cary999

Wonder why El AL airline does not have problems with bomber passengers? Maybe there is something to learn from them?

cary

alanRow

<<< Who will you pick? It’s a coin toss. One choice is as equally risky as the other, right? Otherwise you are guilty of the heinous crime of profiling. >>>

In your first case the white, black or Asian could easily be illegal - and given the BMW could be involved in something even more illegal like drug or people smuggling

In your second case a terrorist isn't trying to draw attention to themselves so it's possible that the person with the wife and two kids is the terrorist.

cary999 - Israel has about 11 million people passing through it's airports in a year, an average major US airport 40 million.

Most people flying through Israeli airports are Israeli and those that aren't (or who aren't Israeli Jews) spend a lot of time getting interviewed by several people. Care to try to do that at a typical US domestic airport, let alone a major international airport. The whole system would come crashing to the ground within minutes

hsmithcr

Jeff in Costa Rica: Your comment about military may or may not apply. My son is in the Army, currently stationed in Germany. He had served in Iraq and when he returned to Washington DC for a conference, was questioned for about 10 minutes before he was allowed to pass through passport control. "What are you doing here, etc etc", questions about as stupid as "What is the Nile." He had his passport, his military ID and his orders but was still questioned closely. He was, apparently, right on the verge of really losing his temper (and ugly thing!) when they finally sent him on.

Never overestimate the intelligence of TSA or Border Patrol or Homeland Security or whatever it is they are calling themselves today.

As for "profiling" and machines and all, take a look at what the Israelis do and their record of terrorist acts on airplanes. Basically, it is observation and interview. But the observers and interviewers are highly trained, unlike the TSA folk.

Jeff_Costa_Rica

What I meant was that having served in the military in Iraq or Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia will not flag you as having "traveled to Iraq or Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia" in the same way it would if I had a passport stamp from one of those countries. But a military person is subject to scrutiny just like anybody else is. I think that's how it should be.

cary999

"Most people flying through Israeli airports are Israeli and those that aren't (or who aren't Israeli Jews) spend a lot of time getting interviewed by several people. Care to try to do that at a typical US domestic airport, let alone a major international airport. The whole system would come crashing to the ground within minutes

You assume each and every passenger is interviewed. No, here's how to do it.
You reassign those TSA agents now taking tooth paste from grandmothers. They interview passengers based on a -profile-, about 10%-20% of the passengers.

You do this, as does El Al, or you simply accept that a couple times a year a plane will get bombed out of the sky. Your choice.

regards - tom

hsmithcr

Jeff-Costa Rica - If you are military serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, is your passport stamped when you arrive/leave the country?

Cary999 - I completely agree with you on this. TSA is taking the entirely wrong approach. It would not take any more time to do as the Israelis do - think about it the next time you are standing in a security line with 100 other people. It takes the same amount of time to do a little interview as it does to go through the current security procedures. I am not saying on top of current security procedures, but instead of.

gail

Some talking head this AM referred to spending more time identifying terrorist suspects than on contraband shampoo - maybe they are finally starting to get it. Whether it be better use of intelligence information, behavioral observations, demographics - seems likely to have chance at higher success rate than x-raying my flipflops. Impossible to be 100% safe, but efforts should be on people rather than stuff.

alanRow

<<< You assume each and every passenger is interviewed. >>>

They are - but "some" get longer interviews than others.

Their system assumes that Israeli Jews are unlikely to commit a terrorist act against Israel but everyone else could be. So the Israeli system only gives in-depth interviews to a small portion of the people who travel to Israel.

This cannot be expanded to other nations as the range of passengers they deal with are far wider - you can't even assume an American isn't a terrorist.

Jeff_Costa_Rica

I was going to ask the same question, hsmithcr. When you are sent to war, what kind of documents are you traveling with?

NoFlyZone

I believe the guideline is that military traveling on commercial flights will have passports. Flying on military flights formal orders suffice.

Or something like that (at least there are cases where passport is not needed).

hsmithcr

OK. My question was: do military personnel deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan have their passports stamped in Iraq or Afghanistan? If no one knows, I will ask my son and let you know.

hsmithcr

I heard back from my son and he said when he was deployed to Iraq, he didn't use his passport but was checked into military customs in Kuwait. Don't know if it has changed now, that was about a year ago. He had to have a passport just to get on the plane - commercial flight - but it was not stamped in Iraq or Kuwait. Very few people fly on military flights these days and really don't want to since they are mostly cargo planes and not very comfortable, according to son. So it's mostly commercial.

