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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?
This is the first tech I've heard of that actually leads me to believe it might cover a real security hole. In this case, the grab a couple semi-automatics and gun down the crowds waiting to get through security hole.
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.'"
I was once at an airport, I think it was LAS... people were all piled up in a clusterfuck right after of the entrance to TSA where they check IDs, even though there was about a mile of Disneyland spiral queue that was not being used. A helpful TSA agent started to open up the spiral queue, and was actually rebuked by a superior because "that's not the way they do things", and everyone that went in the queue had to rejoin the mosh pit of people.
And then they closed two of the four open screening lanes because "it wasn't busy enough to justify having that many open". We had to literally jog across the airport to catch our flight after being stuck in that mess for 50+ minutes.
I'm not sure it would take new technology to fix the TSA, just some people running the show that don't have their head up their ass.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
How about all those metal detectors they already have.
1. Shut down the body scanners
2. Drop all the silly ID checking
3. Everyone goes through a metal detector
4. Luggage goes through an x-ray machine, looking only for weapons or explosives.
No weapons or explosives? On you go.
Really, putting a locks on cockpit doors was just about the right response.
How do cockpit doors achieve behavioral compliance conditioning?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Ignoring the general stupidity of many TSA practices, and that this is an artificial market created by government inefficiency, what's so fundamentally wrong with paying more to get through faster?
If your money is worth more than your time, you'll wait, if your time is worth more than your money, you'll pay. That's a fundamental decision every time you say something like "I'll pay someone to change my oil because I don't want to spend 20 minutes and get dirty doing it myself", or "I'll eat out so I don't have to cook". Time/money/value decisions are something you make dozens of every day.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
Yeah, but then how would they be able to justify forcing people to throw away their bottles of water, shampoo, etc.? "That might be a bomb, throw it in that trash can over there!"
I went to SF for a conference, and bought a snow globe for my in-laws, as is my habit when I travel. They wouldn't let me take it because it could contain "bomb making materials", which is ludicrous. They told me I could either surrender the package, or go to the post office to mail it. If I went to the post office, I'd miss my flight and it was a $4 snow globe, so I told them I'd surrender it. I was highly frustrated and busy putting my stuff together that they had pulled apart, so I was too distracted to notice that they kept not just the snow globe, but the bag that had all of the other souvenirs I had bought, including t-shirts and Ghirardelli chocolates I got for the rest of my family. The TSA is a pack of thieving, security-theater perverts.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
What company is that? I signed up for Global Entry (I travel internationally a dozen or more times a year), and got a free TSAPre account as well - meaning I can use the short lines. But only because I went through a full Government background check.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I think the problem is that we've created artificial supply and demand.
Now if you'll just bend over, I need to insert this probe for national security reasons. Or you could pay me $20 and I'll find someone else.
This signature is false.
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!
Ignoring the general stupidity of many TSA practices, and that this is an artificial market created by government inefficiency,
That is the whole point. And while I understand the time/money trade off, what I object to is that this market shouldn't exists in the first place.
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Time/money/value decisions are something you make dozens of every day.
Exactly. As noted in the movie Volunteers
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The true answer is to allow people to get through a full background check in exchange for skipping the screening process entirely. Frequent travelers (the majority) would do so, and this would cut the number of people waiting in line to almost nothing.
But they won't do that, because the TSA is primarily a jobs program, not a security screening service.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If it was simple it'd be done. Bomb/weapon detection isn't so simple. What if I had a vacuumed sealed container (plastic of course) stuffed into my luggage? What if I brought on a ceramic knife/sword? I understand the complexities of trying to stop someone determined to hurt as many people as possible. The question isn't "what's the bare bones solution" but rather "what is an adequate solution".
9/11 ticked off a LOT of people and they questioned why the government didn't stop this at the airport or before hence all of this overreaching. The key is to find a balance, develop better technologies, and work WITH the populace. Not provide the bare minimal amount of protection that even I can circumvent with 3 different ideas off the top of my head in 30 seconds.
Right, like the ones that everyone hated, caused cancers in some TSA personnel (unadmitted by the TSA), and were pretty useless, since over and over, people demonstrated that they could smuggle weapons past them? And that are now retired, after tens of millions of tax dollars wasted on them?
Or like the new submillimeter machines, which have close to the same problems, that it's been demonstrated that you can smuggle weapons past them?
Here's a better way to spend money: fire all the managers and execs, and bring in some professional security managers. Ones that will, for example, come down like a ton of bricks on the screeners who do extra screening on good looking women, or pull vibrators or other sex toys out for their "amusement" value?
Go look at the archives from , by a guy who just quit the TSA after some years, and all what really happens back there.
Oh, and the boxcutters that the 9/11 hijackers were supposed to have had were *ILLEGAL* and should have been found before all this crap.
Keep the TSA on the job, guys, the terrorists have won, completely. America, the home of the cowards and the unfree.
mark
You do realize they more-or-less do that now, right?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Is this the Libertarian fantasy? The purpose of any government agency is to do the job given to that agency and you'd be surprised what a well funded terrorist cleanroom can produce. As for the knife thing, how exactly do you know? What about a plastic container carrying a biological weapon such as smallpox or a modified flu?
I fully agree that the threat is minor...part of that is due to the work of various government agencies, lucky, and our international relations. I disagree with your targets stuff, even "continuing" business as usual isn't so simple unless you are of the opinion that people should remain heartless. In that case, anything is possible...even a Libertarian future!
There are actually other things they should do
Nope. Get these worthless, immoral government thugs out of airports; the end.
Thank you Dave Raggett