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Next Step For US Body Scanners Could Be Trains, Metro Systems
Hugh Pickens writes "The Hill reports that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says terrorists will continue to look for US vulnerabilities, making tighter security standards necessary. '[Terrorists] are going to continue to probe the system and try to find a way through,' Napolitano said in an interview with Charlie Rose. 'I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime.' Napolitano added she hoped the US could get to a place in the future where Americans would not have to be as guarded against terrorist attacks as they are and that she was actively promoting research into the psychology of how a terrorist becomes radicalized. 'The long-term [question] is, how do we get out of this having to have an ever-increasing security apparatus because of terrorists and a terrorist attack?' says Napolitano. 'I think having a better understanding of what causes someone to become a terrorist will be helpful.'"
The obvious next logical step would be body scanners to get into your car, and should you refuse, your car will grope you inappropriately.
Although I'm sure the car fetishists are salivating at that prospect already.
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Fuck you.
Hi John Pistole.
Fuck you too.
And Obama. God it pains me to say it.
Fuck you. What the fuck, man?
And to the 82% of people who think this is good,
Fuck all of you.
Not to mention that they will be unable to ensure the entire route between stations is secure. Why risk being caught boarding a train with a bomb when you can plant a bomb next to the track?
I knew she was this stupid when it comes to security. She was good at education and better at the budget than some, but her border security policy was awful and never did jack shit towards actually keeping anyone safe. Why she was selected for this, of all jobs, is beyond me. As I said, she could have been good at something else like Secretary of Education, but Homeland Security is possibly the worst possible position for her. She just has no grasp of what makes things secure (hint: it's not a fence/scanning machines).
I would love it if we had a president who said something like this:
"Yeah, about the TSA. We're ending it. Same with Homeland Security. Folks, the simple truth of the matter is there's no possible way to secure ourselves against all risk. I think we can all agree that the Soviet Union operated as a police state none of us would want to live in and even with all that security, they still had serial killers. China routinely uses the death penalty for drug smugglers and yet they still have a drug problem.
"The trappings of the police state represented by the TSA does not deter terrorists, it represents the illusion that government is doing something. It also is making a great deal of money for people who provide goods and services for the paranoia industry.
"The fact of the matter is that we will get hit again. We don't know by who, we don't know where, we don't know when, but it'll happen. You know what, though? We're strong. We can take whatever they dish out. They could fly ten more planes into ten more buildings, they could set off a nuclear device in downtown New York. No, we won't like it. But we'll crawl out from under the rubble and rebuild. Living as we have before, uncowed, unbowed, not conceding a goddamn thing to terrorists, that's middle finger resolutely extended right back at them. It says 'If that's all you've got, we've got nothing to worry about.'
"What we're no longer going to do is live our lives looking over our shoulder, jumping at shadows, giving up the way we live our lives because someone has rattled us, because we've lost our nerve, because we've been beaten.
"Oh, and while we're on the topic, Middle Eastern nuts wouldn't have so much money to finance terror attacks if we weren't giving it to them for the goddamn oil. They wouldn't even have a reason to attack us if we weren't involved in their politics in the first place. Our post-oil energy policy is also our anti-terror policy."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It's completely absurd. Anyone with half a brain can think of at least half a dozen reasons why they can't secure trains this way.
In short, Ms. Napolitano clearly has not thought this through. Either that or she has thought it through and she's just the biggest idiot on the face of the planet. With political appointees, it's often hard to say. Either way, it's time to defund the TSA and Homeland Security. They're the biggest laughingstock of the security world since Windows XP.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Oh, Janet! Sure we can take over boats and wreck them using mere boxcutters and explosives. I'm sure you've seen the movie Speed.
But let me give you a hint. Trains? Didn't you watch old cartoons as a kid? When we want to derail them, we don't need to be on them, and if we are, we have wasted some kamikaze brothers who could have better employed elsewhere.
I also think understanding what causes someone to become a terrorist will be helpful.
Yours,
The Terrorists
You'll do a hell of a lot more damage with a lot less boom if you can derail the train.
Note that this doesn't even require explosives...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
But unlike the 3 minutes at 30,000 feet, the radiation is lower power, designed to scatter off your skin.
That means that 3 minutes a 30,000 feet your entire body (insides included) is hit with the same amount of power: in a scanner only your surface area (skin) is hit with 3 minutes of radiation exposure at 30,000 feet in just under two seconds.
