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US Changes How Air Travelers Are Screened
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration is abandoning its policy of using nationality alone to determine which US-bound international air travelers should be subject to additional screening and will instead select passengers based on possible matches to intelligence information, including physical descriptions or a particular travel pattern. Under the new system, screeners will stop passengers for additional security if they match certain pieces of known intelligence. The system will be 'much more intel-based,' a senior administration official says, as opposed to brute force. For example if US intelligence authorities learned about a terrorism suspect from Asia who had recently traveled to the Middle East, and they knew the suspect's approximate age but not name or passport number, those fragments would be entered into a database, shared with commercial airline screeners abroad, and screeners would be instructed to look for people with those traits and to pull them aside for extra searches. Administration officials have said that, in hindsight, the central failure in the attempted bombing of an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight on Christmas Day involved inadequate sharing of information." In other TSA-related news, CNN takes a look at the full-body scanners that are beginning to be deployed in the US and elsewhere, concluding that they are good at finding concealed drugs but haven't found much that could bring down an airplane. John Perry Barlow is quoted: "Every time technology makes another leap forward, we have to reclaim the Fourth Amendment, and often we have to reclaim the entire Bill of Rights, because technology gives [the authorities] powers that were not envisioned by the Founding Fathers."
And here I was always told that I was "randomly chosen" for increased security screening.
See, it's not racial profiling if it's based on the shocking Intelligence Information that The Terrorists are often Brown People.
You may think I'm being sardonic, but you'd be wrong. If I were being sardonic, I'd have leaned to one side, sardonically.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Yet ironically we don't seem to be as badly as the United States at the moment. I don't recall being treated like a criminal upon entering New Zealand, nor does any country in Europe. In fact the entry requirements for the United States are now so onerous I won't be going back until they relax: I don't just mean "relax the requirements", I mean the entire United States needs to collectively chill the fuck out.
except unabomber, oklahoma bomber, eco nuts, black panthers and other pure christian terrorists. but dont let facts get in the way of security theatre!
Noticing that half of all the terrorist attacks on US soil in the last two generations were performed by white people white isn't being racist, it's being minimally observant.
All your statement tells us is that most of the individuals in a single terrorist attack were from the same country which is not insightful, it is fucking obvious.
Am i the only "european, single male in their 30es" who frequently travels on one-way (business class) tickets?
Despite my Airline PLATINUM standard (>100,000 miles/yr), in the past i have had frequently a series of SSSSSSS printed on my boarding pass, which was a sure fire 100% way to get pulled over EVERY SINGLE TIME for a "random" search in the security line.
After a while i just "volunteered" and asked "so, where's the sssspecial line" ?
i got a weird look, showed my boarding pass, and then the usual "oh, sir, you've gotta come with me, you've been randomly selected for additional security screening".
I tried to explain to the folks that they need to smarten up, because if they basically tell me at check-in that i'm the "chosen one" when going through security, i would of course have dumped anything which would be "suspicious" to my friends (with non-SSSS boarding passes).
Unfortunately my honest concerns (and ramblings about randomness and predictability) were usually met by the TSA drones with the famous lack of understanding and common sense.
I'm glad that MAYBE they are actually doing something reasonable, instead of the "security theater" of the last 10 yrs. but then again.... what am i thinking!
And the Founding Fathers wouldn't have gone the "Let's trade our hard-won freedom for the empty promise of security!" route, either. They'd see those flying tin cans and say "How could a few men with small knives (or other blade-like instruments) take over an entire plane full of citizens when the citizens aboard should be more than capable of preventing such an attempt?" Then they would look at the way the general populace is being disarmed and say "This is exactly the opposite of what we intended!" when told that they could not carry their primary means of self-defense everywhere they went. They would look at how the people they did all of this for are giving everything they argued and fought so hard for away in order to feel safe, instead of actually being prepared and equipped to ensure that safety.
The "they couldn't have known" and "they didn't foresee" defenses are just a way of ignoring the original intent and then claiming that "now" is so much more different from "then" and that dealing with what affects us "now" was never the intent to begin with. They had boats, those not-so-mythical things called pirates, terrorists, and invading armies back then, and they dealt with them as they encountered them. The only real differences between "now" and "then" is that we can travel between locations faster, we can communicate faster with people farther away, and we have the ability to know what of (in)significance is currently happening in places we never heard of before to people we'll likely never meet in person. Admittedly, the "killing people" thing may have become easier with newer technologies, but so has the "saving people" thing, and sometimes we use the exact same tool(s) to do both. Exactly none of this didn't exist back then in one form or another, but we (as a people) seem so intent on treating "now" in such a different manner as "then" because we can, and not because we must.