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Oh this might very well have been instigated by the Airport and not the TSA. We have a history of craziness here. See this recap of a Director driving drunk in Airport vehicles and another spending Airport funds on cigars and strippers: http://archives.californiaaviation.org/airport/msg48963.html

TSA agent charged with raping 14 year old girl But it's ok! Lets have them grab crotches of our teenage sons and daughters, take naked pictures of our wives, etc. It makes us safer!

And he's not the only one: Online predators arrested in Orlando sex sting include TSA screener.

"Also arrested was Joseph Cioffi of Altamonte Springs -- a U.S. Homeland Security employee who trains screeners at Orlando International Airport, the Sheriff's Office reported."

The people training the Freedom Fondlers are part of the problem. What if they're hiring their friends? It could be like the Catholic church scandal, but this time, they've got the force of law behind them.

In the hearings today in the senate, John Pistole, the head of the Transportation Security Administration, children under 12 would not be pat down.

So John Pistole would be OK with having TSA pat-down his 13-year-old daughter? (How convenient, judging from that article, that's just the right age for a TSA worker!)

Remember, teach your kids that it's wrong for an adult to touch them in a private place, unless the adult is wearing a uniform, and then it's OK.

Won't somebody think of the children?...

The TSA is always thinking of the children. What a dream job for a defrocked Catholic priest... he spends the morning shift looking at fuzzy low-resolution monochrome pictures of naked kids, and the evening shift getting his hands on the real thing.

TSA GOONS: You really think this guy is the only one? As civilians, we can't stop predators from getting jobs at TSA where they'll be free to assault kids all day long, but you - as a TSA worker - can. We're not worried about the 99% of you who hate the freedom-fondling part of the job as much as we do. We just want you to ask yourselves this: how well do you know your co-workers?

1) FBI or some other agency suspects someone of something, and documents the suspicion, then files for a warrent.

That has existed from the founding of the USA, ever read the 4th Amendment? Law enforcement is required to get a court issued warrant.

3) if deemed a "dire emergency" they can enter the property, arrest citezens, or collect physical evidence, consistent with the scope of any warrent filed, wether approved yet or not.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act set up the FISA court which "rubber stamps" admin requests for search warrants. Heck the FBI can file for a warrant 48 hours after the FBI puts a wiretap in place or conducts a search.

They need to be able to snoop.

Are there needs to be a system of checks and balances, And there is, just get a court issued warrant. But the Bush admin fills no need to follow the Constitution of the USA.

If you are doing something illegal, it matters not how you are discovered, only that you are.

Ah, an advocate of torture.

Knowing who I call and how often is no more private information than who I send postal mail to.

They may know who you send mail to but they don't know who I send it to. I don't put my return address on my mail and I always drop it in a mail box on the street or at the post office. And no it's not because I'm paranoid, those I write to already have my address and if I drop an envelope in a public mailbox I know it will arrive at the post office. I've lost mail when I left it for the mailman to pick up.

I also approve of scanning of random e-mail messages sent in and out of the country, and also all e-mail sent to/from known terorist associated addresses (names added to a list with a judges approval).

Who gets to decide who's a terrorist? Many innocent people are still on the Do Not Fly list and have no way getting their name off it.

People who are paranoid about the FBI reading their secret love letters to their boyfriend and then the FBI telling their husband should have no fear. We'll make it illegal for the FBI to collect and store any information noo associated with known criminals or terrorists, and make it illegal for them to collect and store information about non-violent or minor crimes unless a warrent was issued and approved for local law enforcement.

And how will a victim know?

Reading your post you sound like you trust government, but many others don't. Fact is is government have killed way more people or violated their rights than have all of the terrorist in history. your chance of being killed by a terrorist is minuscule. As Benjamin Franklin said "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Or as Thomas Jefferson said "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."

"Data" is not the plural of "anecdote". Some of the things the submitter was talking about are obviously personal observations, but he was probably referring to stuff like decreasing legroom.

Apparently, the statistics for lost/stolen luggage is about 2%. Doesn't sound like much, but consider that this means that on a flight of a hundred people, two will probably have their luggage lost. Also, this means that you will likely have your luggage lost or stolen once every fifty times you fly... not an issue for me, but my dad travels frequently on business.

Looks like you're right about the prices being lower than in a while, though, according to this. I wouldn't know; I haven't flown in a while.

It's the security thing that's most worrisome to me, though. From what I heard in the other thread, people weren't allowed carry-ons, laptops or other electronics, even books. Considering other changes in aviation security in the past (metal detectors, shoes, explosive sniffers) this may become the norm rather than a temporary measure. I don't know about everyone else here, but to me a six-hour flight (hell, even a two-hour flight) would be intolerable without some of those distractions. I'd rather take the train, but this obviously isn't an option for going to Europe.

You're not one of the David Nelsons are you?? Personally, I think it would be interesting to watch the TSA meltdown when 30 or 40 David Nelsons show up for the same flight. Picture the chaos after boarding when they announce, "Would David Nelson please exit the plane". Be really funny if one of them was the pilot, with a license to carry a handgun in the cockpit... I wonder if potential Air Marshalls are checked against the No Fly list?? There could be an armed David Nelson legitimately on a flight, writing bogus reports about random strangers. :)

It's not just Arabic sounding names. There is no way to dispute being on the list, so there is no way to find out if the lists are abused. I know someone named David Nelson who managed our data center and is subjected to additional review, because someone else with a common name made it on the list. Here's a reference for this problem:

http://archives.californiaaviation.org/airport/msg 26610.html

You are *already* required to identify yourself when you board a plane

Umm.. hmmm.. really?

http://marc.perkel.com/archives/000686.html

http://archives.californiaaviation.org/airport/msg 22780.html

"Once a traveler has been added to the reported list for a flight, subsequent reporting of a traveler with the same name and date of birth for the same flight will be discarded. Corrections and/or additions to a traveler's data cannot be made after the initial report."

