Loss of Privacy

From EPIC:

On July 20, 2010, the Department of Homeland Security announced a substantial change in the deployment of body scanners in US airports. According to the DHS Secretary, the devices, which had once been part of a pilot program for seconary screening, will now be deployed in 28 additional airports. The devices are designed to capture and store photographic images of naked air travelers. EPIC has filed an emergency motion in federal court, urging the suspension of the program and citing violations of several federal statutes and the Fourth Amendment. Public opposition to the program is also growing. For more information, see EPIC v. DHS (Body scanners) and EPIC Body Scanners.

A new set of posters at LAX is being dubbed “terror-veillance” as they were made to invoke terror in people instead of preventing it.

See something. Say something. Imprison innocents. Terrorize travelers.

The police want you to iWatchLA, but I won’t be. Put these posters together with the anti-terror citizen watch groups and the iwatch videos from last year, and you’re got scared citizens everywhere.

The TSA wants everyone to follow the guidelines of “see something, say something,” without actually thinking if something is really out of place or if it’s something that’s perfectly natural. New York City officially kicked off this week-long campaign today at Penn Station with the swearing in of John Pistole, the new head of the TSA.

The program is being launched in partnership with Amtrak just months after two alert street vendors reported smoke coming from a car in Times Square. They saw something, said something, and helped thwart a terrorist attack. This just proves what we’ve known all along. The public plays a very critical role in keeping our nation safe.

Unfortunately, the public isn’t as informed as it should be and, while most people might let something slide, with this campaign in their face, they’re going to report everything without thinking. It places undue burdens upon the public to be able to discern real concern from normal events.

John Pistole should be concentrating on instead is the failed Secure Flight program that unjustly puts people on the no-fly list with no recourse to getting off or to stop being harassed each time they want to travel. He should be focusing on hiring qualified, educated people to be TSA agents instead of the “low-brow, abuse everyone” agents they hire now. Pistole should also admit that the liquid ban is not necessary and repeal it immediately.

He needs to implement consistent requirements at every airport and not let TSA agents at the airport use their discretion to decide what one can and cannot take on board. If potato peelers are legal at one airport, they should be legal at all airports. Pistole should immediately order and independent investigation into full body scanners so everyone can know and understand what dangers these machines may or may not pose to a person’s health.

Finally, these rules and guidelines should be published and readily available to the public so that they don’t have to worry about “gotcha” security procedures. Pistole needs to admit that, besides heavier cockpit doors and letting the public react to threats on a plane, everything else has been a failure and a huge overreaction to the problems at hand. He must assure the public that it is impossible to keep every 100% safe, 100% of the time, but that they are working with highly trained individuals to make you as safe as possible. Extensive training with qualified personnel instead of the thugs that man the security posts are a must. In addition, repealing the liquid ban and scrapping the no-fly list and starting over are the first steps that Mr. Pistole can take to regain public confidence in an agency that many find to be ineffective and a useless waste of taxpayer money.

The TSA has not caught one terrorist in its eight year existence. They did not catch the Times Square bomber. They even let him board a plane despite his name being on the no-fly list. We don’t need more security theater. We need an agency that understands the practicalities of daily travel and can admit when policies don’t make sense, quickly moving to repeal such measures.

Out of the ordinary doesn’t equate to terrorism. See something, be hesitant to say something. Mr. Pistole would do well to heed these words.

Despite numerous reports that the SPOT program doesn’t work as it should, the UK is bringing their own version to British airports.

OVER the past four years, some 3,000 officers in America’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have been specially trained to spot potential terrorists at airports. The programme, known as SPOT, for “Screening Passengers by Observation Technique,” is intended to allow airport security officers to use tiny facial cues to identify people who are acting suspiciously. The British government is currently launching a new screening regime modelled on the Americans’ SPOT. There’s just one problem with all this: there’s no evidence that SPOT is actually effective.

SPOT lies more in the realm of pseudoscience rather than real science. There is no real way to detect if such a program actually works because, under controlled conditions, it is never under the same conditions one would face in the real world. Given the popularity of TV shows, such as Lie to Me, people are rely on the false assumption that SPOT technology actually works.

“No scientific evidence exists to support the detection or inference of future behaviour, including intent,” declares a 2008 report prepared by the JASON defence advisory group. And the TSA had no business deploying SPOT across the nation’s airports “without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment”, stated a two-year review of the programme released on 20 May by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the US Congress.

The bottom line is that, according to the GAO, the TSA is “unsure” whether SPOT has ever led to the arrest of an actual, real-life terrorist. The agency has hired an independent contractor to evaluate the program, and the results are due next year. In the meantime, the TSA will presumably continue to spend taxpayer dollars on a program that it’s not really sure is effective.

Considering the fact that the SPOT program has been in effect for four years, it didn’t stop the underpants bomber when red flags were raised at every step of his journey.

SPOT is nothing more than security theater, just like the Iraq bomb detectors, and The United Kingdom is willing to bring it to their shores at the cost of millions of taxpayer’s money.

From NBC News:

A Transportation Security Administration agent has been arrested for allegedly stealing nearly $500 dollars from a wheelchair bound passenger as she passed through a security checkpoint at Newark Airport.