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TSA's Sloppy Redacting Reveals All
A travel blog breaks the story of a poor job of redacting by the TSA: they posted a PDF of airport screening policies, with certain sections blacked out — not realizing that simply laying a black rectangle over the text is hardly sufficient. Cryptome has posted a copy with the redaction removed (ZIP).
http://cryptome.org/tsa-screening.zip The actual link.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
is here:
http://cryptome.org/tsa-screening.zip
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
How stupid are these people?! Adobe even has a feature to redact (not draw black boxes) text from documents
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I suspect the boarding pass check is primarily to keep the TSA from being overwhelmed by people not flying, such as family members waiting for you to arrive. Using it for any other purpose (including identifying selectees) is pretty pointless until they actually validate the boarding pass. They're slowly starting to do this, but it's a long process.
The document states explicitly that, absent a Federal Flight Deck Officer ID and presence of a TSA-issued weapon, aircraft crew are to be subjected to normal screening. An FFDO that is unarmed is also screened.
The exemptions that you're talking about are exemptions from selectee screening (Section 4.3.15 B). Military, FEMA, forest firefighters, etc., are exempted from selectee screening. They're not exempted from standard screening.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
you misread: the category you just listed is merely exempt from random extra screening. they still get screened, and if their boarding pass has "selectee" markings they have to get screened extra too.
More relevant, I think, is that knowing the exact calibration thresholds for the xray machines; which aircrew uniforms are exempted from screenings, etc might allow terrorists/malcontents to adjust their smuggling/terrorism plans to better avoid or circumvent those protection.
While this *IS* unquestionably a form of security through obscurity, I can clearly see whey a security force would want to prevent this information being public.
(EG, knowing that the sensitivity cut-off for wire is 28 gauge, one could substitute say-- 36 gauge wire in their bomb instead, because that would be too thin to be reliably detected, and may pass right through inspection unnoticed.)
Or, in the case of a suicide bomber, knowing which aircrew uniforms to procure prior to the operation to avoid being detained and searched by the airport security personnel could be very handy.
Essentially, they wanted to "black box" the details of their security protocols, to make them harder to target for circumvention. (No puns about the ineffective redaction intended)
It's worse than that. One trick that the IRA used to use (not sure if it originated with them or not) is to have sequenced bombings: Determine where people fleeing the first bomb will go then set off a second bomb (or bombs) at the logical escape routes. People fleeing danger tend to get densely packed at choke points.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
the goal of terrorism is to cause terror
The goal of terrorism is to effect political and social change. The terror is just a means to an end.
there's no security (or at least none that would stop a luggage bomb) before you reach the checkpoint
There is if you travel through a country with serious security issues, like India or Israel.
During the "troubles" in Northern Ireland the Irish airport police had checkpoints at the airport doors where they used explosives sniffers to check luggage. They were efficient and I never saw a queue more than a minute or two long. It was enough deterrent and there never was any attack in an airport or on a 'plane.
Indeed, the Lockerbie bombing for example. Apparently a bomb that fit in a tape recorder was enough to blow a hole in the fuselage and that was that.
Are you actually a pilot, or do you just play one on TV?
Barrel rolls are 1G maneuvers. A "normal" roll down the axis of the airplane is an aileron roll. This would probably cause injury to those not sitting down with their seat belts on, and those who are hit by the unseated, but won't cause the plane to crash as long as the pilots don't overstress the airframe during the recovery. A snap roll is something else; it's a more violent maneuver that's more complicated than an aileron roll, and one that would likely break the airplane.
Your "analysis" of Airbus FBW systems is entirely off-base. Fly-by-wire is not some fuzzy-logic computer that tries to think about what you want vs. what it wants to do; rather, such systems have known, hard, rigidly-defined limits. They may have pitch and roll angle limits (as you allude to) in addition to other ones, but essentially they are just feedback controllers, not much more complicated than the PID ones we all remember from our controls theory classes.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_dog
The only question is why they replaced "dog" with the snootier "canine," but the sentences parses just the same. /Buzz Killington
Just FYI, parent is definitely NSFW.