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Every day, Transportation Security Officers interact with nearly two million travelers across the United States with a single goal in mind – ensuring the safety of the traveling public. TSA had a busy year in 2013, screening 638,705,790 passengers in 2013 (over 1,700,000 per day), which is  1,123,668 more passengers than last year.  Sadly, this year marked the first incident where a TSA officer, Gerardo I. Hernandez, was killed in the line of duty at Los Angeles International Airport.   In many ways, Transportation Security Officers are the public face of our nation’s security. It is difficult work, requiring patience, stamina,...

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog Under Obama, the TSA harasses children, the elderly, and the disabled, but gives members of the Muslim Brotherhood a pass The Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization.It was recently reported that in April 2012, the Obama administration allowed members of the Muslim Brotherhood to skip TSA screening.Meanwhile, the Obama administration gave a very invasive patdown to a three-year-old boy in a wheelchair, which caused the boy to tremble in fear.The Obama administration gave an aggressive patdown to a seven-year-old girl with cerebral palsy.The Obama administration said that a four-year-old girl was a “high security threat.”The Obama...

HILL AIR FORCE BASE -- If you're an active duty or reservist airman at Hill Air Force and you're planning to travel by plane, you can now step to the front of the line. Pentagon and Transportation Security Administration officials recently announced that all U.S. Department of Defense service members will be eligible for expedited pre-flight screening at airports -- which means they'll be able to get into an express line where they don't need to remove their shoes and belts or take laptops, iPads or liquids out of their baggage. The new policy is effective immediately, but troops must...

Pot-smoking travelers at one Colorado airport who need to ditch their stash before boarding can deposit their marijuana in an "amnesty box." The boxes began cropping up at Colorado Springs Airport on Wednesday to give passengers unaware it is illegal to carry pot on a plane the opportunity to dump their weed, The Gazette newspaper reported. While Colorado legalized recreational marijuana use on Jan. 1, major airports in the state have banned it on their facilities to comply with federal agencies, which still consider it illegal. ~snip~ Greg Phillips, aviation director of the Eagle County Airport near Vail, said the...

TSA pre-screening program The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has implemented an expedited security screening program at participating airports, allowing certain travelers to move through security with greater efficiency and ease when traveling on an itinerary within the United States or on select international itineraries.

Will TSA agents be replaced by machines? One of the main reasons that Americans hate to fly is the Transporation Security Administration (TSA). Not only is it annoying to have to strip down at security checkpoints, submit to the occasional patdown and stand in long lines to verify our identities, but the entire system is inefficient. So what happens if we take humans off of those jobs and use machines instead? Several European airports are looking to answer that question by installing eye and face scanners, along with fingerprint readers, at security checkpoints. Many airports’ immigration checks have used these...

The TSA is well-known for being too aggressive in its body searches, so it shouldn’t be surprising in the Obama years that the TSA has a web page titled “Transgender Travelers: Special Considerations.” “TSA recognizes the concerns members of the transgender community may have with undergoing the security screening process at our Nation’s airports and is committed to conducting screening in a dignified and respectful manner,” they promise. First, they reasonably suggest that your birth date, name, and gender on your reservation match your government ID (“Cisgender oppressors!”) Making Reservations: Secure Flight requires airlines to collect a traveler’s full name,...

In a blistering takedown of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s approach to airport security, the former chief of security for Israeli airports described an agency riddled with incompetence and wastefulness and that, despite large infusions of government money, may never have actually stopped a single terror attack. The TSA may even be inviting a deadly attack on airline passengers due to poor planning, he charged. Though his analysis was posted on the humor website Cracked, airline security expert Rafi Sela detailed serious flaws in American airport protection, ones he contrasted starkly with his own experience in Israel. For one thing, Sela...

Whether it’s removing a family from a flight because their 18-month-old is on a “no-fly” list, demanding that a 4-year-old get a pat-down because she hugged her grandmother, patting down an infant, evacuating a terminal because one parent passes a baby to the other without receiving a secondary screening, or screaming at the parents of a child with cerebral palsy, the TSA has shown time and again that it has a masterful touch when dealing with young children. That unique sensibility is definitely on display at the agency’s new site dedicated to educating children about security theater. TSA Kids is...

