the article. In the Israeli airlines you know what's going on and they are up front about it.
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Re:Sounds a lot like what El Al does (Score:4, Informative)
In practice this method is not used, as someone intending to cheat could simply learn how to say these words properly.
smile, smile, smile (Score:3, Interesting)
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"Gold standard" (Score:5, Insightful)
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They can afford it. (Score:2)
Just cause it works there, etc...
For a different take on this program... (Score:3, Interesting)
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You quoted the one case where a police officer noticed someone acting "suspiciously" and ended up being right.
You didn't quote the 1000 other cases everywhere around the country - not just in airports - where police bother someone who they think acts suspiciously and end up as a false alert.
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First of all, these are not police, these are TSA officers. They work in airports, the article is about airports, and our discussion is about airports. It's not as if these peop
Re:For a different take on this program... (Score:4, Insightful)
So, does that mean I can ignore them? I mean, if they're not police, they're just regular citizens. The most they can do is talk to the airlines and ask that I not be allowed to board. On the other hand, that's a great basis for me to sue the airlines. I mean, I paid them for a service, and they're denying it. The only way out of that is, of course, to have TSA screening as a part of the contract. Or are you willing to admit that the TSA is a federal police force, and so they do have authority to arrest you or force a search upon you?
Well, that's good to know. You do realize that a lot of people at airports are there to see other people off, right? And given that airport security will screen family that's seeing someone off, I can only imagine that the TSA does as well. So, sure, the TSA isn't "out on every street". They are screening people who aren't flying, though.
In short, because the TSA is unreasonable in its security, we should expect more unreasonable security procedures and not complain about it. Yea, that's *totally* logical...
Well, since it's a fairly new program, we'll just ignore the clear absurdity of it until it rears its ugly head. I mean, it's like if tomorrow there was made a law that every second born child under 12 should be executed on sighting. Since it'd be "a fairly new program" and there wouldn't instantly be "provide[d] any instances of real people encountering problems", we'll just have to wait until the body count grows to a large enough amount to start complaining. And even if the law gets overturned, if Congress kept passing new second-born-child-execution laws, carefully worded to be different yet do the same thing, after a while we'd just have to accept that that's how things are. I mean, it's not like they'd be killing adults or the first born. Irrational tradition beats Constitutionality or sanity.
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I don't have a problem with someone well-trained being assigned to watch the passengers as they check in and board the plane, and if they see someone who's acting hinky, pull them out of line just to see if they're OK. That does not strike me as Orwellian or some nightmarish violation of our rights.
It actually strikes me as much more sensible and effective than man
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The Israeli's have it easy! (Score:4, Insightful)
We Americans aspire to be something better.
Nitpick (Score:5, Insightful)
"Arabs" != Muslims.
There exist non-Muslim Arabs, and there exist non-Arab Muslim groups (Iranians for a start).
-b.
not really (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, there are demographic differences : Israel's terrorists are usually palistinian, and thus look exactly like Israelis. America's terrorists are usually Saudi Arabian, i.e. half African but nothing like African Americans.
In fact racial profiling for terrorists would work quite w
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Also, unless you are willing to search *every* Arab, it isn't very useful to profile race, as there are many many Arabs, and your false positives will be huge, while some bad guys slip through. Behavioral approaches are much sounder(especially when combined with 'police work' approaches).
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Racial profiling obviously means "used in conjunction with behavioral profiling, police work, and other intelligence". I'm not sure you'd use it for passenger screening but why not place air martials using it?
Re:not really (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, wait, he wasn't an Arab. (Or even foreign.) Or a Muslim. (Or even religious.)
In fact he was a white American agnostic. Didn't stop him committing one of the worst acts of terrorism in America's history, of course.
Okay, so you want to look only at cases where Muslim fundamentalists are trying to blow up planes, do you? Okay, please explain how racial profiling would have helped catch Richard Reid, who was, uh, a white British-Jamaican man, who easily made it onto a plane with a bomb and would have succeeded in downing a trans-Atlantic flight if another passenger hadn't spotted him trying to light the fuse.
But hey, let's not let the truth get in the way of indulging our xenophobia, shall we?
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Timothy McVeigh isn't too relevant to airplane security since he wasn't suicidal. McVeigh had always identified as Christian. He was more a death bed agnostic. No one want's racial profiling in all aspects of life.
