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TSA Investigates Pilot Who Exposed Security Flaws
stewart_maximus writes "The TSA is investigating a TSA deputized pilot who posted videos to YouTube pointing out security flaws. Flaws exposed include ground crew clearing security with just a card swipe while pilots have to go through metal detectors, and a 'medieval-looking rescue ax' being available on the flight deck. Three days after posting the video, 6 government officials arrived at his door to question him and confiscated his federal firearm (and his concealed weapon permit)."
that the correct spelling is 'axe'.
Granted, I haven't seen all the videos this pilot made, but from what I have seen and read so far it sounds like what this pilot was pointing out was things that were already publicly known. Things like airport ground crews having access to restricted areas without themselves having to go through screening, no TSA agents searching them or anything they carry prior to having access to aircraft, etc. Anybody with an ounce of intelligence could have figured out what this pilot documented by just sitting at an airport and watching for a little while, or by getting chummy with airport employees at a nearby bar and asking a few basic questions.
And I certainly don't think this pilot was the first one to point out these flaws. It just sounds to me like the TSA is trying to make a scapegoat out of him.
but I did not catch the terroriiists.
(c) 2010, the TSA.
The Nazi government of US of A has turned completely bat-shit insane. All it does is taking away personal freedoms from people:
Freedoms to speak (wikileaks), freedoms to think (public schools funded and guided by the dep't of education), freedoms to fair trial (Irwin Schiff, Guantanamo, private Manning...), freedoms to do business without harassment (Patriot Act, IRS, CIA, all the regulations and rules and subsidies and taxes), freedoms to deal in real money (Fed printing, 0% interest setting, destruction of currency).
The entire thing is rotten to the core, whether you agree with me on every point or not, but I am not interested in any consensus. My consensus is simple: gov't is cancer and it's killing the society through killing the economy and taking away people's freedoms.
Some justify the US federal gov't in what it does by bringing up the commerce clause, the general welfare clause etc., but since the gov't can justify anything it wants with those clauses right now it's time to ask yourself a question:
Is there a PURPOSE to the Constitution and what IS the purpose? Isn't the purpose of the Constitution to LIMIT the gov't in what it can do? If the commerce/welfare clauses allow the gov't to do whatever it wants, what is then the real purpose of the Constitution and why not just say: gov't can do whatever the fuck it wants and be done with the pretenses?
You can't handle the truth.
The TSA is clearly a firm believer in security through obscurity.
I didn't try my spelling correction, that is certain. Damn. Shut. Should = shut.
What would you expect if you purposefully published the flaws in your company's security? "Oh, you silly goose!"
Other countries take note: this is what happens when your country just rolls over and lets the terrorists win.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
It's a good thing those terrorists are stupid enough to document all of their pre-attack planning on Youtube, otherwise we'd never catch them...
Security through absurdity, America's greatest weapon again terrorism!
I was unable to locate the video in question, so I assume it's been taken down, and, sadly, and somewhat surprisingly, appears not to have been reuploaded.
Yet another example of that old saying:
Question authority and Authority will question you!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Ground crew have privileged access to secure areas of the airport that demands more security, not less. Make them do an iris scan and enter a passcode in addition to swiping their badge.
Wow. Airport 'security' is a joke, and almost everyone knows it; a Google search for "security theater" turns up over a half-million results. Yet this guy tells us something that we're all aware of already, and gets put throught the mill because of it. It's bad enough when people get crucified for revealing some hidden truth, but when it happens to someone who is simply stating the obvious, that's just sad.
Just what ARE we paying these clowns for anyway? They should go back to allowing knitting needles on planes; pissed off Grandmas would probably deal with terrorists a whole lot more effectively than these clueless idiots.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
What are you going to DO about this
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
For the new US national sport: Shooting the messenger.
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
How much of this security theater can be solved with a bomb-sniffing dog? Instead of checking each new thing for a bomb and still not being able to find them, a dog can just smell the explosive wherever it happens to be hidden. But no, we don't want to do that, that's too obvious, cheap, and easy. We'd much rather have a 1000x more expensive, incomplete and cumbersome solution.
stuff |
You don't need to bend over, Jack. Why don't you just secede? It's perfectly legal, and there's plenty of poeple already moving along that road: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession_in_the_United_States#Recent_efforts_in_the_United_States
As a foreigner, I believe this is the only possible road for redemption of the former "land of the free and home of the brave" - the Russian Soviet Confederation was dismantled, the Chinese Confederation will be broken up too eventually, but the USA is the one most badly in need of an enema.
