my post about the TSA crap

[desh]

* Given a choice between a backscatter machine and an "enhanced" patdown (i.e. between nudie pictures and groping), I'd choose the enhanced patdown.

* I don't have a kilt to wear, but I'd consider it if I had one.

* I have no problem with people who'd personally choose backscatter. Whatever you have to do to get through the process.

* It's not clear to me how substantial the radiation risk from backscatter is. I've heard very contradictory things from people I trust. I'd like to see some actual science on this.

* I thought I'd been through a backscatter machine once, a few years ago, but in retrospect it was actually a puffer machine.

* As I said in another forum to someone here who can identify herself if she likes:

My problem is more these 3 things: One, that the "enhanced" pat-down seems to be more to provoke embarrassment and encourage choosing the scanner than it is an actual security measure. Two, that there's little or no published evidence that the combined backscatter/patdown system is more effective than the metal detector system at preventing what we're actually trying to prevent. And three, that there seems to be less and less acknowledgment of what the actual security goals are here. (It can't be to save a couple of lives, because short of a police state, anyone can bring a gun almost anywhere and kill some people. It can't be to save the lives of dozens of people when they're all contained in a small space, because we don't protect bus or train passengers, or people in airport security lines, the same way. And I'm not convinced that this new procedure actually decreases the chance of a plane-as-missile scenario, which is my point 2 again.)

And as I elaborated later:

What I meant about "what we're actually trying to prevent" is: Is this contraband that can be caught by backscatter but not metal detectors sufficient to blow up a plane? Is there contraband that's equally powerful and equally easy to obtain/make that can still be hidden from either backscatter or a pat-down (such as in a body cavity)? Are there other, easier ways for this contraband to be brought into the secure area of an airport? Are there other, easier ways to bring more conspicuous contraband to somewhere other than an airport but still achieve the same terroristic goals?

If backscatter can catch a glass-tipped knife (yay, Snow Crash!) that metal detectors can't, then great. Use them in court houses. My point is that they don't make sense when considering the larger picture of an airport, the pat-down alternative, and everything else.

* There's not enough science being talked about at all. Why is there no data out there on effectiveness, risk, health, cost, and so on?

* I love that the "Israelification of security" article keeps coming up every few months. The first clause of the article is: "While North America's airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols...." The date on the article is December 2009. How timeless. And Israelification is what we should be doing. Not this "security theater".

* I'm flying in January. If it sucks, I'm never flying again. At least until they fix this.

Comments

[nnaylime.livejournal.com]

Science :-)

ETA: Israelification . . . my understanding of that is that a lot of it (albeit not all) relies on ethnic/racial profiling--which we can't employ in the US and also that the level and depth of their "triaged" (for lack of a better word) security is not one that we can do with the number of flights & passengers we have. A lot of our reports cite El Al, but the reality as I understand it is that it's simply not feasible for a variety of reasons, though we do try to borrow from the areas we can (Phoenix airport actually has a testbed program in tracking passengers' activities from check-in to take off--but Phoenix is a much less traveled airport than some place like JFK or IAD.)

[desh]

Hmm, why do those names in the table of contents look familiar....

I'm not convinced that Israelification would require more manpower than what we currently devote to screening. It would just be a big shift in who does what.

As for profiling...yeah, I'm a nondescript white dude who dresses middle-class, but I have to think that profiling is preferable to screening. Especially if it's actually more effective, and especially if, as the article asserts, it's more about behavior profiling than racial/ethnic.

[nnaylime.livejournal.com]

Indeed, that's where a lot of my opinion comes from . . .

I need to look more into the Israeli process--which may be difficult as there's only a certain degree of transparency in any security process lest it be defeated but some of what I've read on Wiki and elsewhere indicates that there's as much racial/ethnic profiling involved as there is behavioral profiling--a non-Jew is going to get subjected to a higher level of scrutiny than a Jew and an Arab an even greater level of scrutiny than that--and the US's approach has always been to avoid any racial/ethnic profiling (although there's been some chatter among policy-makers about "intelligence" profiling that still requires all of our databases to talk to each other--so we have to make do with what we can for now.

[kezinge.livejournal.com]

I really like your point that the goals aren't clear. Though I think my priorities are different, I also think there are some good points in Anil Dash's post about this a couple days ago, including that "Americans have consistently indicated they're not willing to live with air travel being a fraction as deadly as, say, traveling by car." We're really paranoid about airplanes. I think it might be that we know there's no outside to turn to in an airplane. Being on a bus with someone who wants to kill you would be scary, but at least you could hope to stop the bus and run away or find police. On an airplane, you'd have to rely on the other passengers to protect you. We (and I mean this as an aspect of national character) prefer to rely on systems rather than people, and certainly rather than communities. I wonder why we don't hear more about air marshals.

[desh]

As a rule, Americans seem to not like relying on communities, period. Even 3-generation family units are less common here than almost anywhere else, right?

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Frankly most passenger level security searches are going to catch the amateurs and the deranged. A serious plot will use more than one cell. The classic airline attack involves a supply cell infiltrating the airport as staff to preposition supplies for easy retrieval. That operative cell then poses as passengers and goes through security clean. This system will not catch such a plot. It will, however, catch drugs, lighters and other nussiance crap.

The shorts bomber should've been caught through analysis of networks. In fact, a couple of researchers at University of Michigan did catch him by analyzing social networks on Arabic language forums. The real security measures should be an effective human intelligence effort that detects threats as they evolve. I still don't feel like our counterterrorism organizations really understand the enemy or enemies. Until they figure that out, no amount of point defense will stop everything.

I'm leery of the radiation threat myself. For me, at this point in time, it doesn't amount to much. If I flew a lot, I'd worry. This sort of radiation is similar in type, but not in magnitude, to what I worked with when I did X-ray crystallography. In fact, it's very much the same technique. Just at a vastly lower power setting. I find the detail of the images disconcerting, though. If you get the software right, you image incredible detail with this.

I think I'm going to choose the pat down and exclaim loudly "Hello, thailor!" when the pat down gets to the good part. It'll either break up the whole line or embarrass the heck out of the agent and make him back off.

[msschein.livejournal.com]

Why would they fix it? It's been YEARS since a failed liquid based bombing attempt in a different country, and they're still diligently throwing away toothpaste. People will get used to it. They wouldn't get used to pat-downs, but they'll get used to pretending it's no big deal to be non-invasively strip searched.

For this reason alone, I'm really not looking forward to going home for Thanksgiving. Do I chose to get groped? I guess? Then at least I get to pick (or at least know) the gender of the person invading my privacy.

[arctic-alpine.livejournal.com]

i'd go with the groping, just to be more time-wasting and hopefully troublesome. i really don't like this, but i will be flying out of US airports at least once a year for the next few years.

[dorchadas]

The part I think is counterintuitive is that the more elaborate and time-consuming the security procedures get, the more attractive it is for any terrorists to just attack the security line before they've been screened, rather than trying to sneak something through.

Well, that and it seems like all the actual threats we hear about that were stopped were stopped on the plane--aka, after they'd already passed through security.

[intangiblehugs.livejournal.com]

1. i read an article recently that mentioned how in the 80's there was a whole string of airplane terrorism that no one flipped out about and had a debriefing chat with my housemates about why we can't just chill the fuck out (because after one administration ups the fear and screening level, it looks bad for anyone in the future to back off, ie. if anything does happen it will be their fault).

2. I saw a political cartoon in a conservative publication this morning that to the best of my interpretation was Obama going through a full body scanner and the scan revealed that he was GW Bush on the inside. I would think this would be a liberal critique?