TSA calls a halt to child patdowns

Secured cockpits and the realization that somebody might hijack a plane to crash it into something renders the value of a knife or any other weapon sketchy.

Have the pilots behind a security door, and what are you going to do, kill everybody else on board the plane?

You know, amidst all this talk of elderly people's adult diapers being searched, I'm surprised something else hasn't come up with these patdowns — the risk of infection. We freak out when somebody with TB gets on a plane, and the TSA officers don't change their gloves after every search and are required to put their hands down people's pants.

I mean, seriously. Think about it.

edited 16th Jul '11 3:31:42 PM by OhSoIntoCats

The scanners you walk through at an airport don't use ionizing radiation, but flying itself causes radiation exposure, with a flight across the US exposing you to about twice the radiation of a chest x-ray. But then, the lowest level of radiation exposure linked to any statistically significant cancer increase is equivalent to about 5000 chest x-rays per year.

I think that this is an interesting news clip on airport security. It definitely raises some questions.

There are some health questions about said scanners, including how much the dosage actually is. The measurement as negligible is based on radiation received over the entire body, but the actual scan is focused in the upper mms of skin.

They have.

I meant a functional bomb.

The fire never reached the actual explosive, although people often underestimate how difficult many explosive substances are to detonate; I don't know whether the mixture he used would have exploded if the fire had reached it. But suppose he had had a low explosive detonator in his underwear as well. Do you think security would have fared any differently in catching him?

I'm not really familiar enough with explosive detonators and airport security measures to say. Bear in mind, when I posted that I was working under the assumption that a couple sticks of dynamite would be enough to satisfy a would-be-plane-destroyer's needs.

Better yet than Black Humor 's example, even the new body scanners have been proven to be incapable of catching people going through with illegal objects.

Cockpits have been reinforced, and are no longer accessible, and there are standing orders to shoot down hijacked planes.

Indeed, I think one of the points we've been arguing is that there are many more vulnerable, larger targets.

edited 16th Jul '11 7:00:19 PM by deathjavu

You know, the whole security thing confuses me. 9/11 was so successful because the terrorists took control of the planes and ran them into huge office buildings. If you just blow up a plane, even considering it blows the plane right out of the sky, how many people would you kill? I mean, even considering everyone in the plane dies, it's still unlikely that the plane would ram into a huge building like it did without any aim.

The debris, however, would cause a lot of damage, especially over an urban area.

@Raven: Hey, underwear bomb dude successfully got a bomb onto an airplane. As far as he knew that thing was fully functional. That it didn't actually work doesn't mean he didn't get it past security.

EDIT: Heh, from the article:

edited 16th Jul '11 7:56:43 PM by BlackHumor

1) Again, when I posted that, I thought all you needed to take down an airplane was a hand grenade or a stick of dynamite, so I figured the fact that the guy was forced to use more complex and likely-to-fail explosives was a sign that he couldn't get simpler ones through. Knowing that airplanes are more durable than I thought changes matters, obviously.

2) That person's a security expert, though. They've got professional training in how to spot all the weakpoints in a security system, and this particular expert has lots of experience with the ins-and-outs of airport security. Most terrorists, as far as I'm aware, are not.

Most terrorists who are even half likely to actually blow up the plane do their research. The people who did 9/11 did their research. Even underwear bomb guy had been fed a plan and a bomb by people who did their research.

Not to mention he does say "that's why we haven't put them in our airport". Security experts are called that because they are experts in security. If one says the body scanners won't make the airport more secure, I'm inclined to trust his expertise.

Too much cost for too little benefit, though. Everything I've read about airport scanners suggests that the only real benefit is psychological, to reassure passengers that "something" is being done to improve their safety.

Rectum. Mouth. The crowded lines right before the checkpoint where they search you. An amusement park. A shopping mall. The Portland Christmas tree lighting (thankfully stopped by the FBI who had a bead on the guy through unrelated means long before he tried). Any crowded street, bridge, building, or public gathering ever.

Wow, those were such hard layers to think of. A terrorist deterred from airports has so many other avenues of attack (many of which might even be more deadly) it's not even funny — even if you do deter a terrorist from attacking one place, it does not remotely deter them from terrorism just as dire as it would have been. If anything, it'd be better they keep going after airports where we have armed marshals everywhere ready to beat them the hell down.

Or it means the threat on the homefront has been dramatically overstated. We're talking about a threat that even counting 9/11, ranks orders of magnitude lower in this country than driving and bathtubs.

They were around long before that, but just in a pretty benign and not at all disagreeable form (if anything, too lax). The stricter precautions they took over the next few years were probably badly needed, actually.

What we've got now, of course, is a malignant tumor long since overstepping its bounds.

IIRC it's somewhere around the number of deaths by mountain goats. Again, most of it domestic.

You think that's ridiculous?

edited 16th Jul '11 9:15:24 PM by Pykrete

Hehehe, even the company that developed one such type of scanner admit it wouldn't have caught the underwear bomber, or several other terrorists that made it through security.

You know it's worthless when the people selling it admit its shortcomings.

edited 16th Jul '11 10:02:20 PM by deathjavu

To be fair, my understanding was that the scanners work, but that other security measures already in place do much the same thing, making them redundant.

To be honest rather than preventing a person from hijacking a plane by catching them with preventive measures, I would rather make a mandate to have an Air Marshal on every flight.

Screw the massive amount of TSA employees we have. Get rid of most of those positions(Obviously metal detectors and other staff are still necessary, but those have always been around) and start an Air Marshals Corps. Just fund a minimalistic "barracks" of sorts at each major airport for marshals to sleep in and catch some quiet time in between flights. Now given, FAM's are extremely well trained, to accomodate that many you may need to lower the standards a bit.

But shit man, I feel absolutely safe if there's an Air Marshal onboard. That's all the security I need.

When many facilities have a small army of thousands of TSA employees, I think the number of Marshals you would need to organize that sort of plan would be a small matter, and you could probably save money.

edited 17th Jul '11 12:50:30 AM by Barkey

You probably want to say every flight over a certain number of passengers.

No, the scanners don't work. They don't even catch stuff the metal detectors would. They're considered less safe by security experts than not having them at all because they put a false sense of security into inspectors while not actually doing anything.

Really, metal detectors, quick bag scan, and air marshalls. The last really have done the most to take care of hijackings.

edited 17th Jul '11 10:47:14 AM by shimaspawn

Actually, the reinforced cockpits (something we've already implemented) has done the most to deter hijackings. Following that, the idea that a hijacked plane might be flown into something has done the next most, in terms of reaction policy (shoot down the planes) and potential passenger reaction. [/nitpick.]

...and explosives check equiment/dogs.

I checked out how Ben Guiron airport in Israel handled security. From my quick look over cutomer comments it sounded pretty bad too. No backscatter X-Ray, but lots of invasive, repeated questions and very thorough searches, especially if the customer had visited or come from other middle eastern countries. Understandable of course, but they didn't seem like the beacon of 'how to do it' that I thought they might have been.

Remember here that Israel gets a lot more people trying to blow stuff up than we do.