And just think, you don't even need to take up arms to do it...
The purpose of the theater is to make the public fearful, not protected. Our government needs a fearful public to enable the erosion of public rights. We gave up a bunch of rights with the Patriot Act that we would never have tolerated the loss of without the "it's for your protection" lie. TSA is part of the cover for this lie and others.
The point is not about the information being public. The point is about the public being aware of it. The TSA exists so that the general public will feel like they are being protected from dangerous terrorists when they travel.
If you are in a big city, take a look around, especially in busy areas. On one side, you see the things the public is supposed to see: storefronts, public transportation, police officers, SWAT teams that just sort of stand around, etc. On the other side, you see service entrances, maintenance corridors, and unlocked doors labeled "DO NOT ENTER." The general public is kept on their toes by constantly having reminders that they need to be protected pushed in their faces, and scary-looking people with guns and dogs do a good job of that (as do enhanced pat-downs, apparently). The fact that a determined terrorist could sneak past all the security is pretty much irrelevant.
Palm trees and 8
No expense or effort must be spared in burying the truth. The truth must be obscured under all conditions. There is nothing worse than truth bursting out. Freedom of suppression, the right to suppress the truth, must reign supreme.
Bomb sniffing dogs are effective, efficient and can be trained by many different companies/organizations.
Scanners are expensive, inefficient but can only be supplied by a few companies.
Follow the money.
Somewhere in all this talk about tERRORism there is a larger, hidden problem. It's plain before our faces, but most of the prominent stakeholders in the debate seem oblivious to it. But it is of capital importance that we find ways to bring this root problem out in the open and deal with it.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
FTFA: "Late last month a 50-year-old pilot, who asked that his name and the airline he works for not be made public, took a series of videos with his cell phone to show major flaws he says still exist in airport security systems."
Who wants to take bets that cell phones will now be required to be stowed in checked baggage, due to the "security threat" the camera phones pose?
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor
I would love to see a true cost / benefit analysis of the TSA.
Costs $ billions.
Cuts productivity of business travelers.
Dissuades casual travelers from taking vacations.
Increases airfare.
Decreases the flight hours of cockpit crews.
Degrades morale of customer-facing airline workers.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
let's see
The sad part is it's probably more likely that two pilots have the same name then that same set of credentials.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The law states that a person is innocent until proven guilty. WHAT he is guilty of is beyond me. Since he's NOT proven to be guilty of anything, yet, the confiscation of his personal firearms and permits are a breach of his constitutional rights. The government has broken constitutional law by doing this, and the persons involved need to be prosecuted and jailed for doing so. Also, the items must be returned immediately.
The impression I get from what has been said about the tapes is that he will have hit his goal once the USA is seen as something that the Saudi rulers and possibly others in the region can not associate with if they want to retain power.
He may be happy if the USA were to disintegrate as a side effect, but pretending that was his initial goal as many opportunists have is just a stupid exercise in adding a long list of manufactured evil traits to something that is already a monster.
you = fail
What about his concealed carry permit?
Is it typical in the USA to 'shoot the messenger'?
Why is security theater so unavoidable, even when they are made to be ashamed?
Why don't they fix the issues he pointed out?
It is all so childish, as seen from here: no security even though they pretend to all the time.
Why do I see parallels to the Assange so-called-case? (various entities try to punish him when there isn't even an official complaint, let alone case)
There are usually two or three people in the cockpit- Pilot, copilot, sometimes navigator (Or whatever that third guy is- flight engineer, maybe?). If the pilot starts going off-course, the other two are going to start asking questions. If he goes into a crazy dive or aims at a building, the other two are going to try to relieve him of command as quickly as possible. Eliminate those other two quickly, and the cabin door is locked, so nobody can do anything about it and Mr. Pilot has the plane all to himself.
I believe it happened once on a FedEx flight- Flight crew attacked the pilot and copilot with a claw hammer. He failed, thankfully.
Sent from my CR-48
Here and again here.
you had me at #!
Yes, better to trust an upstanding "unbiased" organization like CBS who doesn't engage in anything fake. Right?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The TSA is the scariest organization in the USA. It is huge. The regulations it seeks to enforce are classified for national security. It highers only low wage under-educated people. The belligerence you encounter dealing with the TSA is astounding.
It is a recipe for violations of civil rights and suppression of freedom and expression.
