The millimeter wave whole body imager scans people's bodies.Posted on 09/14/2009 10:32:49 AM PDT by BGHater
As any airline passenger can attest, security at the nation's airports has gotten infinitely more stringent in the eight years since the Sept. 11 attacks.
While the technology to screen passengers has become more advanced and the check-in lines a little shorter, the question of whether flying is terrorism-proof remains.
By now the routine has become mind-numbingly familiar: Travelers take off their shoes and put them in gray plastic containers along with their toiletries. They carry no more than three 3-ounce bottles in a 1-quart plastic bag, remove laptops from cases and so on. It's a scene played out millions of times a day across the country's airports.
Controversial Technology
If not a showcase, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport is certainly one of the nation's better-equipped facilities, security-wise. It has the latest in explosives-detecting luggage X-rays and something called a "millimeter wave whole body imager." The machine produces an image of each traveler who passes through it and leaves little to the imagination.
A TSA employee who cannot see the passenger checks the scan for what Robin Kane, assistant administrator of security technology at the Transportation Security Administration, calls anomalies.
"He'll just see the image come up," Kane says. "They'll look and see if there are any anomalies on the body." For instance, he says, the employee scanning the images might notice the person has something in his right pocket, which would allow a targeted search.
The machinery at the checkpoints is just the tip of the iceberg of what the TSA says is a 20-layer approach to security.
'9/11 Hangover'
But critics of the airport-screening process call all this "security theater."
Patrick Smith, a commercial pilot who writes a blog called Ask the Pilot, for Salon.com, says much of what occurs at airline checkpoints is needless.
"We have this 9/11 hangover going on for eight years," he says. "We see it most poignantly at the airport."
Smith says there should be less emphasis on looking for sharp objects, which, since the advent of secure cockpit doors inside planes, don't pose much of a threat anyway. The focus, he says, should be on explosives detection.
"We're wasting immense amounts of time and manpower searching through people's bags for little knives and pointy objects, and taking harmless liquids away from people," he says. "That doesn't make us safer."
Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon says airports need to beef up security in another area — the "back" of the airport, where maintenance personnel have unfettered access to planes.
"Our original vision was that everybody accessing the secure area of the airport, whether it was the terminal or the tarmac, would have to go through screening — similar to the system at Heathrow airport," he says. "I mean mechanics — everybody has to go through that system every time."
Positive Steps
But DeFazio defends the TSA. He says screening has improved dramatically in recent years. "When I came to Congress, the level of security at the airport couldn't even find a fully assembled .45 in a briefcase with a pair of socks and a pair of underwear," he says. "Today there is no question they would find a fully assembled handgun."
The government has spent about $45 billion since Sept. 11, 2001, on aviation security.
On Thursday, the Obama administration said it intends to fill a key vacancy at the top of the TSA and will nominate Erroll Southers to lead the agency.
Southers currently is assistant chief of Homeland Security and Intelligence at Los Angeles World Airports.
The millimeter wave whole body imager scans people's bodies.
Joy. How much would it cost to secure the border?
Another bonanza for unionized government jobs courtesy of D-rats amendments when W wanted these contracted to private companies.
Are Post-Sept. 11 Airport Screens Just ‘Security Theater’?
The prime function is to Sovietize the mentality of the American people.
Nothing. We’re already paying the troops anyhow.
My buddy is a pilot. It always amuses him that they take away his little “pointy” objects but he still has his two bare hands that he could use to fly the plane into any object of his choosing. It’s all a hoax and is all theater. You can bet all those people delivering sodas and magazines are not being screened as carefully as they should be.
Aviation “security” was implemented when passengers realized that their hijackers might use their airplane as a cruise missile. Better to die fighting that to be flown into a building.
Wow. What happens when kids go through? Child porn? Serious.
Getting on a plane to travel overseas a shortly after 9/11, I couldn’t help but notice that the metal silverware was replaced by plastic. Walking through first class I also noticed an entire tray of GLASS glasses. Any passenger could grab a glass, break it, and have a “pointy object” that would do just as much damage as a razor blade. ‘Security theater’ it surely is.
Yup, I agree. Theatre pure and simple, and doens’t make us one iota safer.
Regards,
True story...I was boarding a plane in Dallas and got waved into a pat dpwn booth. I was facing the gate. I am one of the most obvious white men in America, older and obviously a business travler. While I was being patted down and examined what looked lik three poster children for Jihad rolled up to the line, walked through with two bags apiece, speaking some Arabic language, went through “security” and headed for the gate. I sais to the silen t guy who was going through my stuff “Are you guys kidding? YOU ARE PUTTING ME THROUGH THIS AND WAVING THESE THREE INTO THE PLANE? I WON’T GET ON THAT PLANE WITHOUT THEM GETTING THE SAME SEARCH!” And yes, I was really loud.
Well, you would think I had just threatened to kill the POtuS. Yep, I was pissed, but what happened was I was surrounded by two more ugly SOB’s who thought I was WAY out of line (their ethnicity aside, I was having trouble understanding all the words, but got the gist) and was told I had better STFU or I WOULD miss the plane, because I would be held by security for “deeper clearance.”
Just as things were about to get a little ugly, there were obviously a number of passengers in the line that saw the same unbelievable PC wave-through that I did and there was such a commotion and several people at the desk, that it took all of us in REBELLION to get the Saudi looking Homies off the plane and passed through with a reasonable amount of security. They were, of course, deeply offended and really pissed that they would be singled out like that.
Score one for the older white guy, some offended passengers and common sense, I guess, but I wonder how many others have had similar stories?
I worked as a security guard at the Mpls-St. Paul airport in the 70s and 80s. Both passenger gates and maintainance gates.
1) “Pointy” objects can still be used to take hostages. Since passengers are generally unarmed, an airplane is a hostage-rich environment. Yes, they should be screened for.
2) It is more like “Political-Correctness Theater” than “Security Theater”. Profiling is a valid and effective security measure. But the hands of the TSA workers are tied by PC rules.
3) Yes, the biggest hole in security is the maintainance workers.
And all those hands with swine flu germs on them touching those gray plastic boxes. A source for the upcoming pandemic.
The idiot made me miss my flight. If I did have an explosive in my case, that moron would never have found it.
Hey, mini-tea party! Somewhere Sam Adams is smiling.
He asked to see their Supervisor in the loudest of tones, and told him her Civil Rights are being violated and that you have a Civil Rights Suit on your hands if you continue.
They stopped faster than $&!t threw a tin-horn.....
Umm... S&%t doesn’t stop on its way through a tin horn.
Did the rate of plane crashes drop or stay the same since they started this “needless” checking?
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