Where's The Do Not Fly List When We Need It?

OK, it's Crazy News Day apparently.

So, a local software consultant has been convicted of "sexually groping" the thigh of a fellow passenger on a flight from Las Vegas to Chicago.   He was convicted by a Federal jury after a 3 day trial in Chicago.   But wait, there's more.

The guy was seated between a woman (in the window seat) and the woman's husband (aisle seat) for this flight.   The woman planned to sleep during the flight and woke up several times when feeling something on her leg.  The third time, she woke to discover the guy's hand up the leg of her shorts, at which point the woman "struck" the consultant and yelled at him.  Fellow passengers and flight attendants on the 2011 Southwest Airlines flight also testified.     But wait there's more.

It appears that the offender has been convicted twice before for virtually identical crimes.   In 2000, he pleaded guilty in Cook County Court to groping the breast of a passenger in the seat in front of him on a flight from Detroit to Chicago.  In 2002, he was convicted in Federal Court in Detroit for groping the breast of a fellow passenger on a flight from San Jose to Detroit.

So, we have a secret "No Fly List" in this country.  If your name gets on this list, you're banned from boarding flights, allegedly because you might be a terrorist and harm people.  So if we already have this list, why isn't this jerk, a serial sexual groper with three convictions on his record, banned from flying anywhere?   He's a clear and present danger to female passengers.  How many felony convictions are required before you get jail time?
 

TSA Intrusive? Yawn.

I don't fly much anymore, mostly because it's become an unpleasant, over-crowded, and expensive exercise.   Lately if I travel far enough to consider flying, I've ended up driving.   The hullabaloo in recent weeks about the new TSA inspection procedures and use of new "x-ray" equipment has largely, IMO, been a tempest in a teapot.   And now at least one VERY experienced traveler also feels the reality isn't anywhere near as awful as the anticipation, especially if you're a talking head like John Boehner or Matt Drudge.  Travel expert Arthur Frommer has blogged about his recent travel through Kennedy Airport in NYC, and he found getting through security to be somewhat of an anti-climax. 

My TSA experience was totally without drama or tension. My passage through security was handled professionally by people dedicated to a never-ending battle with Al Qaeda, and these procedures seemed to be welcomed by citizens of a democracy who have determined never to let the terrorists interfere with our right to travel. We have all acquiesced in these trivial burdens out of a determination to keep our skies safe for air travel.
Matt Drudge will now need to find a new crusade.

Read Frommer's account here.

Who's The Security Risk?-Part 3

Ah, the continuing saga of the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) inability to distinguish between al-Qaida operatives and 8 year old kids from New Jersey.  The NY Times article tells the story of Mikey Hicks, who has spent countless hours of his young life getting frisked at various airports, starting when he was about 2 years old.   Yes, two years old.

Why are our security systems so rigid?   Any system, security-related or other, that is so rigid that it does not allow for judgment and adjustment, is so brittle that it will break and fail when it's most needed.   

The underlying problem may be that the people implementing our security systems are unwilling to make risk assessments and make decisions accordingly.   That is, we should expect that someone at the airport can look at an 8 year old kid and make a judgment that this is not the same person whose name is on the watch list or whatever damn list TSA is using (after the near disaster in Detroit on Christmas Day, we learned that our government has a number of "lists," only one of which actually prohibits alleged "bad" people from getting on commercial airliners).   The multitude of such "lists" is also part of the problem with our security.

Someone at TSA ought to be able to take a chance on determining that an 8 year old kid from NJ, or an 80 year old grandmother from wherever, is not a security threat.  I doubt you'd see the Israelis spending so much time frisking Cub Scouts.

The FBI Sucks at Photoshop

There appears to be no end of the USA's inability to get security right. This incident would be funny, if it wasn't so lame.

