9/11 hadn’t happened when you were a child, @JHS. It’s a different world today.
My husband gets stopped about 60% of the time. He must share a name with a criminal. He has never had to go to a back room or been detained in any way. Usually it is cleared up within 10 minutes.
A lot of attention is paid to searching passengers. I don’t see the point of it when the airport workers do not have such strict procedures. Just think of all the stolen items from baggage and how that get spirited out without notice. http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/13/us/airport-luggage-theft/ Drugs and guns move through the US. http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/23/us/delta-employee-gun-smuggling/ and http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oklahoma-drugs-idUSKBN15F0M8.
The TSA is implementing a newer more invasive pat down for people who refuse to go through the machines or if the machine spots an anomaly. I have a 100% hit rate of “anomaly” - the back of my head and my left knee always lights up. Random passengers can also be selected. http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-92728297/. I am not how much worse it can get than this in December http://www.bet.com/news/national/2016/12/17/watch–cnn-s-angela-rye-posts-video-of-her–humiliating–tsa-sea.html
Now, here is the problem. Random cannot be assumed to be truly random. At Denver airport young men were being targeted. http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-patdown-colorado-idUSL2N0XB30F20150414 Women too have felt that they were being targeted. http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2012/02/03/female-passengers-say-theyre-targeted-by-tsa/
Yes, a couple of those articles are a couple of years old. I believe that human nature is what it is and perhaps this job is attractive to some creeps. Just this week a TSA officer was found to be texting a 13 year old. http://www.post-gazette.com/local/west/2017/03/15/Former-Pittsburgh-police-officer-accused-of-inappropriately-texting-13-year-old-girl/stories/201703150125?pgpageversion=pgevoke And a college student was molested http://abc7ny.com/news/tsa-screener-accused-of-molesting-college-student-in-lga-airport-bathroom/960533/.
Obviously not all TSA agents are dangerous. However, 73 that had possible ties to terrorism were permitted to work at the airport having passed their background checks http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-83742074/. ANd a war criminal http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/01/us/accused-war-criminal-works-at-dulles-airport/
I won’t even go into what the disabled and cancer patients go through.
If had a patient who shared a name with a cousin. He was detain d from a cruce for 2 weeks. I can’t share the atrocities that happened to him. Needless to say, he still cruises, but doesn’t leave the ship.
I am not sure if I’d cruise if I never wanted to leave the ship, but glad your patient must still enjoy it enough to continue.
The alternative fact is that he wasn’t detained. Those are the only facts that seem to matter anymore.
The TSA was not set-up to catch “terrorists”. The no-fly list is supposed to catch those guys.
TSA exists is a last line of defense, “catch-all” for anyone (usually amateurs) with weapons/explosives.
DH turns out to share initials and a birth date with a terrorist, so he kept getting flagged at the airport. After he submitted all sorts of invasive documentation, he was given a “known traveler number” that he enters when making reservations, and that seems to have cleared up the difficulty. Now he only gets randoms.
That said, I accidentally included a swiss army knife in my carryon that made it through two international security checks only to be discovered on a domestic flight inside a European country. And I don’t for an instant believe it was a random check that had me pulled out of the line leaving that country and detained - leaving my teenage daughter in a panic - for over an hour while they ransacked my dirty underwear.
The woman sitting next to me had flown back within 36 hours because her elderly mother, who she had just been visiting, had taken a turn for the worse just after she left. Both of us must have triggered some auto-profile thing.
Wasn’t the TSA set up to socialize / nationalize the then-existing system of airport security screening for weapons (which was previously done by private companies hired by airlines or airports)? (The disallowed object list was also changed then and later.)
If you travel enough, at some point you are likely to be stopped. I’ve been stopped in quite a few airports all over the world; my children have been stopped separately as well, even when they were minors and even when they were minors travelling alone. It is a cost of travelling these days; inconvenient but still worth it to enjoy modern travel in my opinion.
I was stopped pretty often when I booked last minute flights because I kept hoping against hope that the case would settle and no one would have to fly.
Since we have gotten Global Entry and book our flights weeks to months ahead of time, H and I have not been pulled for extra scrutiny (knocking wood it continues). They do examine my medical equipment that I fly with – showing varying degrees of interest and thoroughness in inspecting it.
So much money, so much room for abuses (and grey areas like this one), so much harm to America’s image and reputation around the world, and for what? The majority of fatal attacks inside the US are committed by white supremacists: http://nextshark.com/white-supremacists-killed-people-islamic-terrorists-u-s-since-911/
@marvin100 – looks like jihadists/muslims have retaken the lead (from the source of your source):
Almost doubled the count vs WS … and that totally ignores the gigantic elephant in the room, 9/11, with 3000+ dead.
If there was still a Nazi Germany and they were chanting “Death to America”. had committed an atrocity like 9/11, had training bases for white supremacists, and continued to threatened us, whites coming from that country and its allies would (and should) face extra scrutiny.
Except the travel ban doesn’t include the Saudi Arabia, where those terrorists came from, @droppedit . Not a single terrorist has come from Syria. Terrorists have come from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Egypt–all unaffected.
(Also worth noting, of course, that even if “jihadists” have overtaken white supremacists, the response is still outrageously disproportionate.):
And this thread is about the travel ban exactly how?
Okay, you can ignore that part @sorghum . The point remains that the airport detention ramp-up is disproportionate, costly, and ineffective.
Most of the world takes airport security very seriously these days. In some places, they’ve taken it more seriously for 50 years. The US is just catching up. It was nice to not have to do so for a long time, but those days are over. It is always your choice whether or not to fly.
Another non-story. :-q
@roycroftmom - I’ve lived outside the US for 15 years and travel international 4-6 times a year. The US has the most ridiculous security theater in the world. They made us take our shoes off for goodness’ sake. I mean, it’s laughable: if someone had once tried and miserably failed to hijack a plane with a pair of pants we’d all have to get on the plane in our skivvies when travelling to the States.
If the worst thing that happens to you is having to take off your shoes, count your many blessings on your privileged life and move on. If your shoes are so crucial to you, you can always fly into cities close to the border like Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and drive over the border, keeping your shoes on. There are many government programs which are not paragons of efficiency; this one doesn’t top my list.