screen_name_taken

and I guess you answered my question. OK City did NOT involve air travel.

Jeff_Costa_Rica

My point was to say that U.S. citizens have been involved in terrorism a big way in the past 15 years. To exempt us from scrutiny in air travel is shortsighted.

Gardyloo

I really hope these two articles, by Paul Campos and Nate Silver, are accessible to non-subscribers to the Wall Street Journal, because IMO they should be required reading for airline passengers, government elected officials and bureaucrats, and the general public. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000...587677752.html

<i>I'm not much of a basketball player. Middle-age, with a shaky set shot and a bad knee, I can't hold my own in a YMCA pickup game, let alone against more organized competition. But I could definitely beat LeBron James in a game of one-on-one. The game just needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and when I score, I win.

We might have to play for a few days, and Mr. James's point total could well be creeping toward five figures before the contest ended, but eventually the gritty gutty competitor with a lunch-bucket work ethic (me) would subject the world's greatest basketball player to a humiliating defeat.

The world's greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm Americans; and

(2) If terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously frighten any of us, they win.

These rules help explain the otherwise inexplicable wave of hysteria that has swept over our government in the wake of the failed attempt by a rather pathetic aspiring terrorist to blow up a plane on Christmas Day. For two weeks now, this mildly troubling but essentially minor incident has dominated headlines and airwaves, and sent politicians from the president on down scurrying to outdo each other with statements that such incidents are "unacceptable," and that all sorts of new and better procedures will be implemented to make sure nothing like this ever happens again...

...It might be unrealistic to expect the average citizen to have a nuanced grasp of statistically based risk analysis, but there is nothing nuanced about two basic facts:

(1) America is a country of 310 million people, in which thousands of horrible things happen every single day; and

(2) The chances that one of those horrible things will be that you're subjected to a terrorist attack can, for all practical purposes, be calculated as zero.</i>

alanRow

<<< if you were stamped out of Jordan at (e.g.) the Allenby Bridge >>>

You don't get stamped out of Jordan at Allenby Bridge. This is the normal route used by people wanting to AVOID evidence of a trip to Israel. BUT you'll need to return to Jordan via the same route before the Jordanian visa expires otherwise the lack of an exit stamp is taken as proof of entry to Israel.

Note also that recent reports in other forums state that it's increasingly likely that the Israelis will stamp your passport rather than a sheet of paper.

Speaking of visa stamps on pieces of paper - that's what Cuba does so people never have evidence of a trip to Cuba in their passports. And why differentiate between a Cuban citizen who sails to Florida and one who flies to Florida - both could be a "terrorist" yet one of them is welcomed with open arms rather than an intimate body search

alanRow

<<< 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. >>>

Oh boy, I would reckon that 90% plus of passengers to the US will never have been to the "naughty country" let alone "recently". So it means that most passengers would have to have their passports checked to a level of detail unknown outside the ME.

mrwunrfl

Right, alanRow, an agent MAYBE flipping through and looking pp stamps is a far cry from a policy being implemented where the agent's procedure requires him/her to examine every stamp in every pp, which was suggested above.

A poster above was <i>"questioning whether it makes any sense for everyone to remove shoes at US airports but not at overseas airports"</i>.

I don't remember what the procedure was for my last international flight to the use was, but on a previous trip the HKG authorities (which was where we connected from SIN to the US) did implement US procedures because it was a US-bound flight.

alanRow

Surely if the idea is to find out who has been to a "naughty country" recently then the agent would have to have a really close look at a passport otherwise the policy becomes a waste of time

thursdaysd

I recently (mid-November) flew from Istanbul to New York, having arrived three days earlier from Jordan, but having visited Syria earlier in the same trip. There were security people checking passports before airline check-in for the flight, and I was asked a number of questions about my visit to Syria. The plane started "boarding" early, because there was a second security check for everyone at the gate, although that didn't mean you got to get on the plane after you were cleared.

lets_fly_cheaper

I learned the hard way that an hour hand a half isnt long enough anymore.

mrwunrfl

<< Surely ... >>

That is speculation, alanRow, and not necessarily what the TSA is going to do in all cases.

alanRow

Then what's the point. All an Evul Turrist has to do is say they haven't been to a naughty country and they've got a good chance of avoiding detection.

Assuming of course the passport actually has a stamp for a naughty country the Evul Turrist has been to.

Some - like Cuba - never stamp your passport

mrwunrfl

How we interpret what DHS says and what they will actually do could very well be two different things.

I would like to know, not assume, that their new policy means that they will look at every pp stamp and visa in every pp. It might be the best way, but government agencies don't necessarily do things the best way, do they?

hsmither, above, had it about right: "Never overestimate the intelligence of TSA or Border Patrol or Homeland Security ..."