Tagged: Transportation Safety Agency
TSA still groping kids
Families wishing to board commercial aircraft in the US or Canada can choose between irradiating their children with x-rays, or submitting them to a full-body pat-down. Check out the latest viral example:
A video taken of one of our officers patting down a six year-old has attracted quite a bit of attention. Some folks are asking if the proper procedures were followed. Yes. TSA has reviewed the incident and the security officer in the video followed the current standard operating procedures.
H/T: Daily Dish
Another day, another airport security meltdown
Claire Hirschkind, 56, is a rape victim. She has a medical implant similar to a pacemaker. She set off an airport security metal detector. Solution? Grope her. When she objects, shove her to the ground, cuff her, and drag her out.
Text version here.
H/T: KVUE News via Daily Dish.
Body scan boogie – (cont.)
Contrarian reader Andrew Bourke is reconsidering a trip to Disney World after seeing this video of Transportation Safety Agency screeners in Chattanooga Tennessee manhandling an upset three-year-old.
(If you can’t see the video, try this link.)
The San Francisco Chronicle explains:
A TSA employee gave Mandy the pat down and she started screaming and kicking her legs… Why was Mandy searched in the first place? She started crying when she was asked to put her teddy bear through the X-ray machine. This made it difficult for her to walk calmly through the metal detector and she set the machine off twice, which meant she “must be hand-searched.”
Body scan boogie
Get ready for Opt Out Day:
For those using Flash-impaired Apple products, try here. From the clever Taiwanese animators, Next Media. Hat tip: This week in Google.
Security theatre: an asylum for authoritarian nuttiness
Last Saturday, 57-year-old Jules Paul Bouloute, got off a flight from Haiti to New York. While attempting to find his way out of Kennedy Airport’s American Airlines Terminal, he accidentally opened an emergency exit door and set off an alarm.
Jules Paul Bouloute
This has happened to most of us. In confusion, inattention, or an ill-considered attempt to find a shortcut, we open a restricted door and set off an alarm. Sometimes it leads to an embarrassed chat with the on-duty Commissionaire; sometimes there are no consequences at all.
In Bouloute’s case, however, security officials evacuated Terminal 8 for more than two hours. Police scoured the building with dogs and SWAT teams, and required hapless passengers to go through security theatre screening a second time. Arrivals were stuck on the tarmac; departures delayed for hours.
As for Bouloute, he was charged with first-degree criminal tampering and third-degree criminal trespass, and he faces up to seven years in prison.
Salon columnist Patrick Smith, an airline pilot, analyzes the consequences:
[W]hat shocks me the most is that throughout all the coverage of the incident, including numerous interviews with ticked-off passengers and somber-voiced officials, not once has anybody raised the point that maybe — just maybe — we overreacted. Everyone, instead, is eager to blame Bouloute.
“As a result of the defendant’s actions, thousands of people were required to evacuate and to be rescreened by TSA, causing substantial delays in the airlines’ schedules,” District Attorney Richard Browne said in a statement.
No, I’m sorry, Mr. District Attorney, but that’s not it. What caused the delays and what hassled so many travelers was not the defendant’s actions, but our mindless and hysterical response to them.
Smith goes on to recite the interesting history of air terrorism, and details how a country that once took real terrorist attacks in stride became a “nation of scaredy-cats.” He cites other recent examples of ludicrous overreaction, and urges us all to calm down.
Calming down will not make us “less safe,” as security zealots are wont to argue. Quite the opposite, it would free up time and resources, allowing us to focus on more credible and potent problems.
The whole piece is well worth a read.
