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Don't Fly If You Just Had Surgery!
mcgrew writes "The Chicago Tribune is reporting that the TSA is now worried about surgically implanted bombs. Are they trying to get everyone to stop flying entirely? I know there's no way they'd get me in an airliner these days. I'll drive, even though it is far, far more dangerous."
The next logical measure is to conceal contraband internally, be it through surgery, or more probable, up the butt. I can't wait for someone to be detained with explosives in their bum so we can get our mandatory anal probes.
This was the logical end of this stupidity. Face it folks, you can't be 100% safe, no matter how many liberties you give up.
I remember in the 80s, Sonny Bono himself managed to get a bomb onto a SPACE SHUTTLE without really needing to hide it anywhere! In fact, he bought it in the airport gift shop!
I mean, your chance of death from crash is lower sure, but thats a pretty narrow definition of "danger".
What about the "Danger" of being detained and missing your flight? The "Danger" of irradiation from newfangled machines that the TSA lied to the public about wrt safety and safety testing? How about the danger of having property taken from you? Forgot that little credit card tool with the knife in your wallet? fuck you, gone.
The danger that you will run afoul of some new secret rule?
I suspect the danger of being a victim of the TSA tips the scales in favor of driving.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The TSA operation manual is actually Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Whoever mods me Funny, please don't. It's not a joke.
Shhhhh Don't give them ideas!!!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I've got a metal box in my chest for a nerve stimulator, TSA is going to have fun with me when I fly next week.
No, they should be disbanded and we should go back to the old security methods. They are clearly just security theater.
MI5/Spooks had an episode where the woman had a bomb implanted in her, and she was supposed to blow up a bunch of dignitaries.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
They've been ignoring the threat of butt-bombs for years now, even though a terrorist actually used that technique in 2009: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6862247.ece
They also continue to ignore the fact that a liquid ban is ineffective when several travelers could combine their 3oz containers past the security checkpoint.
We reinforced the cabin doors, and that's all we ever needed to do to prevent another 9/11. The fact that we've allowed our government to waste billions while molesting innocent citizens is just sickening.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Ya got to wonder how competent these people are. They should've realized this even before they deployed the back-scatter machines. On the other hand, if they were aware of it, and they're doing likelihoods - figuring that the back-scatter machines just increased the level of difficulty for terrorists, meaning they're being smarter about it, then they've no reason to have grandmas remove their diapers (as they did last week), because again, they operating on likelihoods.
Either way, all is not right in the upper stories.
Jobs program!
Scalpel ready project!
The outer limits had an episode where aliens abducted a human couple (wife and husband) while they were camping, made them into complete replicants with the same memories and all, except when they got near a trigger person (the president or whomever) their hearts would turn into a nuke and blow up. The antagonist was a security officer who's solution was to capture these replicants before they detonated and extract their beating hearts. He even mentions in the episode something to the fact that the last five humans (who were afterwards found out to be non replicants) died for a just cause.
Fast forward to the end, the husband escapes to the park they were camping in to find the alien ship to prove his innocence. They suspect his wife is the replicant and shoot her before she can explode. They find the original body of her in the alien ship, and then in a twist they also find the dude's body. When learning that he is a replicant he self destructs and explodes killing the security office.
I can't wait until we get heart extractors in airports.... you know, to find the terrorists.
There are some surgeries that leave objects they cannot reliably distinguish from bombs without removal. Now that the TSA seems to slowly begin to understand what it takes for the to actually provide security, they may discover that they cannot.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why? A more sane solution is to just kill everyone trying to fly. That will show the terrorists we mean business.
I used to work in the airline business in Minneapolis. Rochester, MN, home to the Mayo Clinic, is just a small commuter flight away. A lot of people would fly there for hospitalization from around the country and around the world. We regularly had trouble with people on their way home from Mayo who would get to Minneapolis then require an ambulance upon arrival because of problems with blood clots, lung function and other issues resulting from flying in a small seat on an airplane in a lower-pressure atmosphere.