The FBI decided to produce one of those age-progression photos of Osama bin Laden since he's aged over the years he's been hiding out in the mountains. Unfortunately, the FBI seems to have used Photoshop Lite (and perhaps a trainee photo analyst?) and essentially used Google to find a photo on the Internet; a photo from a Spanish politician's campaign poster. So this Spanish guy, Gaspar Llamazares, now finds himself on an FBI wanted poster and doesn't find it particularly humorous.

“Bin Laden’s safety is not threatened by this but mine certainly is”, Llamazares said.

Buried Under A Mountain Of Information

Our government's repeated efforts to accumulate information about us results in us being less secure rather than more. This article ("The backfiring of the surveillance state") is from Salon.com, and author Glenn Greenwald gives two main reasons why this is true:

(1) eliminating strict content limits on what can be surveilled (along with enforcement safeguards, such as judicial warrants) means that government agents spend substantial time scrutinizing and sorting through communications and other information that have nothing to do with terrorism; and (2) increasing the quantity of what is collected makes it more difficult to find information relevant to actual terrorism plots

The article provides a number of examples of how information overload is making us less secure. One of the major ones is the Christmas Day attempted bombing of the airliner in Detroit. As more and more information is revealed as to what the government knew about the bomber before the near disaster, it's clear that more than enough information was there to keep him off American planes. What the President has described as a "failure to connect the dots" is a direct result of information overload. Our intelligence agencies had lots of valid information about the plot and bomber, but they couldn't see the "trees for the forest," to torture an aphorism.

So the next time someone tries to frame the debate over government surveillance powers as one of "security v. privacy and civil liberties" you might suggest that increasing the government's surveillance abilities will make us less, not more, safe. Glenn Greenwald quotes former FBI agent and 9/11 whistleblower Coleen Rowley:

Extraneous, irrelevant data clutter the system, making it even harder for analysts to make meaningful future connections. A needle is hard enough to find in the proverbial haystack, without adding still more hay. . . . Quantity cannot substitute for quality.

The 'Israelification' of Airport Security

This article is about the difference between what we in the U.S. and the Israeli's call airport security. It's about actually addressing the problem (keeping bad people out of airports and off flights) instead of inconveniencing everyone except the bad people. You can find the Toronto Star article here. The word of the day is "Israelification."

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.

Where the US/Canadian approach to airport security is reactive and focused on however the last bad guy attempt was carried out, the Israeli method is to keep people behaving (or potentially behaving) badly out of the airport. That's why we're still removing our shoes to get through the security line, and why we're now facing limits on having things in our laps during the last hour of a flight. Because the American security approach assumes that the bad guy has gotten on the plane. The result is escalating inconvenience for travelers and little or no real obstacles for bad guys. The Israeli's don't care if you're black, white, Arab, Jew; they care how you're behaving and whether that behavior is suspicious.

The Israeli security expert in the article outlines three "security perimeters" travelers must get through before they even get to the airport terminal. Checkpoints on the entrance road, parking lot, and terminal entrance are staffed by trained personnel who are looking for odd behaviors. One word repeated throughout the article is "trained." The Israelis spend the money on training personnel to look passengers in the eyes to detect nervous, potentially dangerous behavior. Identification of suspicious behaviors requires lots of training. Americans avoid looking each other in the eyes in the grocery store, no less at the airport.

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.

There's that word again: trained. The questions asked at various points aren't terribly important; what's important is the traveler's reaction and behavior when asked. If you act suspicious, you'll get searched. And even then, the Israeli approach is preventative, not reactive. For example, if a possible bomb is found inside the terminal in the inspection area, that small area is all that has to be "evacuated." It's bomb-proof and can withstand the detonation of 100 kilos of plastic explosives. There's no need to try to evacuate an entire airport terminal. Every time some idiot in the US wanders in through an exit, our response is to try to evacuate the terminal and find said idiot. Most often, the evacuation takes hours and the idiot has left the building along with Elvis. If the intruder was planning to detonate something he has more than enough time to do so.

