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How One Radioactive Man Has Us Rethinking Airport Security

We can't quite decide whether this story—which involves a traffic stop in Connecticut but which we'll connect to airport security in just a second—is quietly reassuring or deeply creepy. The things that police officers and security officials can do, and the different ways they can do them, are becoming harder and harder to catalog.

Stratford firefighter Mike Apatow was driving along a Connecticut interstate when he found himself getting pulled over for no discernible reason. It turns out that Apatow has high blood pressure, and just that morning he had been to the hospital for a medical stress test. Doctors had injected him with just a tiny amount of radioactive material so they could track what was going on with his blood. Hours later, the leftover isotopes in Apatow's body were still enough to light up his car as it drove by a state police vehicle equipped with a mobile radioactivity detector.

Keep in mind that he was on an interstate. That means he was either driving 65mph+ or stuck between a lot of other cars. Either way, the sniffer still picked him right out. Hmmm.

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Bad News and More Bad News about the Underwear Bomb Terror Plot

Would TSA scanners have caught the non-metallic underwear bomb at the center of the latest Al Qaeda plot? That was the discussion late last week and over the weekend, after the public learned of the planned attack via the Associated Press, which learned about it from an anonymous leaker who now may well go to jail.

The ex-TSA chief who bought the scanners says yes, because of course he does. A Congressman who routinely bashes TSA says no, because of course he does. But "candidly, no" was also the answer given by Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who would know. And the consensus of experts also seems to be that scanners would have missed the bomb.

Meanwhile there are good reasons to believe that more underwear bombs are in the wild and that a "wave of plane attacks" might be on the horizon. Happy Monday!

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Japan Travel / Airport Security / Airline Security / Travel News / → All Tags

Japan Launching Random Airport Pat-Downs, Because You Might Be a Terrorist

If you've been day dreaming to yourself "I'm really looking forward to 2012 being a year of aviation for Japan travel, because even though tickets to the world's largest tower are $37 a pop at least there's no chance I'll get groped leaving the country"—we've got some bad news for you.

It was just last fall when a Japanese comedy show mocked TSA for the agency's gropey random searches. The segment poked fun at how "random" searches can become excuses for getting a little too hands-on with passengers, a point we've unpacked explicitly here and here and here. In Japan things were conducted with much more circumspection, apparently.

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The TSA Won't Be Fooled by Your Fake ID Again

Fake boarding passes and fake IDs have been an obvious hole in TSA's security theater for over half a decade. We know it's been that long since we wrote about it a bit in 2008 and then at length in 2009 and then offhandedly in in 2011. That whole time terrorists were able to evade the no-fly list either by getting a fake ID that matched their real boarding pass or by generating a fake boarding pass that matched their real ID. Options!

Perhaps realizing that the situation was not conducive either to objective security or to the public's perceptions of the agency's reliability, TSA announced last fall that they would be rolling out new machines to bust fake IDs and boarding passes. Fast forward half a year later, and they're now actually doing it.

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Denver Museum Now Focusing on the TSA as Modern Art. Yes, Really.

There's a theory about why people so often complain that modern art designers are pompous gasbags, and it goes something like this: "the reason people so often complain that modern art designers are pompous gasbags is because those artists say things like 'as the TSA creates an environment of fear surrounding their infamous Prohibited Items list, individuals are subjected to the power bestowed on the items.'" Want to guess how this exhibit at Denver's Museum of Contemporary Art goes, which we found via this backgrounder in the Daily Beast?

A museum exhibit revolving around airport security in general and TSA in particular, all covered with a thick coat of self-important hipsterific content? And we're covering it here on Jaunted? The hell you say.

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Yes, TSA is Testing Some Common Sense New Rules about Senior Citizens, But...

In the name of giving credit where credit is due, we're hereby noting that TSA is considering maybe letting travelers over the age of 75 keep on their shoes and light jackets as they pass through security. The pilot program—which will be launched Monday in ORD, DEN, MCO, and PDX—joins other experiments designed to speed the screening of trusted fliers, pilots, and children. They're all part of TSA's effort to move away from a one-size-fits-all model, which is quite laudable and so three cheers for slightly less stupid airport security.

But come on. Have we really gotten to a place where we need staggered pilot programs to evaluate whether it's OK to let grandma wear her beach flip flops as she shuffles, ever so slowly shuffles, through a scanner? It's definitely worth trying out, but it just seems so small.

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Blogger Totally Defeats TSA's Full-Body Scanners with a Simple Trick

You've seen the video, now read the TSA pushback (and if you haven't seen the video, we've embedded it at the bottom). The airport security agency is facing renewned criticism triggered by a 27-year old Florida man's viral video, in which the man appears to use the world's dumbest hack to smuggle metallic objects through TSA's super-expensive full-body scanners.