DerViking

A British newspaper reports that the full-body scanners everyone thinks will be the answer to all our problems with air terror may not work. That's right: they may not work at detecting the kind of explosives the Nigerian was carrying on his person. Now watch Congress whip itself into hysteria, mandate their use, without paying attention to any evidence to the contrary.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...m-1856175.html

clevelandbrown

Hindsight is always perfect, so the executives and politicians will always be able to dig out a piece or two of information and say that some analysts screwed up by not divining what was not their from that information. They give the impression that workers are sitting around and not doing their jobs, because they refuse to comprehend how much information comes in, and they don't want to have to kill some personal pork project to pay for more people to analyze the information.

It's easier to just pound the desk and demand that people do better, especcialy if you can find some low-level employee who was late for work, and fire him.

The hard fact is we don't select our leaders because they are good managers; we select them because they have a nice appearance and a glib manner. Then those leaders appoint people just like them to run the agencies. None of them have managerial talent or experience, and none of them are fired for inept performance unless the press and the other politicians force the issue, for whatever reason.

Take, for example, the current head of homeland security spending. She is a politician, and from what I've read has no experience in the field of national security (no experience? Some might say she hasn't a clue!)

Her initial response to the diaper bomber appears to have been to try and cover it up, or at least minimize it. She is widely quoted as having said the system worked! Belatedly, realizing how stupid that sounded, she said she meant to say that the system had worked after the bomber had been taken into custody. Yet I read an article by a commercial pilot who said that after 9/11 they had created an operations plan which included notifying all aircraft in the sky at the time of such an incident; he was miffed because he had been in flight over the Atlantic at the time of the incident, and had never been notified, and hadn't found out about the incident until he landed and saw a report on CNN. So apparently the head of homeland security was less than truthful when she said the system worked after the incident.

Now if all of this is true, how can the President look around the room and not see that a major part of the problem is right in that room. And if he can't stomach dealing with failure high in his administration, he should do the right thing.

mrwunrfl

Where did y'all get the idea that the CBP is going to be looking at passport stamps?

The only thing I've read/heard was that the enhanced screening would be applied to pax traveling from or thru those countries.

thursdaysd

"or thru those countries" - only way to be sure about the "thru" is to look at passport stamps - some people (like me) visit multiple countries per trip. And maybe these folks are actually bright enough to figure out that some people (like me) travel overland. The countries that don't admit people who've been to Israel are certainly said to do so - if you were stamped out of Jordan at (e.g.) the Allenby Bridge they don't need an Israeli stamp (available on a separate piece of paper) to figure out that you went to Israel.

mrwunrfl

But you are speculating at how the policy will be implemented. The govt doesn't necessarily use the "only way to be sure".

It is one possible implementation, to have CBP check all the stamps in every passport. But I doubt that is what they are going to do.

Another implementation of the policy is to instruct CBP agents to do the enhanced screening if the traveler indicates that they have traveled "from or thru" those countries.

For a US citizen that could simply mean checking the entry card. There is a box on it where you list the countries you visited on this trip. If you list Afghanistan and Cuba then you get enhanced screening.

If you don't list a country then the agent might flip thru the pp looking for a recent (yesterday) stamp in one of those countries.

screen_name_taken

Ok, I admit it - i MUST be missing something here.
As far as I know, no american citizen flying within the US has ever been a threat to any airliner. Am I wrong?

As far as I know, no white male or female, holding a US passport flying back to the US, has ever been a threat to any airliner. Am I wrong?

-----

DH and I just flew back to NY from the Bahamas. The charade before boarding in Nassau was ludicrous. The system in place only serves to aggravate innocent tourists flying into the US. And no, it will not deter someone bent on destruction.

Everyone's carry-on was opened and inspected after we went through the gate. Everyone got a pat-down right in front of the 100s of others waiting to board their respective flights(about 4 planes). Two lines - because only 2 "officers" were conducting this inspection. It took more than an hour AFTER we had already been x-rayed, metal detected, checked luggage, etc.

WHY?????

So that the sheep can sleep better at night? Beyond stupid.

Not to mention the huge amount of money being wasted around the world in this "improved" security farce.

Jeff_Costa_Rica

You're assuming there's no such thing as homegrown terrorism. It didn't involve an airplane, but don't forget that the worst case of terrorism on U.S. soil prior to Sept. 11 took place in Oklahoma City. Who committed that act?

screen_name_taken

I'm not assuming anything ... I'm questioning whether it makes any sense for everyone to remove shoes at US airports but not at overseas airports, for lighters to be confiscated at some airports but not others, for water bottles to be allowed beyond security checkpoints sometimes but not all the time, etc, etc, etc.

Inconsistent rules, which just point to the futility of "security". Makes those in power feel powerful. Nothing else.

Impossible to prevent everything!