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is looking exclusively for an “economically disadvantaged woman owned small business” when it awards its next $30 million contract for security training. The agency announced a solicitation for a company to conduct training for its Inter-Modal Security and Training Exercise Program (I-Step) last week. [Snip] Contracting offices are required to set quotas for hiring EDWOSBs by the Small Business Act, which was enacted in January. According to the law, women are “subjected to discrimination in entrepreneurial endeavors due to their gender” and it is “in the national interest” to “remove discriminatory barriers.” The act sets...

It’s common knowledge that the Giottos Rocket Blowers and the TSA don’t get along. In the past we’ve told you to just leave it at home unless you want it confiscated with no more reason than “it looks like a bomb.” But the reason photographer and Canon Rumors forum user Surapon got was a whole lot more entertaining than that.

But they already seemed like "losers," as their successful Americanized uncle told reporters after the attack. They were out of place in the U.S., and my relationship with them developed because they needed so much basic advice about how to get by. I didn't sense impending danger in their household, but looking back, I can see now that I glimpsed a new type of threat to the U.S., one that we have only recently begun to confront.

A dedicated TSA agent successfully disarmed a sock monkey attempting to sneak a tiny toy gun onto a plane at a St. Louis airport last week. According to a report by King 5, “Rooster Monkburn” was traveling with Phyllis May of Redmond, Washington, on Dec. 3 when the observant TSA agent saw the monkey’s tiny gun, properly secured in a tiny holster, and tucked away in May’s sewing kit in her carry-on bag. It is unknown if Monkburn possessed a valid concealed carry permit for his revolver, but it was confirmed that he was impersonating the John Wayne character “Rooster...

The next time you go through airport security, check those gray and white bins where you unload your pockets. Last year, the Transportation Security Administration collected $531,395.22 in change left behind at checkpoints. Federal law requires the TSA to report the amount of unclaimed money they keep every year to Congress. The fiscal 2012 report, obtained by The Washington Post, shows the agency collected about $499,000 in U.S. currency, and another $32,000 in foreign currency, at their checkpoints.

"Rooster Monkburn" the cowboy sock monkey is without his pistol, thanks to a diligent TSA agent in St. Louis. Phyllis May of Redmond, Wash. says she is “appalled and shocked and embarrassed all at the same time” about the incident that happened on Wednesday. May has a small business selling unique sock monkey dolls. She says she and her husband were on their way from St. Louis to Sea-Tac and she had a couple of monkeys and sewing supplies with her in a carry-on bag. “His pistol was in there,” she says of the sock monkey “Rooster Monkburn,” a take-off...

In the opening pages of Ray Bradbury’s famous novel Fahrenheit 451, protagonist Guy Montag asks: Wasn’t there a time when firemen used to put out fires? They laugh at him, rebuke him and say: Everybody knows firemen start fires.

Over a decade of experience has shown that the nationalization of airport screening was a mistake. ... Private airport screening is the successful approach used by many other high-income nations. Indeed, all main airports in Canada use private screening firms, as do more than 80 percent of Europe’s main airports.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spent approximately $900 million over the last 5 years for behavior detection officers to identify high-risk passengers, but so far, according to the General Accountability Office (GAO), only 0.59% of the passengers flagged were arrested, and among those, not one was charged with terrorism—zero. In 2003, the TSA started testing its Screening of Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT) program, which was then fully deployed in 2007. About 3,000 behavior detection officers (BDO) “had been deployed to 176 of the more than 450 TSA-regulated airports in the United States” by fiscal year 2012 (Oct. 1, 2011–Sept....

TSA Pre✓™ is a pre-screening initiative that makes risk assessments on passengers who voluntarily participate prior to their arrival at the airport checkpoint. TSA Pre✓™ includes U.S. Citizens who are select frequent travelers of participating airlines or members of existing Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Trusted Traveler programs including Global Entry, NEXUS, and SENTRI programs. Canadian citizens who are members of NEXUS are also qualified to participate in TSA Pre✓™. In addition, passengers 12 and younger are allowed through TSA Pre✓™ lanes when traveling with an eligible parent or guardian.

Some drivers along a busy Fort Worth street on Friday were stopped at police roadblock and directed into a parking lot, where they were asked by federal contractors for samples of their breath, saliva and even blood. It was part of a government research study aimed at determining the number of drunken or drug-impaired drivers. "It just doesn't seem right that you can be forced off the road when you're not doing anything wrong," said Kim Cope, who said she was on her lunch break when she was forced to pull over at the roadblock on Beach Street in North...