Richard Reid might now be under surveillance anyway for his past affiliations, conversion, etc. He's a fairly special case. You don't imagine similar special c
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It's not xenophobia, it's security. The fact is that Muslims constitute the biggest terrorist threat against the US, so therefore profiling
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Ever notice how we don't have alot of military bases in South America, or right next to it?
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As to th
That's hardly fair (Score:2)
When the Crusaders retook Jerusalem from Saladin's forces the firt thing they did was massacre the Jewish population who had been living there under the protection of the Moslem forces for generations. Iraq had a sizeable Jewish population until fairly recently.. coincidentally their murders began just after the invasion/liberation (depending on your political PoV) of Iraq. There sre Jews all over the world living in Moslem societie
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To be fair, the Crusaders also killed off many Christians by accident in their rage after they breached the wall.
And of course, these were some of the same fellows who sacked Orthodox Christian Constantinople on the way over.
And many of the German crusaders never left Germany and decided that crusading just me
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Dhimmitude (or "protection") does not give you equal rights.
And that's due to the disappearance of law and order, not because US troops a
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That's like saying The Christians killed John F.Kennedy. It's either a racially-motivated lie or evidence of a worrying lack of education in both fact and logic
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Especially illogical is this part "if they were they would have peace and security." Besides Israel, there are enough examples of countries with equal rights for everyone where (generally) Muslims choose to physically force their views upon others. A good example of this happened recently in Norway, where a Muslim couple-husb
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Tell that to Yitzhak Rabin [wikipedia.org]
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Here is the deal. Being an Arab in regular Israel isn't that bad. They have even have Arab members in the Knesset [wikipedia.org].
However, if you are someone who lives in the West Bank or Gaza strip then your life is generally like living in a prison.
HOWEVER, if you view this as occupied territory and these land areas as not part of Israel then those people who live in it are not Israeli citizens but rather citizens of their o
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No they wouldn't. Israel won't see "peace" until it's been wiped from existence. Israel is much more equal and gives more rights to its Muslim citizens than most Muslim countries, so equality and rights are not the issue.
Realistically speaking Muslims pose the biggest and almost only terrorist threat against the US, so profiling Muslims would be the smart thing to do. Ignoring security threats or pretending l
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I might be in the minority here (Score:2, Insightful)
The flipside to that is that I don't trust anybody I've interacted with at TSA to be astute enough to actually flag people properly. One *might* be able to get a few well trained people everywhere, but you're not going to be able to
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No, it couldn't. Profiling works by selecting people for checks by their physical attributes - ie, all males with dark hair, beard and moustache, olive complexion, who are 18-45, and reasonably fit will be subject to extra checking. All the terrorists have to do is send enough test people through the system to find out what the profile is. Once they learn what the profile is, they can send a person who doesn't fit the profile (ie, a heavyset w
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But that's not to say profiling is useless - some is probably useful if you have highly trained and experienced people - but not to the point where an adversary can reliably increase their chances of gaming the system
Isn't this open to abuse? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that airport security is a tough issue, and something that needs to be done right, but allowing an interpretation of a micro-expression to be used to select people for further investigation basically gives the airport staff the option of pulling over anyone, any time under this pretext.
Do they collect statistics on how powers like this are used? In the UK, the police have had to start collecting statistics on the use of stop and search powers, because of concerns about racial profiling. The statistics have verified claims that the behaviour of the subjects is not what's being used by officers when deciding to search, the race of the subject is. Of course, this has lead to claims that the police are trying to find excuses to stop and search large parties of other ethnic group, to alter their statistics, without any probable cause (eg searching all passengers coming of a train for weapons, when they had no evidence that any existed)
I'm not necessarily against this kind of selection, but I do believe that it needs to be implemented carefully to prevent abuse and unfair treatment of certain sections of the population, so that not only is the security done right, it's seen to be done right.
Isn't the current system more "open to abuse"? (Score:5, Insightful)
They already have this option!
This is designed to make that option actually, you know, useful.
Even if you think it could be "abused", they can already effectively select anyone, for any reason, for secondary inspection. That's the whole point of trying to use some kind of behavioral cues, instead of just randomly doing it to anyone (or young blonde women), or only persons who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent.