The problem comes when they compare the pax list with their databases. In the US even US citizens don't have the right to correct their data, and the FBI has no obligation to ensure their data about you is correct. Already we've seen how good the TSA's system is, putting every Carlos Garcia, John Lewis and David Nelson on theirs Watch-List as it, doing repeated time-consuming checks on all 10 thousand of them each time they fly rather than doing the actual random checks that keep us safer. And now their database is going to have this data for all travel and travelers around the world (because the gov'ts share this info). They'll be so swamped by the millions of false positives that it'll be far more likely that the extraordinarily rare false negative won't be noticed. Makes me feel safer already: cue theme music to Brazil.

Again the "Its a Warning not a Guidebook" Best Essay Ever...on privacy: "The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life.

"[Example of typical gov't database, filled with errors] That was only a research database, so its inaccuracies probably would have remained relatively benign even if it had not been dismantled.

"But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences.

"If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm."

If you're an anti-terrorism agent of some kind, and you're sent to investigate green lasers pointing at airplanes, which mode of thinking will make you feel better?

• "Terrorism is dangerous and an act of terrorism could kill many people. My very important job is to prevent that, and I want to spend as much time as possible working on the important stuff. We've spent days tracking down a father who was showing his kid how nifty lasers can be. He's been embarrassed in the news for being an idiot and in for some community service, but, boy, I'm not going to get those hours back, what a waste of time." or
• "...We've spent days tracking down a father who was showing his kid how nifty lasers can be. This has to be very important, else I wouldn't have spent all those hours working on this. I caught you and you are going down, mr. terrorist hiding as a techie guy. Oh, you're not a terrorist? Well, I caught you and you are going down, mr. example-to-terrorists hiding as a techie guy."

And so specifically if legislative bodies threw in DOS attacks, taking pictures of bridges, paying train tix with cash, or failing to know all the lyrics to 'God Bless the USA' into the PATRIOT Act, it *must* be because those are all related to terrorism, not because the FBI hornswoggled them into shoehorning 20 years worth of Xmas wish-lists into the Act during a month of extreme grief and emotion. Nope.

And so if the TSA puts every every Carlos Garcia, John Lewis and David Nelson on the Watch-List it *must* be worth doing, those repeated time-consuming checks on all 10 thousand of them each time they fly rather than doing the actual random checks that keep us safer.

If you're doing important anti-terrorism work then it just isn't possible that you'll get side-tracked. (which is why, had the PATRIOT Act existed in the 20th century, Tesla, the "October Sky" rocketeer, and pretty much every member of pyrotechnics guilds and model rocket clubs would have ended up with SSSS's on their plane tix and plenty of long, recorded talks with the local constabulary. Especially Tesla- scaring the neighbors like that, potentially taking down the grid, born in a foreign country. How'd he even get in? Thank goodness now we're keeping out all those foreign engineering grad students: maybe our science and economy will suffer, but we'll feel safer.)

There is a similar trial with Biometrical data by lufthansa in Frankfurt. I dunno the detail... But you can read them here :
LH and biometric
German Airport and Biometric

Face it, whether you like it or not (I personally dislike it being traced and identified by my "biological property" for various reason, one being you cannot escape being recognized once they are in governement database...), biometric will come...

Sucks even more to be a David Nelson soon, I'll bet. Link.

Good lord, you know how screwed up the information industry is, and you AREN'T WORRIED? What about all those David Nelsons who keep getting hassled when they travel because the name "David Nelson" ended up on a travel security advisory that was issued (half-assed) based on screwed up info?

The systems will improve, but the bad data lives on. In some cases this is good - in many cases, guess what - they'll err on the side of including everybody, instead of excluding everybody...

Better not to have the system to begin with. After all, once the system is in place, you start getting people who say, "Well, it's already there, we might as well use it." Gun registration -> confiscation comes to mind as an example. Combining your credit score (and social security number) with everything is another - if there was no SSN, would wholesale ID theft be such a problem in the US?

No, when they get Federalized, we HOPE that the end result isn't the winner of the cheapest bid.

The airlines want cheap security. So, you get cheap workers. As long as the airlines are doing the work, and paying the wages, the pressure is to keep wages down. Low wages, poor workers, high turn-over (You know that turn-over was really high 100%+ for airline security staff last year don't you?)

See

Pay is low, and turnover high-- 500% at one
airport-- and their training is often minimal. Federal inspectors have repeatedly been able to easily get weapons and potential bombs past them. (This is from a PBS study done before 9/11/2000)

The old security system was a race to the bottom. Airlines didn't really care about security. They just wanted us to feel better.

The new system might not be better, but for different reasons. Personally, I think it will be, but that's just my opinion.

The personnel they can command will be better, and the ability to fire workers that don't perform will be better. Generally, treat your workforce better - get better performance.

This required typing "El Al airline security procedures" into a search engine. Gee that was tough.