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STUPID AIRPORT SECURITY

 
 
DrewDad
 
  1  
Reply Thu 28 Apr, 2005 08:51 am
Currently, they only make sure that a passenger is on the same flight as his baggage on the originating leg of the flight.

So you board the Austin->Lubbock flight, deplane during the Dallas layover. The plane departs, taking your checked baggage with it.

This is how the plane was destroyed over Locherby, Scotland.

If they positively track baggage with passengers, then the plane couldn't depart until your baggage had been unloaded.




Here's another interesting concept: I've heard that Microsoft's Redmond campus is extremely easy to enter... but difficult to leave. Every door opens going into the building, but you need a security key to get out.

If folks were willing to be screened leaving the airport, how would that affect security?
0 Replies
 
revel
 
  1  
Reply Thu 28 Apr, 2005 09:46 am
I can imagine the hue and cry that would be heard if suddenly we stopped have security checks, in my opinion, rightfully so. I think we need more security not less.

Just because people find ways around everything does not mean you can't do everything you can to prevent something.

I would much rather get stuck in the neck with a ball point pen than a pair sewing scissors. If a person knew what they doing I guess a ball point pen would do a lot of harm, maybe fatal harm, but still..I have little six inch sewing scissors, those things are sharper than regular scissors.
0 Replies
 
Foxfyre
 
  1  
Reply Thu 28 Apr, 2005 03:34 pm
Drewdad writes
Quote:
If folks were willing to be screened leaving the airport, how would that affect security?


Well it could make a difference except suicide bombers/highjackers or those who expect to succeed getting on an airplane won't care.

And, trust me on this, the insurance company is not going to agree to an entire airport having exits closed and departure squeezed down to a very few points of egress. If there is a bomb alert or other emergency, they want people to be able to get out fast.
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hamburger
 
  1  
Reply Thu 28 Apr, 2005 04:13 pm
something that has puzzled me ever since we started flying in the early 60's, is the large number of people hanging around at an airport that have no business being there. imo there should be a 'pre-checkin station' several miles away from an airport and only people having valid tickets/identification should be allowed into the airport proper.
there is really no good reason why loads of people need to be at the airport to say hello or goodbye to travellers. while this would not be a solution to any security problems, it would help reduce congestion at airports. the actual airport should only be there to serve travellers and airline/airport personnel. hbg
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Foxfyre
 
  1  
Reply Thu 28 Apr, 2005 07:02 pm
Boy that one gives me conflicted feelings, Hamburger. There's a part of me that acknowledes the suggestion is a sensisble one. THere's a part of me that says that's giving the terrorist way too much power to affect the way we live our lives. I'll have to think about that one awhile.
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2005 10:56 pm
I'd had normal procerures - like everyone when passing the security in my local airport and in London just now.

The only difference yesterday in London to the checks has been that the British didn't use electronic body chearch but trusted more in doing it manually (in PAD, it was done both ways).

And that I had to wait in London for my camra equipment to be treble checked (15 additional minutes, because some superior had to do that).
0 Replies
 
Foxfyre
 
  1  
Reply Mon 2 May, 2005 11:48 pm
I would like to backtrack here to say that Drew's comments re tracking baggage with the passenger is excellent. But that would require them to never put your baggage on a different flight yes?

One time I was flying out of L.A. to Wichita KS with a 45 minute layover in Denver. Our flight was one hour late taking off so I was technically already 15 minutes late for my connecting flight when we got to Denver. I was younger and faster then, however, and I sprinted the 30 gates to my connecting flight and boarded just as they were closing the door. But there was no way they had time to get the luggage off the first plane and onto the connecting flight, right?

When I got off the plane in Wichita, I went immediately to the phone to call my husband to tell him I would make arrangements to have my luggage forwarded, and then would drive the 80 miles home. As I was passing the baggage claim area, I glanced at a distant carousel where one lone brown suitcase was going around and around. I thought it couldn't be, but I checked. It was my luggage.

How did they do it? No clue unless knowing the connecting flight was going to be a problem when the plane was delayed, they pulled my bag off the plane and sent it on ahead on another flight. Or maybe I never noticed but it was commonplace to automatically send luggage on nonstop flights to its destination.

But with today's security, that could be a problem.

(And it's really interesting traveling with computers these days too Walter. Smile)
0 Replies
 
Foxfyre
 
  1  
Reply Thu 16 Jun, 2005 08:50 am
Am I misinterpreting this, or is Applebaum suggesting getting rid of the silliest rules and that profiling is the way to go?

Airport Security's Grand Illusion
Washington Post
By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, June 15, 2005; Page A25

If you happen to be reading this while standing in one of those disturbingly slow, zigzag lines at airport security -- looking repeatedly at your watch, wondering if this time you really will miss the plane -- here's something to make you feel worse: Almost none of the agony you are experiencing is making you safer, at least not to any statistically significant or economically rational degree. Certainly any logical analysis of the money that has been spent on the airport security system since Sept. 11, 2001, and the security that the system has created, must lead to that conclusion.