Yes, as you say, it needs to be done right. But please read Schneier's article [schneier.com] and the New York Times story [iht.com] on the topic.
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a bit like 'encouraging' sniffer dogs to act interested in someone you want to search?
Let's hope... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh great, let's emmulate the Israelis. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's really where we should be heading in America, is it now? So, since our Palestinians equivalents are the Mexicans then I suppose our lovely new Israeli style airport security policy ought to include strip searching and fondling all young Mexican girls in order to discourage them from travel. I mean after all, that's the example the Israelis offer. It has worked so well for them so far, hasn't it.
If we really want to stop terrorism, then perhaps we should start by not dropping bombs on foreign countries and killing hundreds of civilians each week. That might be an even more effective method than assigning the gestapo to the airports.
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Sure, and thanks for asking. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm willing to assume you're not one of those fascist cunts and that you really are interested in the facts. In that case, this is the video I refer to:
Easiest Targets: The Israeli Policy of Strip Searching Women and Children
description:13-minute video: Five women - Palestinian, American, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish - tell stories of humiliation and harassment by Israeli border guards and airport security officials.
In fact, you will find testimoney by American Christians and Jews as well as Palestinians if you take the time to watch the video.
You can watch it at Google Video with the following link:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-69116100
In addition, you can download the torrent from www.onebigtorrent.org which was formerly known as chomskytorrents.org.
I would say enjoy the film, but it's not meant to be an enjoyable film.
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That's pretty terrible, but ten year old girls are a potential vector for terrorism, which is also pretty terrible. I'm not saying that the Israelis are right, but how do you protect against terrorists who use ten year old girls to smuggle weapons onto a plane? (Not saying they have, but if ten year old girls were never cavity searched, they would.)
Bad as it is, it seems like discri
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To be fair, Israel's security practises, as depicted in the documentary, seem to be unreasonable and beyond pragmatic concerns. On the other h
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It actually *IS* a pseudo-science (Score:5, Insightful)
There are exactly zero citations in MEDLINE and PsycINFO for a peer-reviewed study done on normal people using this technique. There's one where it was used to help people with schizophrenia learn emotional cues in others. The only other citation was a book chapter (which isn't a study).
So yes, when you have little or no science in the psychological and medical databases to back up your psychological technique, we call that a pseudo-science -- it's not a real, proven technique.
And because of this, it definitely should NOT be used at airports. There is a great deal of science showing how lousy humans are at detecting lying, including nonverbal cues.
--
Get your psych on: http://psychcentral.com/ [psychcentral.com]
Nope, there are publications (Score:4, Interesting)
The question isn't whether the study of micro-expressions is science or not; the question is whether particular claims or assumptions about micro expressions exceed what is scientifically defensible, particularly whether inferences made from the study of micro-expressions are reliable. They're almost certainly, in this context, not.
It all has to do with the nature of evidence. Evidence forms a network, within which inferences can be made. Any single strand of that network will tend to be unreliable.
For example, if you know a person well, you probably could use micro-expressions very effectively. If you knew a lot about what the person is doing, you probably could as well. However, as a screening test, it is bound to be extremely unreliable. Even if you catch a fleeting glimpse of anger, disgust, or contempt on somebody's face in an airport security line, even presuming you are correct, it tells you absolutely nothing about that person, other than he is angry, disgusted, or contemptuous. Anybody who has done much traveling by air is bound to feel those things from time to time.
This is the problem with all screening tests that look for something extremely rare in the general population. Even with a highly reliable test, the rate of false positives will tend to be much higher than the rate of true positives. This is the problem with random drug tests; unless you are testing for a drug that is very commonly used, you don't have a great deal of certainty from a positive test, unless you have other evidence leading you to suspect drug use.
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I do some theater on the side -- both directing and acting. The best acting recreates emotional states in remarkable physiological detail. In slow moments, waiting in line
More money wasted (Score:5, Insightful)
Passengers are not the only worry for airport security. For most of modern US history, passengers have posed little concern. At the same time, the US has had many international enemies.
Airports are full of security holes. Other freight handling systems are full of security holes. "Appearing" to do things to improve security is a political strategy.
The USA is not more secure. But government is much, much bigger... and has more power than a supposed democracy should give it.