Assuming that the radiation needs to penetrate 1 mm or less to scatter, an average male's body surface area is 1.9 m^2 (165 lbs 5'9") making an exposure area of 0.0019 m^3
Likewise an average male weights about 75 kg (165 pounds) with an average conversion factor of 1.015 kg/l coming with a rough value of 70 l for an average male's volume.
A little math and you find out that (0.0019/70) the entire in machine dose is hitting only 1/36842 of your body, or about 0.0027% of your body.
Normalizing for exposure per second E = Rate(at 30000)*180(seconds), and E = Rate2(in machine)*2(seconds). Leads to Rate(at 30000)*180(seconds) = Rate2(in machine)*2(seconds). A little more math, an you realize that the rate of exposure is 90 times faster in the machine.
90 times faster exposure of only 0.0027% of your body means that the "only three minutes" argument is true, but misleading. Such things can only happen in a culture where most people are mathematically illiterate.
To make a mathematical analogy. Assume the exposure in the air is like having a match light each second. You feel the heat of one match for 180 seconds. Then standing in such a machine is like being exposed to 36841 matches being lit 90 time a second for 2 seconds. That's 3315690 matches per second for 2 seconds. It's a 3 million plus fold increase in exposure rate.
By the way, 1 million matches lit creates a fire column 3 to 5 meters in size over 10 meters tall. For the Americans, that's 10 to 16 feet wide and over 40 feet tall. I don't want to know how how big the fire column would be for a 3.3 million match lighting experiment.
I used to tear up with pride when I heard the national anthem, or Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA". The final line of the anthem, "the land of the free and the home of the brave", and Greenwood's line that "the flag still stands for freedom, and they can't take that away", are both now lies. We are not the land of the free, the flag doesn't stand for freedom, they did take it away, but most of all we are no longer the home of the brave. We are a nation of cowards, so afraid of the boogeyman of terrorism we are willing to sacrifice not just our rights but our very dignity, all in the forlorn hope of being safe.
The TSA has not stopped a single terrorist in the 9 years of its operation. The full-body scanners would not have detected any of the bomb plots of the last few years, including last year's Captain Underpants. It is a complete and total waste of time and money, and serves no purpose beyond enriching a handful of politically connected individuals.
Enough is enough. It's time we all refuse to subject ourselves to any security measures until sanity is restored. Don't show your ID at the airport, don't go through the metal detectors, don't even submit your carry ons for X-Ray inspection. The pendulum has swung too far in one direction, it is time we push it back where it belongs.
If everyone were to refuse to submit to these intrusions, they would be gone in a matter of days. The "powerful" who think themselves our masters are neither, and in their hearts they know it. The people still have the power in this country to stand up for what's right.
Who's with me?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Anonymous@DHS:
"The terminology contained within the reported memo is indeed troubling. It labels any person who “interferes” with TSA airport security screening procedure protocol and operations by actively objecting to the established screening process, “including but not limited to the anticipated national opt-out day” as a “domestic extremist.” The label is then broadened to include “any person, group or alternative media source” that actively objects to, causes others to object to, supports and/or elicits support for anyone who engages in such travel disruptions at U.S. airports in response to the enhanced security procedures."
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Seriously, is everyone who works for "Homeland Security" an idiot? Is there some maximum IQ you can have before you're unqualified?
Attacking a bus is completely different than attacking a plane.
Even if these measure were useful in defending a plane (which they are not) they wouldn't apply to a bus because any terrorist WOULD NOT GO THROUGH THEM and would, instead, drive next to the bus and blow up his car.
MAYBE they'd be useful in a subway. As long as the train never left the tunnels and all the access routes were sealed shut.
Which still leave the malls and the after Thanksgiving crowds there.
And that doesn't even cover things like a couple of snipers just shooting people in DC.
Fastest way to defeat a terrorist is to give him a real job or business to support loved ones with out interference from corruption.
Ah, that would explain why those doctors and engineers who worked and lived in Great Britain blew up the trains a couple years back. If you do a little research on actual terrorists, you will discover that many of them are well-educated people from middle class backgrounds who have excellent job prospects.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
So, in your universe, propping up the Saudi government doesn't count as imperialism?
Every single step in imperialism always looks entirely sane and just. (Usually because the unjust steps are classified.)
And we can't seem to understand how people have come to the conclusion that we have conquered them. Sure, we're running around with guns killing the rebels at the request of the government we installed in the first place, but they have FREEDOM(TM)!
We could pull out of the Middle East tomorrow and return to a 1930s era isolationism
Could we? Why the FUCK don't we, then?
and there would still be some extremist nutjob that would find a reason to hate us.