This is not to say that the uniformed screeners aren't more professional than they were in the past or that their presence doesn't create a degree of psychological comfort, both for government officials, who can claim to be doing something to keep us all safer, as well as for those passengers who continue to believe that engaging in ritualistic shoe-removal gives them mysterious, magical protection against terrorism. On the grand scale of things, though, that's all it is: magical protection.

In fact, outside inspectors have found, over and over again, that federal screeners perform no better than the private screeners they replaced. Since they inspect only passengers and baggage, not the airport and its perimeter, they haven't eliminated the need for other forms of law enforcement either. And even when they are doing their rather narrow job correctly, their impact is dubious. By their own account, federal screeners have intercepted "7 million prohibited items." But of that number, only 600 were firearms. So, according to the calculations of economist Veronique de Rugy, 99.992 percent of intercepted items were nail scissors, cigarette lighters, penknives and the like.

Yet this mass ceremonial sacrifice of toenail clippers on the altar of security comes at an extraordinarily high price. The annual budget of the federal Transportation Security Administration hovers around $5.5 billion -- just about the same price as the entire FBI -- a figure that doesn't include the cost of wasted time. De Rugy reckons that if 624 million passengers each spend two hours every year waiting in line, the annual loss to the economy comes to $32 billion. There has also been a price to pay in waste, since when that much money is rubbed into a problem with that kind of speed -- remember, the TSA had only 13 employees in January 2002 -- a lot of it gets misspent. In the case of the TSA, that waste includes $350,000 for a gym, $500,000 for artwork and silk plants at the agency's new operations center, and $461,000 for its first-birthday party. More to the point, the agency has spent millions, even billions, on technology that is inappropriate or outdated.

In fact, better security didn't have to cost that much. Probably the most significant measure taken in the past four years was one funded not by the government but by the airline industry, which put bulletproof doors on its cockpits at the relatively low price of $300 million to $500 million over 10 years. In extremely blunt terms, that means that while it may still be possible to blow up a plane (and murder 150 people), it is now virtually impossible to drive a plane into an office building (and murder thousands). By even the crudest cost-benefit risk analysis, bulletproof cockpit doors, which nobody notices, have the potential to save far more lives, at a far lower cost per life, than the screeners who open your child's backpack and your grandmother's purse while you stand around in your socks waiting for them to finish.

But, then, this isn't a country that has ever been good at risk analysis. If it were, we would never have invented the TSA at all. Instead, we would have taken that $5.5 billion, doubled the FBI's budget, and set up a questioning system that identifies potentially suspicious passengers, as the Israelis do. Even now, it's not too late to abolish the TSA, create a federal training program for airport screeners, and then let private companies worry about how many people to hire, which technology to buy and how long the tables in front of the X-ray machines should be (that last issue being featured in a recent government report). But every time that suggestion is made in Congress, someone denounces the plan as a "privatization" of our security and a sellout.

Which is why I conclude that we don't actually want value for money. No, we want every passenger to have the chance to recite that I-packed-these-bags-myself mantra to a uniformed official before boarding an airplane. Magic words, it seems, are what make Americans feel really safe
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/14/AR2005061401346.html
0 Replies
 
old europe
 
  1  
Reply Thu 4 Aug, 2005 11:38 am
So has there been a change in attitudes towards profiling after the London attacks?

I would say that, at least for the moment being, we will have to accept that a mass transportation system like the subway probably can't be controlled at all. That's different for planes and trains, of course, but would profiling be wise?

Another aspect of the problem: wouldn't profiling only be effective if you were telling the public that you are not doing it?
0 Replies
 
ossobuco
 
  1  
Reply Thu 4 Aug, 2005 01:19 pm
On luggage flying with you, my checked in luggage didn't make it to my destination two plane changes later earlier this year, at the same time I did anyway. I blame it on the electric eraser which I had placed in with my camera and some drafting material in my smaller checked bag. I suspect that eraser dumbfounded somebody somewhere. And my camera had it's autofocus lever moved, again. I have to remember that they tend to do that; it's now happened three times and I am slow to catch on why my camera won't focus while I am on vacation.

On the profiling only working if you denied doing it, that has occurred to me, Old Europe - but denial only goes so far, people are observant, especially when they are in the profiled group, but even when not, people are watching.
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nimh
 
  1  
Reply Thu 29 Jun, 2006 09:32 am
Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general of the Homeland Security Department from 2003 to 2004, wrote an article about this in the NYT Tuesday.

The usual suspects: Stereotyping terrorists

It's interesting. Consider this:

Quote:
Stereotypes become stereotypes for a reason, of course. Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al- Zahawiri, are Arabs. All 19 of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Arabs. The late, unlamented Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's top man in Iraq, was an Arab.

