Eideard

The U.S. government’s list of suspected terrorists who are banned from flying to the United States or within its borders has more than doubled over the past year, a counterterrorism official told CNN…

The “no fly” list produced by the FBI now has approximately 21,000 names on it, according to the official, who has knowledge of the government’s figures. One year ago about 10,000 individuals were on it.

Only about 500 people currently on the no-fly list are Americans, the official said…

The United States can now ban people from flying who are “deemed to be a threat to national security” or who had gone to terrorist training camps, said the official. The earlier standard was to block only those considered a specific threat to try to bring down a plane…

…Analysts can now use single-source information, if it’s considered credible, to recommend someone for one of the government’s terror watch lists, including the no-fly list…

The government also has a much larger list, called the Terrorist Screening Database, with approximately 510,000 names currently on it. The smaller no-fly list is a subset of that.

About 1,000 changes are made to the catalog of possible terrorists each day. Names are added and deleted, or more information is included on individuals.

If I ever intended to fly again, I’d probably take the time to harass the bureaucrats in charge of this crap to see if I made the list, yet.

Actually, I refuse to travel anywhere in the world I can’t drive to in my old pickup truck. Courtesy of George W. Bush, Homeland Insecurity and the TSA.

Their vacation trip to Los Angeles came to a screeching halt

Holidaymakers have been warned to watch their words after two friends were refused entry to the US on security grounds after a tweet.

Before his trip, Leigh Van Bryan wrote that he was going to “destroy America”. He insisted he was referring to simply having a good time – but was sent home…

Trade association ABTA told the BBC that the case highlighted that holidaymakers should never do anything to raise “concern or suspicion in any way”. Don’t even fart out loud if you’re passing through the TSA.

The US Department for Homeland Security picked up Mr Bryan’s messages ahead of his holiday in Los Angeles.

The 26-year-old bar manager wrote a message to a friend on the micro-blogging service, saying: “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.”

The Irish national told the Sun newspaper that he and his friend Emily Bunting were apprehended on arrival at Los Angeles International Airport before being sent home. “The Homeland Security agents were treating me like some kind of terrorist,” Mr Bryan said…

In another tweet, Mr Bryan made reference to comedy show Family Guy saying that he would be in LA in three weeks, annoying people “and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up”…

After the interview, Homeland Security’s reported: “Mr Bryan confirmed that he had posted on his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe.

The fact remains that TSA and Homeland InSecurity not only are missing a sense of humor – they have few if any brains. The same people who learn to read and write based solely on phonics appear to have learned what they know of civil liberties at the white American Legion bar on a Friday night.

You’d think they’d be used to loaded guns by now

A passenger’s gun went off Sunday morning in the security line at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, police say.

TSA officers found a loaded .22-caliber Magnum revolver in Richard Popkin’s carry-on bag during an X-ray scan, police said.

And while an Atlanta police officer responding to the scene tried to clear the five “snake” shot bullets – small game pellet ammunition – in the handgun, a shot went off, according to an Atlanta Police incident report obtained from Hartsfield officials.

No one was injured, but according to the responding officer’s account from the incident report, “I was grazed by a pellet fragment on the left side of my face. However, there were no visible injuries.”

Popkin…told police he didn’t realize the pistol was in his messenger bag…

Popkin was arrested and charged with carrying a weapon in an unauthorized place and is being held at the Clayton County jail pending bond.

I understand why people make stupid excuses to cover their buns in a case like this. But, there are legal procedures for transporting guns. I own a lockable, purpose-made gun transport case for handguns.

Of course, you still run the risk of the TSA or airport employees stealing your gun.

 
Flying during the holidays is never fun thanks to the crowds, but airport security policies are going to make things even more unpleasant. If you’re prepared for this year’s security theater hijinks, however, you can avoid some of the misery. Here’s how you can deal with all the crap at the airport this holiday season…

According to the Consumerist, the TSA warns that you shouldn’t wrap your gifts if you plan to take them through security. This sounds pretty ridiculous, but the TSA’s explanation is actually reasonable:

Wrapped gifts are screened just like any other item. We can see through the paper just like we can see through luggage, but just as we have to open a bag when it requires a search due to an anomaly or an alarm, we have to open wrapped items as well if they alarm or require additional screening…

Basically, don’t travel with a knife set or bomb making kit and you’ll probably be fine with a little wrapping. That said, be prepared to re-wrap your gift should a TSA agent feel the need for further inspection.

Are you traveling alone? You probably don’t want to deal with the massive family in front of you who’s trying to dump their bulk package of juice boxes before heading through the scanners. If you’re a family, you probably don’t want to be rushed by all the single people either. In most cases your airport security checkpoint should now have separate lanes for regular travelers and families…

In my experience, these lanes are often unmarked but tend to fall on the left or right side of the checkpoint. It’s always best to ask, but if you’re unable to find anybody to help you then just look for the line with lots of children. Chances are that’s the one you should join if you’re a family and avoid if you’re not.