If you have surgery for some reason wait until you go flying.
Racial and religious profiling don't work. The underpants idiot was black, the next one will be a recent convert if need be. Real security can't exist, the next threat may be from a white Christian, like OK city. We need to stop wasting money on the TSA, not find new ways to waste it.
I saw that documentary too!
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
needs to be shut down!
Why would they shut it down when they've gotten 80% of Americans to approve of the invasion of our privacy?
Apparently, Americans deserve neither liberty nor safety
Measures may include interaction with passengers, in addition to the use of other screening methods such as pat-downs and the use of enhanced tools and technologies, he said.
We're talking about implanted bombs. Pat-downs won't help.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
So, anyone with half a brain has realized by now that there are ways to get around these backscatter devices, whether it's with surgically implanted devices, sticking devices up an orifice, or simply being in the other line at the checkpoint. If we go down the rabbit hole a bit, the TSA will doubtless try to push things further over time in order to "protect" our security against additional threats (let's pretend that there isn't popular outrage for a moment), meaning that they'll start rolling out ideas like having passengers disrobe, doing body cavity searches, or bringing in full-power x-ray devices so that internals can be seen. Let's think about this a bit.
Logically:
1) The TSA has demonstrated that, left to itself and its own ways, it will attempt to enact policies that are as draconian as possible.
2) Surgically implanted devices cannot reliably be detected except with full-power x-rays of a passenger's internals.
3) Full-power x-rays will never be permitted for use on everyone, due to radiation exposure concerns.
4) As a result, the TSA can never hope to detect all devices, and is thus incapable of defending against all attacks.
Any intelligent person should then be able to see that none of the flights are safe because the TSA cannot stop a dedicated terrorist from accomplishing his or her task once they are in the airport already. Therefore, the question shouldn't be, "how do we stop them from getting in once they're at the gate?" Instead, it should be, "what's the most effective way to identify them before they get anywhere close to the gate?" We all have heard the ironic fact that the TSA has never actually stopped a single terrorist, but rumors seem to indicate that the various three-letter government groups have managed to stop several plots in the last few years. Why not double-down on something that works and is flexible enough to adapt to new threats, and ditch the useless security theater that can only react to threats we've already seen?
Not only will these expensive body scanners not be effective against internally-hidden explosives, even if the TSA cat-scanned passengers, the screeners would need a medical degree to recognize the difference between explosives and artificial joints, plates, etc.
The explosives hidden in the printer cartridges were x-rayed and eluded detection. Consider this from Wikipedia:
The Maginot Line metaphor is especially valid as none of the recent airplane bomb plots have originated from within the US, so installation of expensive body scanners domestically does little to prevent bombs aboard inbound international flights.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Silly rabbit, those were not about safety. Those were about money and companies that got the contract to install them being linked to prominent political figures that stood to make a financial gain by their installation.
Wait for some other device that can detect bombs in a cavity in the body next that just happens to have a present or ex politician as CEO or some other top level position with the company.
The TSA's got to keep tap dancing around the fact that they can't use methods that work, namely profiling, no, not just racial or religious profiling, because then "everyone" would be up in arms about how they discriminate so they need to keep up the appearance of anticipating every crazy attack vector.
Yeah, it's all the PC liberals' fault that we can't *really* go after the terrorists. If it weren't for them, we could actually achieve true security.
Nevermind that the false positive rate is so high that profiling is also useless, but I wouldn't expect you to know what false positives are given that you buy into this tripe. They aren't looking for a needle in a haystack. They are looking for a needle that may or may not be in one of the hay fields in Idaho.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
However, it's not really even necessary to do that much. A woman who has recently given full-term birth has quite a bit of uterine capacity and a well-stretched cervix, plus all of the other indications of advanced pregnancy. Room in there for a LOT of HE.
So now the TSA can get really suspicious of every woman with a bulging tummy.