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Actually any article that involves texts like 'your for safety' you should read 'for our political strength'.
Astrological profiling next? (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps that's the key - from now on the TSA can do natal charts for all passengers and use horoscopes to work out which ones are terrorists!
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The calmest and most collected persons (Score:2, Informative)
Flying Harassment (Score:2, Insightful)
However, what security does the TSA provide? It's pretty obvious that any intelligent enemy will continue to change tatics. This became all the more clear to me when the TSA harassed my wife for more than 5 minutes recently about my 4 month old son's baby bottle. It was more than three ounces because he eats more than three ounces, this was a revelation. They also continue to harass me for 'electronics densi
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Deliberatly acting suspicious (Score:2, Insightful)
How long before terrorists catch on and play this diversion game too? If the real terrorists can train themselves to "look normal" and pay some college students to "spoof the system" as a distraction, will that lead to another air disaster?
In the game of spy-vs-spy, or rather the TSA vs. real or imagined terrorists, no technique is foolproof.
Probable cause NOT required (Score:5, Insightful)
A much bigger question is whether these officials should have those powers. Whether passers rights should not be more respected. This is a deeply political question, to be settled by political means. Denying tools is only very indirect criticism.
I would vastly have preferred airport security stay within the control of the airlines. Perhaps with federal "guidence". Then no question of 4th Amendment could come up. Or maybe "fruit of the poisoned vine" doctrine should be imposed: "20kg cocaine? Hmm ... that's not explosive. Have a nice flight, sir." :)
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If you don't like it, don't go there.
I haven't been on US soil since 9/11. I used to go to the US a couple times per year. 2 or 3 usually to go shopping and such, give my money to Americans.
I'm not likely to get pulled over by profilers(I almost always drive rather than fly to the states, and I am as white as freshly fallen snow), but... I had a friend who got detained at the US border during during February 2002. The treatment he described was despicable. It didn't take me long to decide to avoid travelling to the US unless I could f
Never again (Score:5, Interesting)
The over-the-top security measures at our airports are simply political theater and not effective policing methods. I can't believe they still have everyone removing their shoes...thank goodness no one tried to smuggle an IED on board in a bodily orifice. And if anyone swiped MY kid's formula bottle because of some Kubrickian fear of fluids, I'd be on my way to Gitmo for attempting to bend a TSA agent into a pretzel.
Why can't they simply take a nod from Israeli Airlines and stick a guy with an Uzi on board each plane? Lord knows I've been on flights where his presence would have been welcome, if only to subdue the toothless trailer park escapee trying to open the window at 30,000 feet.
And why aren't these same security procedures in place at U-Haul? After all, they haven't always used airplanes to blow up buildings...
All of the money being spent on this bloated home security apparatus, all of the money spent keeping the military stocked with munitions, all of the money spent devising better prosthetic limbs before all of the returning veterans hobbling around begin to make 'victory' in Iraq seem a bit of an oxymoron,,,all of this money might have been better spent reducing our dependence on fossil fuels three decades ago when it first became obvious how vulnerable we were to the vagaries of Middle-Eastern politics. If we'd spent even half the money we have wasted making ourselves feel safe from threats both real and imaginary since 9/11 on alternative fuel research ten years ago, Bin Laden would be penniless and living quietly in a tent in some arid desert, pulling the legs off of scorpions for his sick amusement, instead of enjoying eternal life as the bogeyman of the 21st century.
It would be wise to remember that, througout history, many more people have been killed or imprisoned by their own government than any foreign power. It's probably not such a good idea to make it easy for them.
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Because opening up with an Uzi on a crowded aircraft would probably do more damage than whatever makeshift weapon the terrorist had managed to smuggle on board?
I know that the "people getting sucked out of a bullet hole" scenario comes out of the same Hollywood Physics book as the devastating hair-bleach and nail-varnish-remover bomb - but so do the magic bullets that only kill bad guys. If I was in a c
Re:Never again (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd go several steps further.
It therefore follows that only the most mentally deranged terrorist group would even consider an aircraft hijacking today. It's expensive, and the chances of it all going to plan these days are practically zero.
