Meaningless Security Theater

[Tick]

What destroys my ability to think rationally is the response of the TSA head.  Essentially, he says they're looking into it, but we shouldn't get too hopeful for any changes.  And that we shouldn't whine because it's to make us safer.

 

I hear ya.

[Fuzzboy]

I was thinking. With all the capabilities in technology today no one can convince me they couldn't make scans that don't even show the person at all. They could just reveal any foreign objects on the person.

That's actually a pretty good idea, and shouldn't be too hard to implement.  However, it only matters if you buy into the story that safety and security is the reason they're actually doing this.  I don't. 

I fly once or twice every few years. I am flying to Florida in two weeks and I hope It goes well at the airport.

It probably will, depending on the Airport. I just went through Miami International last week and they only scanned my bag and made me pass through the metal detector. I don't remember how security is at FT. Lauderdale airport, but it's probably not that bad either. It's not as popular an airport too, so there's much less people, everything takes less time, and it's quite clean and nice.

[Tick]

I was thinking. With all the capabilities in technology today no one can convince me they couldn't make scans that don't even show the person at all. They could just reveal any foreign objects on the person.

That's actually a pretty good idea, and shouldn't be too hard to implement.  However, it only matters if you buy into the story that safety and security is the reason they're actually doing this.  I don't. 

I fly once or twice every few years. I am flying to Florida in two weeks and I hope It goes well at the airport.

It probably will, depending on the Airport. I just went through Miami International last week and they only scanned my bag and made me pass through the metal detector. I don't remember how security is at FT. Lauderdale airport, but it's probably not that bad either. It's not as popular an airport too, so there's much less people, everything takes less time, and it's quite clean and nice.

I'm flying into Orlando. Perhaps Mickey Mouse will give me a hand job.

[eric42434224]

It would be interesting to see what the people who bitch about security would say if given an alternative.

"Yes Ma'am, you dont have to get scanned, patted down, or even have your luggaged x-rayed.  But no one else on that particular flight will either...passengers, flight attendants, passengers, airport workers, third party vendors.  I know you say that the TSA dont catch terrorists, so you should'nt have to worry about anything.  Your flight is over at that gate.  Enjoy!"

I think peoples tune would change pretty quick.  Are the security hoops we have to jump through a hassle sometimes?  Sure.  Are they effective?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  But they do install a sense of security in the majority of the population, and that sense of security is necessary to keep people flying, and to keep the entire airline industry from going bye-bye.
You dont have to fly.  If you want to fly, this is what you must do.

Just my 2 cents.

[Tick]

It would be interesting to see what the people who bitch about security would say if given an alternative.

"Yes Ma'am, you dont have to get scanned, patted down, or even have your luggaged x-rayed.  But no one else on that particular flight will either...passengers, flight attendants, passengers, airport workers, third party vendors.  I know you say that the TSA dont catch terrorists, so you should'nt have to worry about anything.  Your flight is over at that gate.  Enjoy!"

I think peoples tune would change pretty quick.  Are the security hoops we have to jump through a hassle sometimes?  Sure.  Are they effective?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  But they do install a sense of security in the majority of the population, and that sense of security is necessary to keep people flying, and to keep the entire airline industry from going bye-bye.
You dont have to fly.  If you want to fly, this is what you must do.

Just my 2 cents.

So your saying this new invasive security is the only way to go? Your saying that the way they have been doing things in the past isn't security at all? Lets not get crazy.

[Super Dude]

You're, tick.  Your ≠ you're

That said, I wouldn't mind these security measures if I knew they were actually gonna help.  As has been said numerous times already, terrorists can find other ways.  If it's this invasive, it better be damned effective.

[Tick]

You're, tick.

Yes I am.

[El Barto]

It would be interesting to see what the people who bitch about security would say if given an alternative.

"Yes Ma'am, you dont have to get scanned, patted down, or even have your luggaged x-rayed.  But no one else on that particular flight will either...passengers, flight attendants, passengers, airport workers, third party vendors.  I know you say that the TSA dont catch terrorists, so you should'nt have to worry about anything.  Your flight is over at that gate.  Enjoy!"