Next on the list: apple pies.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
And that is the problem the TSA hires idiots that are nothing more than rent-a-cops that do what they are told without thought.
Instead they need to hire people that sit and think, if I wanted to do X what would I do....... and then follow up on that. things can be done to solve a lot of the issues without violating the constitution like they are now.
Which makes me believe that security is NOT the point of all this. They don't want to do things in a way that preserves freedom. They want to get people used to being fondled, searched, required to show your papers, explain why you are here, be used to intimidation.
Air marshals are the right way, drop the sucker with a shot from that AR-15. in fact if you have ONE highly visible air marshal on every flight and one that is plain clothes, just the presence of the visible one will stop 99% of the problems. Nutjob #897 will think twice about taking a person hostage or take over the plane if he knows that the next step is a couple of rounds through his head, and the marshal has no hesitation of making those rounds travel through the hostage. This solves the problem on the planes, no need to be fondling everyone and it preserves the rights and dignity of everyone on that aircraft. Will it stop a bomber who sets off his tampon bomb that he shoved up his ass? no. but nothing they are doing right now will stop that either.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Tell me that 9/11 isn't just a cheap ripoff of a comic book from 1986.
No, as a matter of fact it was a rip-off of a novel by Tom Clancy (read the last paragraph of the plot summary).
"THIS is what democro-surgery looks like!"
How's that hope and cha...aw, crap! Forget it!
I can't.
It's not clever or even remotely funny any more...just very...sad.
And scary.
Particularly when you can be labeled a "security risk" and tossed off a flight without a refund (and likely added to some government list) for snapping a pic of a rude airline employee's name badge with your phone.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
...some pedanticness...
that's pedanticity
If they can continue to grope a pre-schooler who is clearly terrified and screaming "NO DON'T TOUCH ME!", they clearly already have a working heart extractor somewhere.
It actually is a pretty effective imitation of Kafka I think.
Were it effective it would be a bad imitation.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
It fueled the unrest that led to the collapse of East Germany ... so it actually worked out pretty well in the long run.
Actually, it does take a fairly big boom to bring a modern plane down. Even an explosive decompression doesn't bring the plane down.
The funny thing is that the guys who design and build planes would prefer they not fall out of the sky, so they tend to be big believers in redundancy. The sort of bombs you could smuggle on planes -- grenades, exploding shoes and underwear, binary explosives mixed up in the bathroom and other assorted nonsense -- don't pose much of a threat. You can relax. The sound you'll hear as your plane falls out of the sky is not going to be "Allahu Akbar" with incredibly annoying ululation.
Nope, the sound you'll hear in dramatic time-shifted voiceover as your plane falls out of the sky will be "Well, Bill, I'm not really seeing the ROI justification for this maintenance schedule. I think a more reasonable approach would be to set the maintenance schedule to what the vendor certified as MTBF. The engineers are paranoid, and that's what we pay them for, but they don't really understand the real-world business impact..."
You want a thought to make you break out in a cold sweat as you sit crammed between the fat guy and the screaming kid?
Here's one. The same sort of guys guys who decided to blow up the Space Shuttle Challenger and the Deepwater Horizon set the maintenance schedule on your plane and also decided just how much fuel your plane should be loaded with before takeoff.
You're not going to die because Achmed the terrorist got to sit down on your plane. You're going to die because the airline lobbyists got to sit down with your senator.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
From that exact Wikipedia article, you can see the airlines FUD. Of course the airlines want you to believe that planes are safer than cars - but only measured by distance. And planes can travel ~8 times faster than cars and have large, enforced distances between them, less people transported per year, etc., so they should be safer, right?
However, the deaths by journey stats show that you are 3 times MORE likely to die in a plane than in a car. That is, if you take 1000 car journeys and 1000 plane journeys, you are much more likely to die in the plane.
However, if you ride a motorbike, please carry an organ donor card so that some benefit can be had by others from your death wish.