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TSA stands by officers after pat-down of elderly woman in Florida

Yes. As per procedure. As zyphillin said, it's OK to profile Arabs (which again wouldn't be a good way to secure an airport) but it's not OK to search white women and kids. Keep on truckin' GOP!

Call me a realist, but when women and kids start blowing themselves up as suicide bombers, I'll be first in line to make sure they're profiled too.
 
Call me a realist, but when women and kids start blowing themselves up as suicide bombers, I'll be first in line to make sure they're profiled too.

They already are. People in this thread or the other TSA thread have linked to cases of 8 year old suicide bombers. If you start profiling one group, and ignoring the rest, terrorists will just use another group. It's not that hard. There are white radicalized Muslims as well mind you.
 
Call me a realist, but when women and kids start blowing themselves up as suicide bombers, I'll be first in line to make sure they're profiled too.

Going one further...when has that even HAPPENED on a flight originating in the US?

Im all for the XRay machines. they are pretty fast and Im anything but self conscious about what my sillouete is going to present on an XRay. Make sure the machines dont have hard drives (and it's proven that they do) and put the screener in a concealed location...and I cant see how anyone could even care.
 
Going one further...when has that even HAPPENED on a flight originating in the US?

Im all for the XRay machines. they are pretty fast and Im anything but self conscious about what my sillouete is going to present on an XRay. Make sure the machines dont have hard drives (and it's proven that they do) and put the screener in a concealed location...and I cant see how anyone could even care.

Exactly. I agree with you that much, to not save images of scanned persons. Other than if someone is detected to have an illegal object, then the image should be saved and studied, but again, you really can't trust what's going on with those things and there'd need to be some serious oversight.
 
They already are. People in this thread or the other TSA thread have linked to cases of 8 year old suicide bombers. If you start profiling one group, and ignoring the rest, terrorists will just use another group. It's not that hard. There are white radicalized Muslims as well mind you.

Suicide bombers in souks in the middle east. When has it happened oh...EVER in the US and especially on an airplane? If thats REALLY a concenr then shouldnt we be doing cavity searches before kids go to elementary school or gramps goes back to the old folks home? I dont hear anyone suggest there shouldnt be adequate intelligent safety measures. Groping granny and babies...thats just plain goofy.
 
Once again... the arguments that if we do it at airports we should do it at schools are not relevant. These procedures are already active and have gotten results... a lot of results? Nah, but some? Sure. Have they discouraged terrorists? Sure.

And once again all it takes is a cell to use a kid to carry their contraband and then he will be allowed to go scott free. It's not hard to understand I have said this 100x already.
 
With new technology that allows terrorists to implant bombs in boobs and teeth, I really don't think searching Grandma's diaper is going to make us any safer.
 
I know stories of plenty of drug dealers who hid drugs and/or guns in a babies diaper. I know of a cop who didnt check and was shot and killed by a gun from a babies diaper. Whats the difference????? TSA was following procedure. If they didnt check and a hijacker was hiding something there....how many of us would be up in arms because they let that slip by????
 
Did I fall asleep for a while and miss out on a huge influx of Arab terrorist acts in the US? I only know of one. Nearly ALL the others were committed by Americans, usually by white Americans. Profiling Timothy McVeigh types would be more useful in actually deterring terrorism. And, of course, the fact that airplanes are incredibly safe.

There were two big changes after 9/11 that closed all the loopholes. Improved screening of passengers was not one of them. What did make a difference was locking the cockpit door, so that no one could take the pilots by surprise, and the other was simply a change in terrorism etiquette. It used to be that the passengers calmly stayed in their seats while the plane landed in Cuba and they were ransomed back. Now, the passengers expect that they are likely to die if they don't stop the hijackers. Since the hijackers have a locked door to get through, they will get noticed, and an entire plane full of people will grab their luggage and kill them. There will not be another 9/11, and it has nothing to do with security. It has to do with people having more knowledge.

All this airport security does not make us safer. At all.

It has helped. You just don't know what they have found. TSA has commented numerous times on people asking what they have caught and they have not shared because it is infact a matter of national security and not something that can be shared. If they go out and start sharing what methods they have used to find certain devices/compounds/terror suspects, then that's not going to be quite productive, is it? TSA also stops people who are on the TSC's list all the time. The media calls it the "No fly list".

This is a lot of bull. If they don't show us any proof, then there's no proof. It's a cop out to blither with a bunch of "national security" crap. If they've caught terrorists and arrested them, that's a matter of public record. And there are no such records. Oh yeah, and as for this "no fly" list. One of my college professors was on that list... for organizing an anti-Vietnam rally in the 60's. There are nearly ten thousand people on the no fly list, many of whom are children under 5. Oh yeah... real scary. And, of course, the bigger Terrorist Watch List (which I was on for a while, too) sits at between 40 and 400 thousand people. Yep... That's a lot of terrorists.

All this security is a lot of fear mongering. There are no boogeymen to be afraid of. There is no enemy at the gates. There's maybe a hundred or so Al Qaeda in the world. The score is terrorists - 1, good guys - lots. And if the bad guys do ever get a second point, it will not come in an airport.
 
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