Why do Americans "settle" for such lousy security? The Israeli security expert says it's because we're "nice:"

"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."

I think it's more because we collectively have the attention span of a gnat and we've been trained by our so-called leaders to go for the cheap, shallow, and largely ineffective approach to solving problems so we can refocus our attention on the latest celebrity gaffe. We should be demanding better from our leaders and our government. Much better.

On a lighter, related note, humorist Andy Borowitz has a plan, merging airport security with American health care reform: Full Body Scans to Double as Annual Checkups.

Who's The Security Risk?-Part 2

(EDIT 1/20/2010-See below)

This article ("Another Reason America Is At War") from the Chicago Sun-Times pretty much says it all. It's consistent with the notion that the only reason why the U.S. hasn't suffered a catastrophic terrorist attack since 2001 is because al Qaeda keeps sending incompetent mopes to attack us (i.e., Richard Reid and the latest chuckle-head).

For some years after 9/11, passengers were forbidden to get up to use the lavatory on the Washington-New York shuttle. Zero tolerance! I suppose it must eventually have occurred to somebody that this ban would not deter a person who was willing to die, so the rule was scrapped. But now the principle has been revisited for international flights, and fresh idiocies are in store. Nothing in your lap during final approach. Do you feel safer? If you were a suicide-killer, would you feel thwarted or deterred?


Why do we fail to detect or defeat the guilty, and why do we do so well at collective punishment of the innocent? The answer to the first question is: Because we can't -- or won't. The answer to the second question is: Because we can. The fault here is not just with our endlessly incompetent security services, who give the benefit of the doubt to people who should have been arrested long ago or at least had their visas and travel rights revoked. It is also with a public opinion that sheepishly bleats to be made to ''feel safe.'' The demand to satisfy that sad illusion can be met with relative ease if you pay enough people to stand around and stare significantly at the citizens' toothpaste.

The full column can be found here.

Edit 1/20/2010:   Steve Dahl's 1/13/10 column in the Chicago Tribune, Feeling naked and alone in the security line, repeats the question: are our reactive security measures making us more secure?

Who's The Security Risk?

So another dim bulb supposedly sent by al Qaeda has tried to blow up an American jet preparing to land in Detroit. Predictably, Homeland Security has "tightened" security rules in the aftermath. So far, we don't know much beyond the flight started in Nigeria, flew to Amsterdam, and then to Detroit. How this mope managed to get explosive materials on the flight remains to be seen, but the new rules we're likely to see will mostly make travel for the rest of us more difficult.

Am I missing something, or should we be doing things to make life difficult for al Qaeda and its hangers-on, rather than the vast majority of travelers? Some reports indicate this guy smuggled his explosives in his underwear from Nigeria. Now, everyone flying is going to be restricted to their seats for the last hour of their flight and won't be allowed to have anything on their laps during that time (including laptops and pillows). Presumably this would be to prevent the rest of us from setting fire to our pants (as this clown apparently did) while hidden by a blanket (or a laptop?). Wouldn't it make more sense to ensure that these jerks can't carry on explosives in their pants while the rest of us are carrying on laptops?

There's already been a report that U.S. officials were aware for two years that this particular Nigerian "could have terrorist ties." Despite that, he wasn't on any lists preventing him from taking commercial flights into the U.S. What's the point in knowing of potential terrorists if you don't think it's worth keeping them out of the U.S.?

What's wrong with this picture? If the Nigerian airport is unable or unwilling to adequately screen passengers leaving the country, wouldn't it make sense to prohibit flights originating there to land here? And if the passengers on this flight were also screened at the Amsterdam airport (which supposedly has a "good reputation for security"), what on earth happened?

In the meantime, the rest of the traveling public will be subject to more ineffective inconvenience and discomfort while flying. Bring on high speed rail service.

EDIT (12/29/09): As usual, Andy Borowitz gets to the heart of the matter with his "Department of Homeland Security Issues Terrorist ID Cards" article.