I think peoples tune would change pretty quick.  Are the security hoops we have to jump through a hassle sometimes?  Sure.  Are they effective?  Maybe yes, maybe no.  But they do install a sense of security in the majority of the population, and that sense of security is necessary to keep people flying, and to keep the entire airline industry from going bye-bye.
You dont have to fly.  If you want to fly, this is what you must do.

Just my 2 cents.

Just like it was until '72.  Since metal detectors were set up to prevent people from taking guns on board, hijackings have become a thing of the past.  I'd say that they've been quite successful in that aspect of security.  The problem is that after one batch of bad guys gets through, everybody wets themselves.  You're not going to obtain perfect security.  Ever.  Strangely, it might be better to abandon the false sense of security that they're trying to instill.  The fact is, the attempts that have been thwarted haven't been stopped by TSA or any other government goons.  PAX who were much more concerned about their safety than any TSA ass-hat intervened and prevented things from turning really ugly.  Now that cockpit doors are [allegedly] secure,  there's even less of a threat.  Try jumping up and yelling allahu akbar and see how fast the fat fuck from 27D will be sitting on your neck.  Pre-911, the tendency would be to give a hijacker the benefit of the doubt.  He probably just want's to go to the Caribbean to work on his tan.  That's why they were successful.  Not any more.  

Personally, rather than paying some jackass to check the capacity of the ziplock bag my toothpaste is in, I'd rather they come up with a decent means of inspecting cargo.  Or better yet, how about they spend the money subsidizing the bombproof LD3 containers that the airlines are too cheap to purchase!  Instead, they'll continue to try and do things retroactively.  Nothing that they're doing right now will be more than a slight inconvenience to a determined bomber. But even still, the 6 or so flights I take each year, the threat of somebody sneaking a weapon on board doesn't scare me in the slightest.  An exploding clock radio in the cargo hold scares me a wee bit more.  Improperly stored O2 containers scare the hell out of me.  It's not the bad guys that worry me.  It's the incompetent good guys on the ground that do.

[William Wallace]

Eric, you're presenting a false dichotomy. I'm not sure if you saw this, but if we could implement a system similar to this we'd be in such better shape.

Along those lines, here's another article that highlights an effective alternative.  I wonder how it would scale though.

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744199---israelification-high-security-little-bother

While North America's airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification.

That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience.

"It is mindboggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago," said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He's worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world.

"Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don't take s--- from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, 'We're not going to do this. You're going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport."

That, in a nutshell is "Israelification" - a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death.

Fliers urged to opt out of airport security en masse

Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel's largest hub, Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?

"The first thing you do is to look at who is coming into your airport," said Sela.

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

"Two benign questions. The questions aren't important. The way people act when they answer them is," Sela said.

Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of "distress" — behavioural profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.

"The word 'profiling' is a political invention by people who don't want to do security," he said. "To us, it doesn't matter if he's black, white, young or old. It's just his behaviour. So what kind of privacy am I really stepping on when I'm doing this?"

Once you've parked your car or gotten off your bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.

Armed guards outside the terminal are trained to observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behaviour. At Ben Gurion's half-dozen entrances, another layer of security are watching. At this point, some travellers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer.

"This is to see that you don't have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious," said Sela.

You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

"The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds," said Sela.

Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has gotten this far.

At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area. Sela plays devil's advocate — what if you have escaped the attention of the first four layers of security, and now try to pass a bag with a bomb in it?

"I once put this question to Jacques Duchesneau (the former head of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority): say there is a bag with play-doh in it and two pens stuck in the play-doh. That is 'Bombs 101' to a screener. I asked Ducheneau, 'What would you do?' And he said, 'Evacuate the terminal.' And I said, 'Oh. My. God.'

"Take Pearson. Do you know how many people are in the terminal at all times? Many thousands. Let's say I'm (doing an evacuation) without panic — which will never happen. But let's say this is the case. How long will it take? Nobody thought about it. I said, 'Two days.'"

A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options.

First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away.

Second, all the screening areas contain 'bomb boxes'. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.