Now Blogger Bob has taken official notice of the controversy and posted a response. Except his response very pointedly does not deny that the hack works. Instead he only says that TSA can't talk about security protocols, and besides the agency has multiple layers of security, and besides the machines can detect objects hidden in lots of ways. Other TSA officials are telling journalists that the machines are "safe." All of that is interesting, but it's not an answer.

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The Week in Stupid Ideas for Fixing the TSA

A partial list of things TSA agents have found over the last few weeks: an unloaded gun, a loaded gun, a spear gun, and a bag of weed that some poor stoner had hidden in a jar of "suspicious looking peanut butter" (say what you will about the risks of carrying drugs through post-9/11 airport security, you have to give him points for efficiency and thinking ahead). So naturally politicians have chosen now to revive some of their...less productive... alternatives to how TSA conducts security.

In Alaska, State Representative Sharon Cissna has introduced legislation to criminalize the TSA's pat-downs and full-body scanners. Jaunted readers will remember this trick from when Texas tried it, leading us to predict with absolute certainty that it would fail, and then to chronicle how it was failing, and then to report that it had failed. We're going to go out on a limb and predict that Alaska's legislation will suffer the same fate. Most likely the proposal will never actually pass. If it did then TSA would simply refuse to allow flights in and out of Alaska—something they can do, because we have federal laws in this country that trump state laws—at which point you would see a hasty reversal.

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TSA's PreCheck Security Program Gains New Airport Ground

TSA agents recently caught someone trying to smuggle a dagger disguised as a hairbrush through security, part of a trend in "artfully concealed weapons" that the agency has detected. They also found a grenade in one passenger's carry-on, though it didn't have a detonator or explosive, and a gun in another's.

However, they totally missed a gun elsewhere, botched a pipe bomb scare in a wince-inducingly stupid way, and have had multiple bag screeners fall asleep. All of which is to say, anything that lightens the screening load on TSA employees is all for the good.

Ergo the PreCheck rollout that we've been following for you since last January (basic backgrounder here; update plus context on TSA's "one-size-fits-all" pushback here). The program gives travelers the option of exchanging a lot of privacy—giving up personal information, submitting to background checks, etc—for a little bit of convenience, including not having to remove shoes and light jackets during security checks.

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So. About That Whole Rand Paul Versus the TSA Thing...

First the raw news, such as it is. Yesterday Senator Rand Paul was flying from BNA to DCA and, while walking through a scanner, triggered the alarm. Per TSA regulations he was put in the waiting area—which at BNA is a glass "cubicle"—until an agent could be found to pat him down. Sen. Paul demanded the right to be allowed to walk through the scanner a second time but, again per TSA protocol, he was told he'd have to submit to get patted down. He refused and instead tried to walk out of the cubicle, and eventually had to be escorted out of the airport.

We want to pause here to emphasize the absolutely explicit explanation that Paul gave for his behavior. He says that he thinks TSA should allow people to walk through scanners twice, so he acted as if TSA does allow people to walk through scanners twice. In other words he acted as if the reality he wishes was true was actually true. We're going to blockquote this so you can tell we're not making this up:

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TSA / RIC / SMF / JFK / Airport Security / Airline Security / Bad Ideas / Full-Body Scanners / → All Tags

Wait. The TSA Intercepts How Many Guns Per Day in Airports?

Ideally we'd like to spend this post criticizing TSA for various inadequacies implicit and explicit. There's something not quite right about the agency's new "we'll retest for radiation levels but not really" announcement on full-body scanners, especially given its extensive and well-documented past dissembling on the issue. There are still issues to discuss from last year about the contradictions in pushing for private TSA baggage screeners. We'd like to know why it was necessary to tase a traveler to the point of hospitalization at the Sacramento International Airport. Someone should ask what steps are being taken to prevent a repeat of the $40,000-stealing TSA agent. And isn't there something wrong with airport security when $400,000 worth of coins are getting left at security every year by flustered travelers?

But we can't talk about any of that, because people won't stop trying to bring weapons on airplanes. Especially guns. Lots and lots of guns. So instead of this post being about the many ways TSA makes traveling worse, it's about one very specific way that travelers make traveling worse.

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TSA Expanding Its Trusted Traveler 'PreCheck' Program

Last October we told you about the nascent PreCheck program that TSA was in the process of soft-launching. The airport security pilot program was designed to provide "expedited screening" for some passengers—specifically, those who were willing to provide personal information beforehand—while still ensuring "random and unpredictable security measures" for everyone. The idea was that, on the whole and all things being equal, frequent passengers would be able to get pre-screened and then avail themselves of faster lines at the airport. A little privacy for a lot of convenience.

Now PreCheck is expanding. Originally the program was only available to Delta and American fliers at a limited number of airports, with the eligibility list culled from the rolls of those airlines' frequent fliers. In 2012 you can expect to see the program at more airports—including, finally, LAX and JFK. There will also be new airlines involved, with travelers from US Airways and United joining the program.

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