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Israeli airport security is easily gamed (Score:4, Interesting)
Americans who are visiting Israel once or twice tend to be deeply impressed with Israeli security. Once you get used to it, however, it is easily gamed -- many of the procedures haven't changed for decades, most of the inspectors are 20-somethings making minimum wage and subject to the same levels of boredom as the TSA, and increasingly they don't have the language skills required to do a good interrogation. Once you've gone through a few times, you know what to expect and, assuming you aren't Arab and aren't "in the computer", you can pretty much choose the level of harassment you want assuming you know how to convincingly lie, which is not a particularly difficult skill to learn (and pretty much a required skill for anyone doing work in the area, on either the Israeli or Arab side). And in fact even Palestinians know quite a few ways around the system -- sure, they will be harassed, but it is fairly predictable.
I once did a business trip that involved visiting, in a two-week period, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon (illegal at the time for US citizens, though plenty were there), back to Jordan, back into Israel, Egypt, then Israel again, then out Tel Aviv. I answered lots and lots of questions about where I had been, what I had done, etc etc, lying the whole time, never once came anywhere close to getting stopped. Again, it just isn't that hard...comes with the territory, for better or worse.
Security going into Israel on carriers other than El Al is incredibly lax, worse at times than flights within the USA. So if someone wanted to try to smuggle explosives onto an airplane, in-bound would be the way to go, not out-bound through Tel Aviv. Given that the passenger profiles going into Israel are more or less the same as the profile going out, you'd make the same political statement.
So yes, it is mostly theater and pseudo-science, but makes a great first impression. And folks are making huge amounts of money "consulting" with the Dept of Homeland Security, who no one has ever accused of being the sharpest pencils in the box, on various hare-brained schemes like this.
The freedom to feel contemptuous of government (Score:3, Insightful)
And through your hard earned tax dollars you are funding them and their cronies to do this to you. As much as 60% of your working life will be directly to fund the government that is doing this to you, that government whose agents are shouting and you with a boot on your head, with your trousers dropped, and an agent's cold hand - big brother's hand - telling you it is for your own good, that if you would only fall in line they would not have to do this.
But don't worry, so long as you smile, keep your mouth shut, and fall in line, you won't be bothered, citizen.
It is only a matter of time if we do not dramatically reverse course now. If this presidential election comes down to a race between Hillary or Obama and Giuliani, Thompson, or Romney, the decline will only accelerate. If we do not reverse course now, in 8 years we will very likely have passed the point of no return, where these policies are accepted by the populous, where the police state propaganda has thoroughly subdued them, and we will be unable to rouse them to fight.
To avoid this fate you must act now. Get behind a candidate who you can count on not to sell us out to the military industrial complex, who you can count on to wrest us free from the interests of large bankers and financial institutions, who you can count on to defend the letter of the Constitution in its original spirit, for which the blood of many patriots was shed.
And that doesn't mean just posting on internet forums. That means volunteering to travel to, to write to, and to call citizens in the primary states. If we do not get wins for these candidates in the primaries, it will be as good as lost. Now is the time to act to defend your freedom, or you will soon find it has been taken from you and it will be too late. http://www.ronpaul2008.com/ [ronpaul2008.com]
Yay for bush and accompanying morondom (Score:2)
now this government is intent on detaining people according to their FACE EXPRESSIONS for god's sakes !!!! have you ever seen something like that ? maybe in nazi germany. even not in fascist italy ffs !
some officer treats you poorly, you frown and voila ! youre in jail !!!
dont tell me that this is not bush & co and republican bullshit. because it hell is.
And even if you do sweat... (Score:3, Informative)
I visited Israel thrice. On the first visit everyone was searched — in a remote terminal in El Al's [wikipedia.org] exclusive use in a German transfer-point. It was rather annoyed by having to drag my checked-in luggage (which I planned not to see until Tel Aviv) and re-check it in again.
On the second flight, I went through a detailed search both ways — in and out of the country. Somehow these experts read my body-language as suspicious... First, at JFK, they took me to a special room, where they even took my shoes away for X-raying...
On the way back in Tel Aviv, I was also flagged, and the searchers' zeal went even further as they took a test-shot with my camera (to see, if it was real).
Only on the third flight, which was not by El Al did I escape the scrutiny. Either because Continental is not as paranoid (much to the annoyance of some of the Israelis on the flight), or because I was flying with my (very) significant other — a couple is always perceived to be of lower risk.
