Posted on 10/03/2004 10:09:56 AM PDT by FairOpinion
TIME exclusive: A new airport security system soon to be tested will rely on human judgment.
The most dangerous threat to commercial aviation is not so much the things bad people may be carrying, but the bad people themselves. That refrain heard constantly from airline security experts over the past three years appears to have finally been heeded by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Aviation sources tell TIME that the TSA plans to address the problem by launching its own passenger profiling system. The system known as SPOT (Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques) relies more on the human dimension in detecting threats, and is to be tested at two northeastern airports starting later this month.
Unlike the TSA's recently announced program to use computer databases to scan for suspicious individuals whose names occur on passenger lists, SPOT is instead based squarely on the human element: the ability of TSA employees to identify suspicious individuals by using the principles of surveillance and detection. Passengers who flag concerns by exhibiting unusual or anxious behavior will be pointed out to local police, who will then conduct face-to-face interviews to determine whether any threat exists. If such inquiries turn up other issues of concern, such as travel to countries like Afghanistan, Iraq or Sudan, for example, police officers will know to pursue the questioning or alert Federal counter-terrorism agents.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
WOW! They are finally figuring it out! This is what El Al has been using for years and it's the only thing that has a chance of working.
Frisking "randomly" just nets a bunch of innocent little old ladies, they are wasting their time and irritating passengers, while real terrorists can sneak by.
I am glad they have finally started to go in the right direction.
BUT the employees,who are doing this screening, need to be trained, seriously trained, to be able to make the right observations and judgments.
If the bad guy is placing something in the cargo hold or even in your luggage as it is being searched, then there need to be extensive background checks into the airline employees as well.
This did not happen immediately with the agents who search baggage. If they can steal things out of your bags, they can place a bomb IN your bags.
A terrorist does not need to ride on an airplane to kill everyone onboard that airplane.
LOL - Norman Mineta giving himself a Homer Simpson slap to the forehead. "Doh, why didn't I think of that?"
Customs inspectors have always used this method. They were very good at it. I have watched them in action in the past and they were very good.
A lot of people are plagued with fear of flying and will exhibit the very behavior they mention in the article. Another fine job of getting to the heart of the problem by Norman Mineta and the TSA. Sheesh.
I recently flew to Tulsa on SW. SW sells cheap tickets online and you buy them one way. They are super cheap and pretty much non-refundable. One way tickets cause you to be flagged ORANGE ALERT as if you are a suspected terrorist. Never mind that I also had a ticket to fly back to Texas, another one way ticket. TSA treated me like a criminal.
They frisked me and wanded me and took my PHOTOS and CREDIT CARDS out of my wallet and did not put them back in, left them loose in my purse. They rifled through my purse in detail for 30 min. and I almost missed my flight. I am a middle aged housewife with blonde hair. Not even a speeding ticket in my name. Not a criminal or a terror threat. I was totally insulted by this search. We flew to Colorado Springs recently and their TSA guys are GREAT working with military precision!
The Tulsa TSA creeps forced an elderly little old woman in a wheel chair to take of her BRACES that were from her ANKLES TO HER KNEES and stand legs spread apart for frisking and wanding. She is unable to walk. I didn't hang around to see what they did to her. I felt like I had just been processed into prison. I think the TSA guys finally decided the elderly lady wasn't a terror threat, I felt SO SORRY FOR HER, and they had an airport employee push her wheelchair for her after that. Tulsa TSA is 100 % totally ridiculous!
I hope this new way of sizing up the flyers helps!
Colorado Springs airport is the BEST! TSA searches your luggage in the lobby while you watch and you can LOCK it before it is carted off to the jet! If airports are going to do searches they should all do it like Colo. Springs! I told their supervisor they were GREAT and he sure smiled a big ole smile! I bet they never had a compliment before.
They actually look at your boarding pass and your photo and call you by name as they look at your face. Colo Springs TSA is way ahead of everyone else.
And we fly a lot. I am passing up a fun trip to Tulsa in Oct. because of Tulsa airport TSA.
