Tag: Terrorism

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Congressman: TSA's New Chat-Downs Are 'Mindless'

October 28, 2011 at 2:06 PM | by | Comments (0)

Responding to criticism like ours over the failure of TSA agents to stop a loaded gun from being checked onto an LAX flight, the security agency leaped into action this week and declared that they will make absolutely no changes to airport security procedures at the airport.

TSA spokesman Nico Melendez explained that there's no danger of having loaded guns in checked baggage, because "no one has access to them." So as long as it's true that loaded guns never ever fire accidentally, you can all go back to feeling safe now.

Speaking of which. A day before we posted about how loaded guns on airplanes make us uncomfortable, we discussed our deep skepticism about the training that TSA agents in charge of "chat-downs" were getting. Chat-downs, remember, are the Israeli-style security line interviews that TSA has been testing out in Boston-Logan and now in Detroit-Metro Airports. Agents ask you personal questions, you give personal answers, and then they read your body language to see if you're lying. In theory.

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TSA's New 'Chat-down' Security Expands to Detroit Airport

October 24, 2011 at 4:21 PM | by | Comments (0)

We really don't want to be those travel bloggers. The ones who reflexively complain about everything TSA does just because it's really easy to pick on TSA. We try to be fair about moron passengers, we take pains to explain why TSA agents sometimes have to conduct intrusive inspections, and we give the agency credit when they improve their security protocols.

But the more we read about TSA's shift to Israel-style airport security inspections—which are now being called "chat-downs" by journalists and politicians, because naming things is fun—the more worried we get. This is the agency's new SPOT program, where agents ask you personal questions while you wait in line, and then they try to read your body language to determine whether you're making things up. We haven't quite figured out what's wrong but we're pretty sure we don't like it.

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TSA Rolling Out New Machines to Bust Fake IDs and Boarding Passes

October 10, 2011 at 3:32 PM | by | Comment (1)

It's been known for years that print-at-home boarding passes are a huge problem for airline security. The TSA restricts access to airside areas by checking the name on your boarding pass against the name on your government-issued ID against your face. If all three match, you get through. So if you're Bomby McNoflylist, all you have to do is buy a ticket on someone else's name, use a PDF editor to create a "fake" boarding pass with your real name for the checkpoint, and then use the "real" boarding pass to get on the plane. And that's before we even get to the problem of fake IDs, which are constantly improving.

Back in 2006, Christopher Soghoian showed how easy it was to create a valid pass with whatever name you wanted. He posted a web-based "Boarding Pass Generator" as part of an academic project on security vulnerabilities (to which the FBI responded to by confiscating all his stuff, because why not?)

The point is, as long as the "identity check" at checkpoints is just visual, there's nothing to make sure that IDs or boarding pass are authentic except TSA agents, who are... imperfect.

TSA officials, having realized as much, seem to be moving in the direction of making the identity checks more than visual. Elegant solution!

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TSA Launches Israel-Style Behavior Profiling Program Called 'SPOT'

August 3, 2011 at 3:00 PM | by | Comments (2)

TSA has very slowly been moving toward Israeli-style behavior profiling since at least March, which was when we first covered this story. The news this morning is that the agency has finally launched a one billion dollar pilot program at BOS under the too-cute name "Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques"—SPOT—with the intention perhaps of eventually deploying it elsewhere. It seems to be modeled very closely on how the Israelis do things, which immediately raises the question of how exactly the agency intends to pull all this off.

"Behavior profiling" can actually mean at least two things. In the most basic sense behavior profiling it's just about passively watching people. This is the Las Vegas "eye in the sky" kind of profiling, where body language experts monitor the casino floor and can detect cheaters just by the way they walk around nervously. Setting up this kind of passive program is just a matter of having enough resources to train and employ people, and TSA already has so-called "behavior detection officers" in 161 airports (you can check out our background on that program here). But that's not really what people mean when they say "Israeli-style behavior profiling."

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The Latest Thing Causing the TSA to Freak Out? Bomb Implants.

July 8, 2011 at 5:00 PM | by | Comments (0)

If we have one overarching criticism of the TSA, it's that the agency is perennially trying to defend us tomorrow from yesterday's threats. Their rules are designed with an eye toward the last attack rather than in anticipation of the next one. That was the problem with the almost inexplicably stupid anti-pillow, anti-GPS, anti-walking around regulations that TSA tried enforcing after the Christmas Day bomber used a pillow, looked at a GPS, and walked around.

If we have a second overarching criticism of the TSA, it's that they're perennially trying to defend us tomorrow from yesterday's attacks in the most obnoxious, intrusive, privacy-invading, citizen-degrading, and flat out expensive way imaginable.

This brings us to the full-body scanners that the agency purchased by the thousands after DC-based machine lobbies doubled in size, and which experts said 100 percent wouldn't catch anybody because terrorists would adapt. It also brings us to the story from this week, wherein TSA announced that terrorists were planning to adapt by implanting themselves with bombs in a way that full-body scanners couldn't detect. The hell you say.

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Without Changes in the TSA, Expect More Pat-downs of Grandmothers in Adult Diapers

June 27, 2011 at 2:40 PM | by | Comments (0)

Consider this your obligatory post about the surreal spectacle of a cancer-stricken 95-year-old woman being forced by TSA to remove her adult diaper while going through airport security. Totally absurd. But if you're looking for us to get outraged at the TSA agents on the ground—something we've been known to do on more than one occassion—you're going to be disappointed.

