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Airline Pilots Allowed To Dodge Security Screening
OverTheGeicoE writes "Wired has a story about TSA's known crewmember program, which allows airline pilots to bypass traditional airport security on their way to the cockpit. Pilots will be verified using a system known as CrewPASS that relies on uniforms, identity cards, fingerprints, and possibly other biometrics to authenticate flight deck crews. Once they are authenticated, they can enter secure areas in airports without any further screening. Participation at present is voluntary, and applies at Baltimore/Washington (BWI), Pittsburg (PIT), Columbia (CAE) and now Chicago O'Hare (ORD) airports. TSA is hoping to expand the program nationally. Bruce Schneier thinks this program is 'a really bad idea.' Pilots are already avoiding scanners and patdowns at security checkpoints (video). Is the new program just a way for TSA to hide this fact from the flying public?"
Couldn't a pilot who's convinced to pull off a terrorist attack just, well -- do it? They are at the controls and all...
Send them through a breathalyzer-only checkpoint and you will have satisfied me.
The issue is whether a terrorist can impersonate a pilot long enough to bypass the screening process.
Once you introduce multiple avenues for clearance, you introduce vulnerabilities.
Is there really any significant advantage to not screening crew?
Sure, for the crew. If you, the crew, have to go through the same tired, intrusive screening 3, 4, 5 times a day...you'd get pretty damn tired of it.
I work at an international airport. There's only one gate between the street and the runway. The 'guards' routinely flag us through from over 100 feet away if we so much as hold up something that looks remotely like it might be a badge. I've held up credit cards, library cards, and once, the Queen of Diamonds. So why in the hell should I submit to a full body X-ray operated by someone without a medical degree, or submit to sexual molestation if I refuse that? Is that supposed to make me feel safe?
Actually, we can to a high degree of certainty. It is as much in the nature of a disliked government agency to crow from the rooftops any small success it might have as it is for water to flow down hill.
They haven't crowed.
We do know that two terrorists slipped right through the TSA since 9/11. Both were stopped by the passengers.
In baseball, that's called an Ofer
Hey, now I have figured it all out. The terrorist have just changed tactics:
They started impersonating TSA agents a few years back without anybody noticing. After all, those are the ones terrorizing people these days.
Airline crews are limited to flight hours as a means to limit the radiation they receive to stay under OSHA limits. It is one of the careers that receive relatively high doses over their careers. Doses are cumulative (think about how people develop skin cancer supposedly from sun burns as a child).
For these reasons pilots try to avoid even small doses of radiation where they can, and walking through a body scanner several times every day they work over several years would add up.
Examples of industries with significant occupational radiation exposure:
http://theenergycollective.com/willem-post/53939/radiation-exposure/
Each pilot would normally have control of one plane, but each pilot that gets a special pass through security could, if they were inclined to do nefarious things, brings weapons through and deliver them to terrorists inside the "secure" area who had already passed through security (since they aren't pilots) but who would each board other planes.
Immediately after 9/11 -- with the reports from the planes of weapons including not only box cutters, but also guns -- there was a lot of speculation that this is essentially what happened with the terrorists in those attacks, that weapons had been brought through by one or more airline employees who were permitted to bypass the screenings that were in place for passengers entering the secure area of airports. That was one of the reasons given for federalizing airport security and eliminating the exceptions to the screening requirements.
If the TSA made a terrorist decide not to attack an airplane, they wouldn't immediately stop being terrorists, they'd just attack something else. Since no one has attacked anything else, it would be fair to assume that no one's been dissuaded form attacking airplanes.