The TSA is, in itself, an anathema to freedom and the constitution.
I joined all excited, I'll start in screening like everyone else and move in to one of the more obscure TSA roles (undercover security testing, behavior interpretation, EDO,etc) . After 5 months it was clear the only seniority was considered for advancement, not prior experience or intelligence. Top heavy and poor performance (saw a screener put his hand on a gun in a bag and pass it though without finding it in the training environment) Having to do pat downs at the gate of active military members because they had a one-way ticket. Not doing background checks on screeners for months after they started (8 weeks in I was informed they lost my SF86 and I had to do another one!?!), the list is huge and there is the pages of documents of stuff I signed saying I wouldn't ever mention.
I do not play in the middle of the road
Replace "TSA" with "Microsoft", and "security vulnerability" with "software exploit". Now we're back to the discussion about posting live vulnerabilities to the net. If we have a problem with that, we should certainly have a problem with this pilot.
He made a fatal mistake. Doesn't he know that people shouldn't know there is no security whilst the TSA is sticking its hands up their daughters skirts in the name of security? Big Brother is come, but we don't see his face... we're too busy looking up in the sky for terrorists and looking at all the pretty pictures on our HD TVs.
Politicians are limited in their power to do what they want, so they crave MORE power to do what they want (good or bad, selfish or selfless.)
To get this, they need to MOVE UPWARD to HIGHER positions not merely maintain their current position.
Naturally, the greedy corrupt ones will want more money which is usually related to how high they can get; but not necessarily. The higher up the less likely your crimes will be punished or prevented...
Term limits would encourage MORE upward movement than we already have; it wouldn't stop all the problems we have.
Sometimes we have a GREAT politician who isn't killed (or dies in an "accident") and I do not think it is worth losing them just to stop a few entrenched crooks. If you haven't noticed, its easy for crooks to win in our system and honest people are not likely to even get elected in the 1st place.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Since terrorism seems to be all the rage nowadays, I give you this very simple plot:
1. A guy wants to blow up a plane, maybe even more than one.
2. He hires some other dudes who have the same ideas.
3. He gets one or more of his recruits to become TSA agents. The plot becomes a long one, but so what, if it takes a couple of years to implement even, as long as there is money...
4. Some of the people he hired do make it and become TSA agents.
5. The fake TSA agents bring weapons through the security check points themselves.
that's it, the rest is details left to imagination.
You can't handle the truth.
What is there to stop him from giving that weapon to someone else on a different flight? Particularly a bomb or bombs. So the pilot crashes one plane and another plane (or multiple planes) explode.
I think it's more likely a pilot could be bribed to give a weapon to someone on a different flight without the pilot intending any harm to his own. This scenario only requires the pilot to be corrupt - yours requires he be an insane fanatic.
#DeleteChrome
What the hell difference does it make?
These are trivial problems, that anybody charged with security, and even remotely competent at their job would have noticed right off the bat, and fixed.
The fact that they haven't been fixed means one of two things:
1. The TSA isn't at all about improving security.
2. The TSA has no competent employees.
I suppose a third possibility is "both of the above" but that's not the point.
This look to me to be more likely done to inform the public about the total waste of money that is the TSA, and the accompanying security theater.
Basically, they're pissed off that he publicly called them on their bullshit.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
don't you know if you upload anything to youtube to use tor and a fake account. relly the case if your gonna expose are rights killing tsa to the stupid theater they are.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/1224/Thermoses-coffee-cups-added-to-list-of-possible-terrorist-weapons
America, TSA esp., has gone off the deep end ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv5iEK-IEzw
He's in trouble for not following proper security procedure of reporting all problems to the appropriate place, /dev/null.
They confiscated his gun for pointing out safety flaws? I guess constitutional rights don't apply to people who embarrass a government? Can you imagine if they said you weren't allowed to go to church or vote because you embarrassed the government? But it's okay if it's the 2nd amendment? What the fuck, america. Pussies.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Standard MO: don't fix the flaws, "fix" the person who exposes them. I feel more secure already!
Can anyone give a link to the YouTube videos?
All the YouTube videos have been pulled. CNN for awhile had nice excerpts that they broadcast live on Dec 24.
The timing of this news event was to scare people who are traveling on the holiday. It will become even bigger international news if there are successful terrorist attacks this holiday season in the USA.
So far the nation has made it to December 25 with out a single successful Al-Qaeda hit, only seven more days to go.