December 2010
2 posts
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TSA Chief: 'We'll Never Eliminate Risk' →
Excellent interview with John Pistole.
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Are travelers happy to bare all in the name of... →
Parsing the TSA’s numbers for how many passengers choose pat-downs vs. full-body scanners.
November 2010
56 posts
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Our New Safety Overlords →
This is unrelated to the backscatter screeners and pat-downs, but is relevant to the security theater and what’s-with-the-TSA discussion.
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The Safety Question, Pt.2 →
Interesting insight into the backscatter scanners’ safety.
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“Israeli personnel do single out small numbers of passengers for extensive...”
– Another look at why the Israeli security approach wouldn’t work in the U.S. without some tweaks.
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“This matter deserves more than a ping-pong match. Instead, the National Academy...”
– David Corn makes a sensible suggestion for testing the safety of backscatter scanners.
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FDA sidesteps safety concerns over TSA body... →
Four UC-San Francisco professors say the differences between typical medical X-ray machines and the TSA backscatter machines warrant further testing to make sure the latter are safe.
The FDA responded, but
gave the issues little more than a data-driven brush off. They cite five studies in response to the professors’ request for independent verification of the safety of these X-rays;...
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Tom the Dancing Bug: A Security Issue at the... →
Ruben Bolling takes on the TSA.
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The TSA backlash-backlash misses the point
The TSA backlash has itself inspired a backlash, in articles like these from The Daily Beast, Time, and Politico. But in trying to be all mature and non-hyperbolic, these pieces largely ignore the heart of the issue.
The first anti-anti TSA argument is that we shouldn’t make a fuss because few people actually get the pat-downs. Howard Kurtz writes in The Daily Beast:
… more than 99...
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“The most invasive part in my opinion was not actually the groin and inner thigh...”
– A calm, non-hyperbolic description of what it’s like to be pat-down.
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The idiocy of airport-scanner "Opt-Out Day." →
WIlliam Saletan makes fair points about why Opt-Out Day is silly. (But that doesn’t mean the scanners and pat-downs make sense in general.)
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“As it turns out, the security methods employed by Israel’s famous Shin Bet...”
– The New York Times suggests that the recommendation to Israelify U.S. airport security wouldn’t be so easy to implement.
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“That case was really instructive. Nobody was injured, and the plane landed...”
– Bruce “Security Theater” Schneier on the underwear bomber, in an interview about the TSA pat-downs and ensuing hullabaloo.
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“The fundamental problem with a lot of these procedures is their lack of...”
– Good ideas for making the TSA more transparent, from Sunlight Foundation’s Paul Blumenthal.
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The 'Israelification' of airports: High security,... →
A look at how the Israelis do airport security, from a 2009 piece in the Toronto Star.
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“As long as it’s just Muslims being tortured and foreigners being detained...”
– Adam Serwer better articulates what I tried to say in this post.
(His context is conservatives suddenly discovering the downsides to the security state. My context was more just average non-political people discovering same. Ultimately, it probably amounts to the same thing.)
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“It’s looking like ‘pat-downs’ is this year’s winter...”
– It’s a little hard to tell from this post where Josh Marshall stands on the whole security theater thing.
On the one hand, he’s right that it’s sort of absurd that after acceding to “Vast wars leading to thousands of American dead and hundreds of billions of dollars of...
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Scientists say they have solution to TSA scanner... →
Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have a simple tweak that “would distort the images captured on full-body scanners so they look like reflections in a fun-house mirror, but any potentially dangerous objects would be clearly revealed,” the Washington Post reports.
Apparently the researchers shared the idea with the Department of Homeland Security four years...
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Today's Security Saga: 'Show Me the Blankey' →
A 2-YEAR-OLD is asked to stand up out of her stroller and show her blanket to security screeners.
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“[Georgetown University terrorism expert Bruce] Hoffman said the administration...”
– The consensus view among people who know about this stuff makes it to the news pages of the New York Times.
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TSA chief: Screening may evolve →
John Pistole at least shows that he and his agency aren’t totally politically tone-deaf, though the security procedures aren’t changing for now.
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Why Cavity Bombs Would Make the TSA Irrelevant →
Current machines can’t detect them, and even if they could, the bomber would just blow themselves up in the security area. Bleh.
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“A retired special education teacher on his way to a wedding in Orlando, Fla.,...”
– Ugh.
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T.S.A. Grants Airline Pilots an Exception to... →
Uniformed pilots don’t have to go through the back-scatter imaging machines or endure pat-downs. Flight attendants aren’t exempt, though.
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Radiation Overdoses Point Up Dangers of CT Scans →
Via James Fallows, a warning about how errors can turn “harmless” radiation levels from scanners into dangerous levels.
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“He was very specific not only about the places, but also about when he would be...”
– Dave Barry gets the full junk treatment.
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Pat-Downs at Airports Prompt Complaints →
A very good overview from the New York Times.
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“Profiling — not ethnic or racial profiling, but individualized profiling,...”
– Jeffrey Goldberg’s words of wisdom.
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Incoming Speaker Boehner avoids airport pad-down →
The metal detectors would probably wreak havoc on Boehner’s orange skin. And the pat-down would have discovered his secret stash of orange face paint. So it’s only fair.
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TSA to investigate body scan resister →
This is a great way for the federal government to ingratiate itself with frustrated flyers.
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“Republican trust in a sprawling and invasive security apparatus was always...”
– Dave Weigel writes about the political implications of the TSA backlash.
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Cancer surviving flight attendant forced to remove... →
Just when you think the TSA horror stories couldn’t get any worse.
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Congress Should Defend My Junk →
Joshua Green has some advice for the incoming Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee.
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“If I have to let someone else see me naked in order to be with you — well,...”
– Megan McArdle kisses flying goodbye.
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Folds in clothes confuse full-body scanners,... →
Folds, guns, bombs — what’s the difference, right?
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TSA Says Better Body Scanners Will End Privacy... →
Alexis Madrigal explores how far off automated threat detection technology is.
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TSA administrator claims new body scanners emit as... →
PolitiFact weighs in on the TSA chief’s claim.
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“There is a lot of software to control these machines, and it’s mostly new...”
– A software engineer worries about the radiation dangers that bugs in the back-scatter imagers’ software could pose.
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'Dear Sen. Klobuchar: Let's Rethink the TSA' →
James Fallows posts a letter from a former PanAm and Northwest Airlines employee “who was on duty at PanAm when its flight 103 was blown up by Libyan terrorists in 1988.”
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Which is Worse for Children, the Pat-Down or the... →
The porn machine, security maven Bruce Schneier tells Jeffrey Goldberg.
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“It is the mission of the President, and of the Congress, to supervise and...”
– Jeffrey Goldberg reminds us of the bureaucratic and personal dynamics that lead to things like the TSA security procedures.
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“It is insane, destructive, and Maginot Line-like in thinking for the U.S. to...”
– James Fallows continues to bring it.
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“The security-versus-liberty situation is always a balance. But who in public...”
– An extremely important — and still unanswered — question from James Fallows.
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National Opt-Out Day →
Another part of the TSA story goes viral.
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“If you’re a male, and you want to bollix-up the nonsensical airport...”
– A clever idea from Jeffrey Goldberg. Who will be the first to try this and capture it on YouTube?
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Body-Searching Children: No for the US Army, Yes... →
James Fallows posts an email from a U.S. Army staff sergeant who is serving in Afghanistan. The soldier writes about the contrast between security procedures in Afghanistan — “At no time were we permitted or even encouraged to search children or women” — and the new ones in the U.S.
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