Now, here why I was not offended. First and foremost, because the Israeli searchers were always extremely polite, well-mannered, and respectful — unlike a typical TSA asshole. (I don't know, why that is. Maybe, because America's low unemployment forces TSA to hire and keep lower quality people...) When they asked for my shoes, for example, they pulled me a chair, so I would not have to stand on the floor bare-feet. After the search, one of them escorted me all the way to the plane chatting and apologizing continuously and handed me over to the stewardess (cutting the line of the boarding passengers), who apologized once more.
Or, maybe, because they weren't looking for bullshit like scissors and other implements, which no terrorist will ever use on a plane again, because it just would not work any more... Because now that we learned, that some hijackers may not be interested in ever landing the hijacked vessel — the passengers and crew will fight them head on (as they did the Shoe Bomber [wikipedia.org]).
Or, more likely, a combination of both factors.
I don't get it. (Score:2)
I agree that most items currently in place (putting toothpaste in a clear zip bag, requiring ID, watch lists, etc) are nothing but band-aids designed to make the government look like it's doing something. This is the closest thing anyone has to identifying actual intent. Yes, it's not fool-proof. Yes, it is open to abuse. Yes, it is based on something very va
Re:I don't get it. (Score:4, Interesting)
However, we must make sure the hijackers don't get control of that plane. If, by some miracle, they do get control, there must be little payoff and control must be difficult to maintain, and those facts should be publicized.
As a corollary, if getting control of a plane remains easy and the payoff is large (or perceived to be large), there is nothing you can do to keep the hijackers out. All you can do is put everyone in a TSA-approved, pocketless, uniform flight suit and disallow all carry-ons without medical certification (pre-certified, doctor authorized medicine/equipment, positive ID).
All you can do is to deny them weapons.
We are headed in this direction because of the hysterical intent to keep all undesirables off an insecure plane. If this is truly our intent, status quo in-flight security to protect the airline industry from having to spend money (or brook government influence in their business practices if the government were in charge of in-flight security), then let's forget the patronizing baby steps and go there already. Bring out the jumpsuits already!
That's the consequence of not securing the plane.
Personally, I say put sane security measures in place on the plane and let them try. We need to spend the appropriate money on in-flight security, and we need to stop hemming and hawing about how it's going to be done. If we can spend this much money trying to sponsor a failing democracy in Iraq, we can find the money for in-flight security.
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Toro
Yes, political commissar, my internal travel paper (Score:2)
"How are they going to keep hijackers off the planes?" some coward whines, forgetting that the locking or fixed-blade box cutters that the 9/11 hijackers used were ALREADY ILLEGAL, and supposed to not be allowed, an
Let me get this straight... (Score:2)
Just for the record (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been warned (and I actually saw a sign in the air port in France to that effect) that my return trip will not be so lenient.
Shachar
What crap. (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's just hope they don't get swamped with false positives.
Lets hope they DO get swamped with false positives and stop with this nonsense. Damn. What a bunch of fascist crap.
RS
Yay Freedom (Score:4, Insightful)
Same old, same old (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Um, no. (Score:4, Interesting)
Then again, I got bumped from my flight to Frankfurt last month, only to be put back on at the last minute. The TSA people walked the group that was reinstated through the checkpoints with practically no security since the plane was leaving in 5 min. Some of those people were "volunteers" who )_asked_ to be on a later flight since there was a eu.400 payment for being bumped.
-b.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you believe that, you're hopelessly irrational. Go read the article... it doesn't offer any evidence that there is any truth to such absurd notions. People on this site REALLY need to learn to think critically, and to apply those skills to things they read.
i dont believe that. it is a rational concluded fact.
they have put forward patriot act, and numerous people ended up in the "no fly" lists for just criticizing the bush adm, and cant use any air service in united states as of today.
they have been running a gulag on guantanamo unquestioned for around 8 years, the congress is just being able to get back at them. it is not known how many gulags they have.
attorneys who were not compliant with bush and co were fired.
i can go on an on with shady s
Re: (Score:2)
So, what does this comment tell you about yourself? What about the other bits where you think you don't fit in and insult the reader, what does that tell you about yourself?
How could you do a psychological profile on people based on a few small snippets of text without it being complete voodoo anyway?