Good news! Your kids’ shoes aren’t bomb-laden, presuming they’re 12 years or younger. The TSA has decided that young children can leave their footwear attached to their feet when passing through security. Although this is a generally positive change, the TSA warns that your kids may be asked to remove their shoes under certain circumstances and they may receive a pat-down if they cause an alert…

Remember all the fuss about the body scanning machines that showed some unpleasant renderings of what we look like underneath out clothes? The TSA actually paid attention and offered somewhat of a compromise. When you go through these new scanners you’re no longer naked-ish…

This still doesn’t eliminate the concerns of having a fairly frequent low-level x-ray, but at least you’ll look more like a cartoon than a fat blob to your onlooking TSA agent.

For more information about holiday travel, the TSA has posted a full guide. We’ve covered the important stuff, but if you want a look at some of the basics and enjoy bad turkey jokes you should check out their post.

Or you can make the same decision I have – and refuse to travel anywhere you can’t easily drive to with a 20-year-old Dodge pickup truck.

Tightened security at airports has created new problems for medical patients, who may be subjected to embarrassing public pat-downs after imaging machines detect devices or implants related to their health.

The latest case involves Lori Dorn, a 44-year-old New York woman who learned in March that she had breast cancer. After tests revealed a high genetic risk for cancer, Ms. Dorn underwent a bilateral mastectomy in April as well as a grueling chemotherapy treatment that just ended in September. As part of her breast reconstruction, tissue expanders were implanted to stretch her skin before placement of a permanent breast implant.

But…last week, on her way to San Francisco to visit friends, she was treated with hostility and humiliated after the tissue expanders were detected by a body scanning machine at Kennedy Airport in New York. She said the workers from the Transportation Security Administration would not let her retrieve a medical card explaining the implants, a situation she wrote about on her blog:

I told her that I was not comfortable with having my breasts touched, and that I had a card in my wallet that explains the type of expanders, serial numbers and my doctor’s information and asked to retrieve it. This request was denied. Instead, she called over a female supervisor who told me the exam had to take place. I was again told that I could not retrieve the card and needed to submit to a physical exam in order to be cleared. She then said, “And if we don’t clear you, you don’t fly,” loud enough for other passengers to hear. And they did. And they stared at the bald woman being yelled at by a T.S.A. supervisor.

I have been through emotional and physical hell this past year due to breast cancer…. I understand the need for safety when flying, but there is also a need for those responsible to be compassionate and sensitive to each situation.

Ms. Dorn said she is not opposed to being patted down, but believes she should have been given a chance to explain her medical situation and taken to a private area for the pat-down. She said a private pat-down was never offered.

She also says she still has several painful areas on her chest where her body is still healing. “The areas are very sensitive with or without touch”…

The T.S.A. e-mailed a statement about the incident, saying that proper screening procedures were followed.

The Obama administration hasn’t improved on the range of incompetents, dullards and burger-flippers that met the standards of the Bush administration. Nor has the White House of Change interfered with other vile and criminal standards for conducting the anti-terrorism patrol more critical to the federal budget than, say, health, education or air quality. No surprise.

But, treating all citizens as criminals and cattle has got to stop! Constitutional protections against behavior common to kingdoms and dictatorship were originally instituted for the same reasons they need to be revived. We are decent human beings supposedly living in the Land of Liberty. Focus the crap behavior on legitimate targets not the whole populace.

Now there’s a way to protest those intrusive TSA X-ray body scanners without saying a word. Underclothes printed with the 4th Amendment in Metallic Ink. Let them know they’re spying at the privates of a private citizen. The 4th Amendment to the US Constitution is readable on TSA body scanners.

From the designers:

“4th Amendment Wear made a statement without having to say a word. It’s what we considered ‘technological Judo’ – it used the very act of invading someone’s privacy to communicate a message that questioned how far Americans were willing sacrifice that sense of privacy. It didn’t outright condemn the search – it just raised questions. It gave the wearer a sense of individual liberty to be able to express their concerns, while not causing a disturbance.”

Yes, this truly appeals to my sense of humor – and provokes limitless ideas of variations on the theme. Some of which aren’t even obscene.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

Three Transportation Security Administration officers and two police officers are among 20 people arrested Tuesday on charges of conspiring to distribute tens of thousands of oxycodone painkillers for illegal sale from Florida to Connecticut, according to U.S. Attorney of Connecticut David B. Fein.

According to court documents, TSA and law enforcement officers accepted cash and gift cards to allow large quantities of the prescription drug and large sums of money to be transported between Florida and New York airports.

“In these times no one needs to be reminded about how dangerous it is when officers who have sworn to uphold the law accept money to ‘look the other way’,” Fein said.

“Operation Blue Coast” began with an arrest at a hotel in Stamford, Connecticut, on April 8, in which DEA officers recovered 6,000 oxycodone pills from a man who traveled from Florida to Connecticut., officials said.

