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Speedier Screening May Be Coming To an Airport Near You
First time accepted submitter Rickarmstrong writes "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is pushing for private contractors to create a screening machine with 'screen and walk' capability for use at the nation's 160 international airports and thousands of federal facilities. The agency recently requested information from high-tech companies and other private firms about any new technology that can help speed up the security checkpoints managed by the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Protective Services."
It would be nice to think that they are attempting to address an obvious problem, but with the TSA, I suspect this is going to be just another opportunity to line the pockets of politically connected people...
Question: if the lines got shorter, how would they gather an audience for their security theater?
Really, putting a locks on cockpit doors was just about the right response.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Are they asking for proposals for the scanner from Total Recall?
How about just going back to a reasonable quick scan on the way to the plane? The whole premise was that anything you could get through such a scan was worthless. Along the way we found out that you needed locking, reinforced cockpit doors in the bargain, and now we have those. Why not just go back to x-raying luggage, and maybe run the humans past the explosives sniffer? Non-invasive screening of humans seems fairly reasonable. I wouldn't want to let people on my multi-million-dollar aircraft without it, if I had one :p
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why not return to the pre-9/11 security?
Because that would eradicate 90% of the TSA bureaucracy.
The inside joke is that the TSA is simply an employment program for the Federal Government. It's about hiring hundreds of people at all the big airports. It's not about security (it may have started with that intent, but no longer) - it's a jobs program, pure and simple.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I agree and would further suggest that it's a form of legalized racketeering. In effect, the system created an inefficient process (racket) and then is attempting to charge us for speeding things up. How this isn't racketeering is beyond me.
There have been a lot of Americans of Somali descent recruited to return to Somalia and fight for al-Shabab, so I don't think it's unrealistic to think that there are people already here who could be recruited to do this. I don't think you need or would even want to recruit people from overseas to do this.
Domestic mass shootings, despite the political rhetoric surrounding them, are always the work of a single individual suffering from some kind of mental illness. They lack all but the most rudimentary planning and execution, they're only quasi-rational. The net effect is that nobody sees them as part of an ongoing threat or conspiracy. There's not this feeling that they are deliberate attacks by a larger organization or with a larger purpose in mind.
A mass shooting by a terrorist organization I would expect to have superior tactics and organization. I would also expect that if they were identified as being terrorist attacks that the perception of threat would be much greater because the attacks would be seen as the result of rational planning and execution, not apparent one-time actions.