My wife gets the full monte every time she goes through, ans is an American citizen. i work for an airline, and know the airline agents will often mark a boarding pass so the screeners with do this to airline personnel rather than inconvenience that same percentage of customers. How ludicrous! The airline personnel are all highly prescreened by federal security. No doubt our family members as well without our knowledge. So this practice makes YOU less safe.
Wait a minute!!!!! This could work, this makes sense. I mean, actually looking for the bad guy....Lord, what will they think up next??
It's about damn time!
I frankly think I get frisked because of my looks.
Every single time...
Send this to the editor of Tulsa World newspaper and see if you get a reply. Also send this info to your congressman, and the congressman from Tulsa airport area, as well as the TSA and chamber of commerce. It will take them a lot more than 30 minutes to answer your complaint.
This doesn't mean they will stop screening the luggage, but instead of shaking down little old ladies, just because their names were drawn at random, they will focus on the suspicious individuals.
Remember, Richard Reid was not allowed to fly on day, because he appeared suspicious, but then the brillian French let him get on the plane the next day.
Yeah, it's really earth shaking. Under the present PC mindset, of the following, guess who would most likely not be searched? An elderly white female, a teenaged latina, a middle aged black male, an elderly white male, and a Middle Eastern male.
The stewardess refused to grant him the 1 minute needed to take care of business, and from the 2nd sentence on threatened to eject him from the plane. Noting that he was on the way to Mom's funeral, and that he was acting as guardian for his nephew (also on the plane) caused even more threats. The captain was called, he stood up for this wretched stewardess, they called security (my pal didn't want to get off in fear of missing his mother's funeral).
Anyway he finally did get off, was met by a phalanx of security, they questioned him and in the end were handing him a complaint form for him to file against the airline.
All this because he needed to answer nature's call, and the stewardess chose to invoke her megalomaniacal post-9/11 powers rather than give the guy a minute to relieve himself.
Unbelievable.
This kind of observation was the reason that the Customs Agent discovered the terrorist who was trying to sneak a bomb into the US from Canada to blow up LAX at the millenium.
"NBC News went back to the customs agent who actually stopped an al-Qaida terrorist from entering the United States in 1999, and she says it was her gut instincts — not meetings in Washington — that helped her make the arrest.
“His story didn’t make sense to me,” said customs inspector Diana Dean. Now retired, Dean was working the border that night. On a hunch something wasn’t quite right, she questioned Ressam and asked him to pop his trunk. Inside were big bags of white powder that were first thought to be drugs.
But that night, drug tests came back negative. When investigators looked further, they found timers and realized the powder was explosives.
Dean said, “My heart dropped right into my toes when I realized what it was.”
She says no one had told her anything about being on alert for terrorists. "
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4864792/
Of course MSNBC presented this as "luck", instead of giving credit to the alert customs agent.
I went through this last week. I had to fly to Georgia after my son was in a car wreck and I didn't know how long I'd be so I bought a one way ticket. Big mistake.
I'm a deafie in a quiet room and the airport is a noisy place making the problem worse. I knew I'd been flagged (SSSS) and the swarm of TSA people going through my case and examining my PDA, PowerBook, RIM pager, cell phone, et al, got on my nerves. They were none too gentle with any of them.
They made me empty my pockets. I carry nitro tabs in a small pill bottle and, if you are a nitro user, you know that some of them always manage to break down into a fine white powder after a couple of weeks of being jostled in your pocket.
That really flipped their switch. Three agents started peppering me with questions that I had no hope of hearing. I just kept repeating that they were nitro tabs for my heart. They huddled for about 5 minutes and then called in 2 other people and talked amongst themselves for another 5 minutes. The three agents returned and patted me down from hair to heels, handed me back the nitro, and told me to gather up my things and go.
On the return trip, I put a couple of tabs in my shirt pocket and checked the rest. I still got searched but none of the nonsense.
I am going to have a hard time trusting these federal employees to use sophisticated judgement for anything.
I was thinking about contacting the TSA also.
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