This dustup is just like the now-infamous baby patdown from a few weeks ago, which happened after the baby's stroller set off an explosives detector. What did you expect TSA agents to do? Not follow up? This time it wasn't a stroller but something suspicious on the woman's leg.

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TSA Stops Patting Down Kids, Promises to Run Them Through Screeners Instead

June 24, 2011 at 12:55 PM | by | Comments (0)

Earlier this week the TSA changed their airport security guidelines on patting down children. Videos and pictures of toddlers getting patdowns have been going viral pretty regularly —triggering outrageously outraged outrage from parents groups, conspiracy theorists, and other demographics disproportionately unlikely to fly—and the agency decided that a change needed to be made. More changes are promised. From now on common sense will rule the day.

For instance, in this week's change, children who move too much while walking through scanning machines will be instructed to try again and again, until they get it right. Until now, kids who produced blurry images would be pulled aside and patted down just like everybody else. That was so the security line would keep moving. Now cherubic little boys and girls who wave their hands around and bump into machines will bring entire lines to a grinding halt, until they can contain their adorable selves. Oh. That should fix things.

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The TSA is Racial-Profiling at Newark Airport? Color Us Surprised. Not.

June 15, 2011 at 3:25 PM | by | Comments (0)

Two things to keep in mind as you read this story. The first is our most recent discussion of racial profiling, where we emphasized that "random screening" doesn't actually exist in the real world. TSA screeners always have the option of profiling. Random screening just lets the agents on the ground choose who to pull aside instead of giving them explicit rules, which gives bad apples the opportunity to abuse their authority: "Why did you tag that African-American gentleman / blonde cheerleader / Cowboys fan for extra screening?" "They were fidgeting."

The second thing is that TSA is on the record saying that EWR screeners are some of the best in the country.

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This May Be the Future of the Full-Body Scanner

June 7, 2011 at 8:30 AM | by | Comment (1)

No more removing your shoes. No more funneling your liquids into small plastic bottles, inside a little plastic baggie. No more revealing full-body scans. This is the future, if we are to believe anything coming out of the World Air Transport Summit in Singapore this week. A mock-up of a three-channel security lane system was just unveiled there, an idea from the IATA, or International Air Transport Association, and it looks goooood (not to mention appropriately futuristic).

The schematic calls for a "known traveler" lane (aka you've been pre-approved), a normal lane, and an enhanced security lane. The degree of screening and steps involved in each increase with security check level. For example, the known traveler lane doesn't seem to include in-depth scans for shoes and liquids, while the normal and enhanced lanes include everything from retinal scans to searching for traces of explosives. It didn't get past us that the only lane requiring the dreaded full-body scan is the enhanced security one, so good riddance.

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United Airlines Ad Mistakenly Displayed at Ground Zero

May 20, 2011 at 3:57 AM | by | Comments (0)

Whoopsy! The New York news is all a-flutter because of an advertising slip-up next to the World Trade Center site in downtown NYC. Here's what happened: in March, United began a new ad campaign that included phrases to be publicized around the Big Apple. One of those phrases was "You're going to like where we land," and the ad placement company (not the airline) stuck that very ad at the subway entrance next to the WTC.

Hopefully we don't have to tell you why this is controversial. Hopefully we don't have to tell you not to picket United because of the slip-up. This is just one of the crazy things that sometimes happens, and steps are being taken to have the ad removed post-haste.

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TSA Hikes Up Security for Now, with 'Trusted Traveler' Program on the Way

May 6, 2011 at 3:02 PM | by | Comments (0)

TSA continues to play the game where they aren't officially raising the terror alert level, but they're increasing airport security as if they've officially raised the terror alert level. The agency is committed, for kind of silly bureaucratic and political reasons, to keeping the security level stable, so this is apparently how they're going to do this. But of course they're not actually pretending like nothing's happened in the last week. Instead they're quietly increasing their vigilance while telling everybody that nothing's changed.

So while California and New York rails are both on official alerts this morning, we've got to go to the New York Times to find out that—yes indeed—"Department of Homeland Security officials have reviewed potential terrorist targets and deployed extra security at airports."

As we've been telling you all week, just because TSA isn't telling you to leave extra time before your flight, that doesn't mean you shouldn't leave extra time before your flight.

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TSA Sending 'Mixed Signals' on Airport Security in Aftermath of Bin Laden Death

May 4, 2011 at 2:34 PM | by | Comments (0)

In response to the threat of Al Qaeda retaliation for the death of Osama Bin Laden, the TSA has increased security pretty much as expected. They've increased the searches of cars outside the airport, and they're more heavily patrolling pre-security areas with dogs. That's according to WPXI in Pittsburgh, which observed the increased airport security measures firsthand at PIT. Either that or there's been no change in security measures, which is what the Dallas Morning News is going with based on TSA statements. Or it's both and security officials are sending "mixed signals," which is per the Christian Science Monitor.

The upshot is that some airports have increased their security and some haven't (at least according to the latter's official statements). That's a sign that TSA isn't really providing any guidance from the top. The reasons for that are political and bureaucratic, and we'll get to some of them below, but the upshot for travelers is that you don't know what you'll be getting until you get there.

You're highly advised to leave a few minutes earlier than usual for the airport. Otherwise you might find yourself in a long line of cars, with each car being stopped and potentially searched, watching the minutes to your flight tick by. Just thinking about it raises our blood pressure.

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