According to court documents, the man revealed that he traveled back and fourth several times a week over the course of a year, buying drugs in Florida and transporting them to Connecticut through commercial airlines and by automobile. He said he sold the drugs to traffickers in Connecticut for a profit…

According to the DEA, to transport up to 8,000 pills per trip, the man said he paid off the arrested TSA officers who screened the passengers and luggage at the Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, and Westchester County Airport in White Plains, New York. He told the DEA he also paid more than $20,000 to TSA officers in New York to make sure he could pass with large sums of cash, the profits from his drug trafficking.

Looks to me that human resources management in the TSA and a couple of police departments are doing about as thorough a job of checking out their employees as, say, the average voter in New York and Florida does at choosing their Congress-critters.

That’s not meant as a joke. Signing off on the Patriot Act and similar repressive laws that limit the liberties of ordinary citizens and then turning the management over to administrators who wouldn’t have noticed they had crooks on the payroll if the DOJ hadn’t sent them a memo – ain’t exactly funny.

A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed most of the constitutional claims raised by a Charlottesville man who was arrested after stripping down to his running shorts during an airport checkpoint protest…

False imprisonment and malicious prosecution claims against three Richmond International Airport police officers were not included in the motions for dismissal.

Aaron Tobey, 21, was detained at an airport security checkpoint on Dec. 30 after partially disrobing to display part of the text of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment handwritten on his chest. Tobey says he was protesting security measures, including enhanced pat-downs and the use of whole-body imaging scanners that he believes violate the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

…Judge Henry E. Hudson also rejected the equal protection and search-and-seizure claims against the TSA screening officers who summoned police, but said it was premature to dismiss the free-speech claim…

“The question, then, is whether the TSOs in fact radioed for assistance because of the message Plaintiff sought to convey, as opposed to Plaintiff’s admittedly bizarre behavior or because of some other reasonable restriction on First Amendment activity in the security screening area,” Hudson wrote.

The president of The Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville-based civil liberties group that filed the lawsuit on Tobey’s behalf, said the answer to that question is clear.

“Aaron Tobey was arrested for exercising his right to free speech, which is clearly protected under the First Amendment,” John W. Whitehead said after Hudson issued his ruling.

Tobey, a University of Cincinnati student at the time of the arrest, staged the protest as he prepared to board a flight to Wisconsin to attend his grandfather’s funeral. Disorderly conduct charges were later dropped by the Henrico County prosecutor.

You can’t always fight City Hall. I recommend against trying it alone. But, I applaud those who use their Constitutional rights to free speech to do so. The TSA – like most Homeland Insecurity mutants – stinks on ice for limiting our freedom to travel while achieving next to nothing at providing safety and security for air travelers.

Federal US officials are attempting to determine how a stun gun was brought onboard a JetBlue flight that landed at Newark airport in New Jersey.

Crew members at Liberty International Airport found the stun gun tucked into the back of a seat on the plane following the flight from Boston.

The FBI said on Monday that there was no indication the gun, found on Friday, was intended for an attack…

How do you determine the gun wasn’t intended for an attack? Because there wasn’t one?

Members of the airline’s crew were cleaning the JetBlue aircraft at 2220 local time on Friday evening when the gun was discovered…

Authorities said they gave the weapon to the Port Authority of New York, before it was handed over to the Transportation Security Administration, the body responsible for carrying out security screening of passengers.

The TSA can be counted on do as thorough a job at finding who brought it on board – as they did at preventing it from being brought on board. Right?

A special unit of airport screeners, charged with detecting suspicious behavior, engaged in racial profiling so frequently at Newark Liberty International Airport that their resentful colleagues called them “Mexican hunters,” according to an internal federal report.

Officially known as behavior detection officers, or BDOs, the screeners were supposed to focus on
nervous, erratic or evasive gestures or speech and other indicators to single out passengers for extra scrutiny, but instead they concentrated on whether Mexican or Dominican passengers had proper visas or passport stamps, the report said — all at the direction of their managers.

If not, those passengers would be subjected to bag searches, pat downs, questioning and referrals to immigration with bogus behaviors invented by the screeners to cover up the real reason the passengers were singled out.

“It became a joke in the unit, these individuals were called the great Mexican hunters,” Newark BDO Paul Animone told investigators, according the report. “I did not agree or did not go along with these types of referrals, but if I was teamed up with one of these BDOs, I would go along with the referral and perform the bag check. When I disagreed with these referrals and brought it to the attention of the BDO managers, I was told by the BDO managers that I was not a team player…”

Å report said Mexican and Dominican passengers were singled out for scrutiny of their travel documents as an easy way to drive up the number of referrals by Newark’s BDO unit so that it would appear productive, even though the officers’ real job was to look for behavior that might indicate a security threat…

What motivated the practice? The same sort of mechanical job rating that afflicts many bureaucracies. They needed sufficient numbers to prove they were doing something valid and valuable – regardless of final determinations. So, they picked on a couple groups of inbound passengers less familiar with language and procedures, assigning “suspicious” actions to everything from bewilderment to speaking Spanish – therefore prompting special searches and investigation.

Good old-fashioned self-serving sleazy behavior.