But even if it is to some extent understandable that we are more suspicious of those we take to be Arabs than we are of others, it is also illogical, politically incorrect and morally repugnant. Moreover, it could play into Al Qaeda's hands.

[..] to understand why reflexively associating terrorism with Arabs is ill advised, consider the arrests in Miami last week of seven men allegedly plotting to blow up the FBI headquarters there and the Sears Tower in Chicago. It may turn out, as the men's families and friends maintain, that they were merely harmless oddballs. But, if the government's allegations prove true, these men were Qaeda loyalists intent on waging a "ground war" against the United States in order to "kill as many devils" as possible.

None of these men is Arab. Most are African- American, and all of them are black. If it turns out that they were terrorists inspired by Al Qaeda and radicalized by an extremist interpretation of Islam, it will not be the first time that terrorist ideology has infiltrated the black community.

African-Americans are not the only non-Arab Americans who have been radicalized and enlisted in the terrorist cause. José Padilla, an American of Puerto Rican descent, grew up in Chicago and converted to Islam in prison.

[..] In other words, terrorists can and do come in every color of the racial and ethnic rainbow. And Al Qaeda takes advantage of our tendency to stereotype Arabs as terrorists by actively recruiting among the non- Arab population. We know, for example, that Al Qaeda regards American prisons as particularly fertile territory for planting and harvesting the seeds of terrorism, especially among the disproportionately high black and Hispanic populations.

[..] So the next time you find yourself wishing that the screeners at a crowded airport checkpoint would speed things up by concentrating only on the swarthy guys with odd headdresses, remember that Al Qaeda may be wishing for the very same thing.
0 Replies
 
Foxfyre
 
  1  
Reply Thu 10 Aug, 2006 01:44 pm
Well I'm not exactly a swarthy middle-eastern guy, but thanks to the most recent wave of terrorism attempts, I apparently won't be allowed to carry a small tube of hand cream on the plane and you better time hope the terrorists don't start using babies so they can carry deadly formula concoction.

Do you suppose they could have put together a half dozen nuns or red headed Irishmen who would carry liquid bomb ingredients onto a plane?

Maybe. But little by little al Qaida is going to win just by making us give up just about everything.

I'm still wondering if we can't do a bit of 'profiling' to catch those Egyptian guys who didn't show up for classes in Bozman or do we have to check IDs of the nuns and redheaded Irishmen there too?
0 Replies
 
Foxfyre
 
  1  
Reply Fri 11 Aug, 2006 10:59 am
Re the new airport and other security measures in the wake of the foiled terrorist plot in London, AOL initiated a straw poll about an hour ago. With 80,000 votes in and counting, the results are:

Are airline safety officials in the U.S. overreacting?
No 69%
Yes 24%
Not sure 7


Pretty strong numbers especially from a service that has been pretty anti-conservative and anti-current administration lately in their straw poll results.
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Dartagnan
 
  1  
Reply Fri 11 Aug, 2006 11:01 am
Not sure why a poll like that has anything to do with politics...
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old europe
 
  1  
Reply Fri 11 Aug, 2006 11:02 am
Foxfyre wrote:
Pretty strong numbers especially from a service that has been pretty anti-conservative and anti-current administration lately in their straw poll results.


So, are you saying these are pretty strong numbers, or are you saying this is just another straw poll? Or are you saying it's only a straw poll when you don't agree with the numbers?
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Setanta
 
  1  
Reply Fri 11 Aug, 2006 11:06 am
OE, you've got the hots for Fox, don'tcha? Come on, admit, you've been stalking her . . .
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old europe
 
  1  
Reply Fri 11 Aug, 2006 11:08 am
Setanta wrote:
OE, you've got the hots for Fox, don'tcha? Come on, admit, you've been stalking her . . .


Bloody hell. How did you find out? Are you stalking me?
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Setanta
 
  1  
Reply Fri 11 Aug, 2006 11:11 am
Well . . . you are kinda cute, especially when you get your dander up . . .
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Foxfyre
 
  1  
Reply Fri 11 Aug, 2006 11:17 am
Dartagnan wrote:
Not sure why a poll like that has anything to do with politics...


Well, it is government who determines what airport security will be put into place. And it is the perception of the people that makes it politics. And this is a thread on airport security. I thought it appropriate to post.
0 Replies
 
Foxfyre
 
  1  
Reply Fri 11 Aug, 2006 11:18 am
old europe wrote:
Foxfyre wrote:
Pretty strong numbers especially from a service that has been pretty anti-conservative and anti-current administration lately in their straw poll results.


So, are you saying these are pretty strong numbers, or are you saying this is just another straw poll? Or are you saying it's only a straw poll when you don't agree with the numbers?


Strong numbers for even a straw poll among a group that usually votes left of center.
0 Replies
 
 

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