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FROM MSNBC NEWS


Airports toy with the idea of tossing the TSA

*SEE OPINION POLL REVEALING AMERICAN COMMITMENT TO BEING FONDLED BY BLACKWATER LOL

A new year has brought new resolve for airport managers who are fed up with the Transportation Security Agency.

"The TSA has grown too big and we're unhappy with the way it's doing things," said Larry Dale, president of Orlando Sanford International Airport. "My board is sold on the fact that the free enterprise system works well and that we should go with a private company we can hold directly accountable for security and customer satisfaction."

Dale isn't alone. Airports in Los Angeles, the Washington, D.C. metro area, Indianapolis, and Charlotte, N.C., are also considering tossing the TSA.

Full-body scanners and enhanced pat-downs have spurred a loud outcry from an angry public, as well as some big hitters on Capitol Hill, and airports are looking at moving away from federal TSA workers and moving toward private contractors.

Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), recently named chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has encouraged the nation's 200 biggest airports to opt out, calling TSA a "bloated, poorly focused and top-heavy bureaucracy."

Same cost, same procedures
This despite the fact that opt-out airports realize no cost savings. "TSA issues the RFP [request for proposal] and selects and manages the contractor" that steps in, said Michael McCarron, director of community affairs at San Francisco International, one of the first airports to adopt private screeners.

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FROM THE HILL

Next step for tight security could be trains, boats, metro
By Jordy Yager     - 11/23/10 02:09 PM ET

Editor's note: This story and its headline have been clarified to show that the Department of Homeland Security has not indicated it plans to use body scanners to tighten security at transportation sites beyond airports.

The next step in tightened security could be on U.S. public transportation, trains and boats.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says terrorists will continue to look for U.S. vulnerabilities, making tighter security standards necessary.

“[Terrorists] are going to continue to probe the system and try to find a way through,” Napolitano said in an interview that aired Monday night on "Charlie Rose."

“I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime. So, what do we need to be doing to strengthen our protections there?”

Napolitano’s comments, made a day before one of the nation’s busiest travel days, come in the wake of a public outcry over newly implemented airport screening measures that have been criticized for being too invasive.
The secretary has defended the new screening methods, which include advanced imaging systems and pat-downs, as necessary to stopping terrorists. During the interview with Rose, Napolitano said her agency is now looking into ways to make other popular means of travel safer for passengers and commuters.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, introduced legislation this past September that would authorize testing of body scanners at some federal buildings.

Napolitano’s comments were in response to the question: “What will they [terrorists] be thinking in the future?” She gave no details about how soon the public could see changes in security or about what additional safety measures the DHS was entertaining.


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Note the nearly 1 million views on youtube entailing corporate sponsorship
Study this article from WIRED magazine.

*You see what they do, they retain the initial idea that you are not safe, while offering up some half-assed critique of the human lifescan to appease moral morons. They "wont keep us safe" so the premise that we are not safe is not up for debate, much less why we "are not safe" clearly because people have too much time on their hands and just like blowing themselves up for no reason, notice how it encourages espionage and proactive security as in . Fundumbental attribution error.

Junk Security: ‘Naked Scanners’ Won’t Keep Us Safe [Updated]

In May, Transportation Security Administration screener Rolando Negrin pummeled a co-worker with his government-issued baton. The feud began, according to a Miami-Dade Police Department report, after Mr. Negrin’s training session with one of the agency’s whole-body imagers. The scan “revealed [Mr. Negrin] had a small penis,” the disgruntled co-worker told police. After a few months, he “could not take the jokes any more and lost his mind.”

Now the TSA is rolling out these ultra-revealing imagers across the country in an attempt to uncover hidden threats like the so-called underwear bomb found on a Detroit-bound flight last Christmas.

The agency and the scanners’ manufacturers insist they’ve installed features and instituted procedures that will make passenger embarrassments impossible. But the larger question is whether the TSA’s tech-centric approach to security makes any sense at all.

Even the most modest of us would probably agree to a brief flash of quasi-nudity if it would really ensure a safe flight. That’s not the deal the TSA is offering. Instead, the agency is asking for Rolando Negrin-style revelations in exchange for incremental, ineffable security improvements against particular kinds of concealed weapons.

It’s the same kind of trade-off TSA implicitly provided when it ordered us to take off our sneakers (to stop shoe bombs), and to chuck our water bottles (to prevent liquid explosives). Security guru and scanner-suit plaintiff Bruce Schneier calls it “magical thinking…. Descend on what the terrorists happened to do last time, and we’ll all be safe. As if they won’t think of something else.”

Which, of course, they invariably do. Attackers are already starting to smuggle weapons in body cavities, going where even the most adroit body scanners do not tread.

My article in today’s Wall Street Journal has more detail on the scanners in use and the details they reveal. But it’s not all gloomy skies. There’s some hope that the TSA may be changing course, at least a bit.

New TSA chief John Pistole says the agency has to shift from a threat-driven outfit into an “intelligence-driven” organization. There are some signs that such a move may be afoot.

On the night in late October that Saudi intelligence tipped the American government off to a plot to blow up planes using explosives packed in printer cartridges, Pistole got a call from White House counterrrorism czar John Brennan. The TSA was then able to give new marching orders to everyone from air marshals to cargo inspectors. An agency team was even dispatched to Yemen, where the bombs originated.


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ScanWow!!! 04/06/2010
 
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