The problem isn't who hates us, the problem is how many people and what sort of recruitment they can do.
On 9/11, 19 people killed about three thousand...so each person killed 150, although that was partially absurd luck on their part.
But let's assume that it's still possible to blow up airplanes, and only takes two people to do that plot, so each person can still kill 150 people.
But the problem isn't the 150 people. There is functionally no way to stop that if the person is willing to die. You could fricking mix ammonia and bleach at a high school talent show and kill 150 many people which chlorine gas
It's the 19 people willing to kill and give their life to do so that many that's the problem.
And it's not really being an 'extremist nutjob' to hate the US because they blew up your house and killed your family. That's just perfectly normal hatred.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Tons of people have worked out that this stupid policy is not a solution - why hasn't the government?
Because they believe their purpose is to *do something*. That's why they were elected/appointed. Not doing anything means their position is pointless, and you can't sustain a bureaucracy that way.
Simply put, nobody is going to tell the people responsible for their job that they can't find anything to do. It either makes you look incompetent, or it makes it look your position is redundant and should be eliminated.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
A truly erroneous hard-left outlook, but stupidity is fitting given your account name. Jihadists are very clear about their intentions. It has almost nothing to do with forcing our economies on them. The primary driver of jihad is the desire to subjugate the entire world to the dictates of Islamic dictatorship. Radical Muslims view the non-Muslim controlled parts of the globe as the world they are at war with, and the war they are waging is to impose their religion on all non-Muslims. Other justifications for jihad are at best secondary motivators. And shame on you for whitewashing and apologizing for the unquestionably evil, outrageously heinous campaign of misery and death waged by radical Islam.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
"Have an unmanned sweeper vehicle run down the track a little ahead of the train, ..."
I'm a railway dispatcher since 1973 and I'm enjoying reading the remarks here, very funny.
People get their cars stuck on the rail, drunks driving their cars _on_ the track, suicidal morons waiting to get overrun with or without their cars, people walking their dogs on the tracks, throwing stuff from bridges onto the tracks or trains _every_ fucking day!
A couple of bombs would not even make a dent.
They weren't terrorists. All of them had specific targets - people or Government buildings - in order to take those targets out: they were murderers. They were NOT targeting groups of Americans for the sake of creating terror.
They were targeting the government for the sake of creating terror in those working for the government. Both the 90s right wing terrorists and the 60s left wing terrorists.
What that means is that they had become so jaded that they thought that terrorizing the people to change the government wouldn't work, so they terrorized government officials instead.
You're right in that this isn't really 'traditional' terrorism, but traditional terrorism is incredibly stupid and only causes a backlash. If Terrorist group X starts killing civilians randomly, civilians will run to the government for help. If, OTOH, X kills government workers, government workers will quickly find other jobs, crippling the government.
But that really is 'terrorism', just aimed at government civilians instead of other civilians.
However, while that point is valid, the 9/11 attackers did the same thing. The 9/11 attacks were against the White House, the Pentagon, and...the World Trade Center. And what that means is that they appear to think...um...the military and big business run US foreign policy.
Instead of thinking of 'the US government' as a discrete entity, they saw it linked inextricably with big business, and decided they'd terrorize bis business also, who they also think are attacking them.
This is, incidentally, probably more accurate a world-view than the left- and right-wing terrorists in the US, which seem to think that domestic policy is set at Federal buildings.
Of course, the US population doesn't see it that way.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
A truly erroneous hard-right outlook, but stupidity is fitting given your account name. Imperialists are very clear about their intentions. It has almost nothing to do with forcing our social democracies on them. The primary driver of imperialism is the desire to subjugate the entire world to the dictates of American hegemony. Radical imperialists view the non-American controlled parts of the globe as the world they are at war with, and the war they are waging is to impose their empire on all non-Americans. Other justifications for imperialism are at best secondary motivators. And shame on you for whitewashing and apologizing for the unquestionably evil, outrageously heinous campaign of misery and death waged by radical Imperialism.
Give peace a chance.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Perfectly normal hatred would be hating the very specific people who blew up your house and family, hating everyone who shares the same race or nationality as the people who blew up your house and family is what defines an "extremist nutjob".
So when a soldier, in the employ of an army, does something that he was ordered to that seriously harms you...your problem should be with that soldier? Really?
Not the people who gave him those orders, which are, ultimately, the people of the United States?
I can see how some people would emotionally think that way, but that's the emotional thinking, the logical thinking, the non-nutjob thinking, is 'If he hadn't done that the guy next to him would have. The people giving the orders are the problem.'
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?