"This is a very small simple example of how we can simply stop a problem that would cripple one of your airports," Sela said.

Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at the only one which Ben-Gurion Airport shares with Pearson — the body and hand-luggage check.

"But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America," Sela said.

"First, it's fast — there's almost no line. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They're not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you," said Sela. "Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes ... and that's how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys."

That's the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.

This doesn't begin to cover the off-site security net that failed so spectacularly in targeting would-be Flight 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — intelligence. In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies.

"There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States," Sela said. "Absolutely none."

But even without the intelligence, Sela maintains, Abdulmutallab would not have gotten past Ben Gurion Airport's behavioural profilers.

So. Eight years after 9/11, why are we still so reactive, so un-Israelified?

Working hard to dampen his outrage, Sela first blames our leaders, and then ourselves.

"We have a saying in Hebrew that it's much easier to look for a lost key under the light, than to look for the key where you actually lost it, because it's dark over there. That's exactly how (North American airport security officials) act," Sela said. "You can easily do what we do. You don't have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit — technology, training. But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept."

And rather than fear, he suggests that outrage would be a far more powerful spur to provoking that change.

"Do you know why Israelis are so calm? We have brutal terror attacks on our civilians and still, life in Israel is pretty good. The reason is that people trust their defence forces, their police, their response teams and the security agencies. They know they're doing a good job. You can't say the same thing about Americans and Canadians. They don't trust anybody," Sela said. "But they say, 'So far, so good'. Then if something happens, all hell breaks loose and you've spent eight hours in an airport. Which is ridiculous. Not justifiable

"But, what can you do? Americans and Canadians are nice people and they will do anything because they were told to do so and because they don't know any different."

[Super Dude]

Israelification article

That's exactly what I was saying in the other thread about this.

To my knowledge, there hasn't been a terrorist attack on an EL AL plane in 20 or 30 years.

[El Barto]

Aside from the impracticality of "Israelification" that I keep mentioning, I just noticed this line from the article:

"The word 'profiling' is a political invention by people who don't want to do security," he said. "To us, it doesn't matter if he's black, white, young or old. It's just his behaviour. So what kind of privacy am I really stepping on when I'm doing this?"

Everything I've heard is that that's an enormous pile of shit.  Israelis and Americans that are part of tour groups go through very quickly.  Out of a group of 10 Europeans, the 9 Caucasians will go through fairly quickly and then have to wait all day for their black friend.  I'd just as soon not drag profiling into the discussion, but I just want to point out that this guy was just spouting off the official line.

Now, while I still maintain that the multi-layered approach they use could never be implemented here, some aspects of it are quite sound and already being used.  Behavior recognition is a great thing to have going on, assuming you have guys intelligent enough to actually look at behavior instead of appearance.  Most Americans would have spent an hour hassling a Sudanese college student and let Tim McVeigh waltz right on-board a plane. 

Here's a nice article about the program at BOS

[Super Dude]

Actually my non-Jewish American friends (all of them white) did have some bit of trouble last time I went with a group.

Also, how is it impractical?  Moreover, what does that matter if it gets results, like their system does?

[El Barto]

Actually my non-Jewish American friends (all of them white) did have some bit of trouble last time I went with a group.

Also, how is it impractical?  Moreover, what does that matter if it gets results, like their system does?

The problem is the scale.
https://www.dreamtheaterforums.org/boards/index.php?topic=18037.msg681490#msg681490
And another consideration is the quality of screeners you're going to get.  I'd be willing to bet that the average Israeli is a little bit sharper than the average American.  Now, factor in how many screeners you'd need here vs. there.  A consideration of that suggests a pretty big pay discrepancy.  I'd be willing to bet that the greenest rookie security guy at Ben-Gurien is comparable to a supervisor with TSA.  The vast majority of people doing this behavioral analysis will be $12 an hour flunkies and only a marginal improvement of the guy at the second window at Burger King.


And as for why it matters, if getting on a flight becomes an all day pain in the ass, nobody will fly and then what's the point. 

[Super Dude]

It's not THAT much of a pain in the ass...but then again I'm Jewish so it's not that much of a hassle for me. :-P