govt patdowns at airports

Enforcer Talen · Post by **Enforcer Talen** » 2004-11-30 11:55am

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=s ... patdowns_2

rather interesting, I thought. its splitting between privacy vs secruity, with frisking seeming to edge into groping - but whats the best place to hide explosivss, other then where you wont be checked?

JME2 · Post by **JME2** » 2004-11-30 12:32pm

The words of Robin Williams come once again to mind.

The five-year old kid, they're patting him down and he's going, "What are yo doing? You're not a priest. Let go of me!"

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2004-11-30 12:51pm

I have to question the wisdom of this whole "random selection" process. It seems like a waste of time if the selection is truly random, since an actual terrorist has extremely low chances of being selected. Even apologists of this process admit this, but they defend it by saying that the terrorist won't risk his ticket being designated. The problem is that the boarding pass itself is designated, so that means the passenger himself will know in advance whether he'll be searched. It seems like a ridiculous system.

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2004-11-30 12:56pm

Durandal wrote:I have to question the wisdom of this whole "random selection" process. It seems like a waste of time if the selection is truly random, since an actual terrorist has extremely low chances of being selected. Even apologists of this process admit this, but they defend it by saying that the terrorist won't risk his ticket being designated. The problem is that the boarding pass itself is designated, so that means the passenger himself will know in advance whether he'll be searched. It seems like a ridiculous system.

One would think that they'd be smart enough to not mark it directly. Are they actually marked in an obvious fashion?

aerius · Post by **aerius** » 2004-11-30 01:17pm

The TSA is beyond retarded, and pretty soon you'll be looking at the complete collapse of the US airline industry thanks to their "security measures" which provide little if any actual security. Passengers are getting sick of them fast and travelling by other means.

Here at Canada Customs, we do targeted searches (officially we don't, but in practice we profile & target people) for drugs, weapons, illegal immigrants and all that other stuff. We put undecipherable codes on the papers (all papers get codes, only some of them are flags) to flag the people were sending in to secondary for full pat-downs and/or stripsearches, and these are all done in a separate private area by at least 2 officers of the same gender as the searchee.

People can still get through the system, but there's a lot less chance for abuse and we actually get things done and bust a lot of people, whereas the US system mostly hassles people & pisses off passengers to provide an illusion of security.

Korvan · Post by **Korvan** » 2004-11-30 01:21pm

When I flew to Venezuela about 10 years ago, on the return flight, all passengers were physically frisked before boarding the plane. They had two agents doing the frisking, one man and one woman. The woman was extremely hot, so both me and my Dad got into her line. Both agents though this was hilarious, but directed us to get into the proper line. My Mom was pissed off though.

But, noone in the line acted like they were being violated and the process went by pretty quickly, considering that everylast man woman and child was searched before boarding the plane.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2004-11-30 01:24pm

Stormbringer wrote:
Durandal wrote:I have to question the wisdom of this whole "random selection" process. It seems like a waste of time if the selection is truly random, since an actual terrorist has extremely low chances of being selected. Even apologists of this process admit this, but they defend it by saying that the terrorist won't risk his ticket being designated. The problem is that the boarding pass itself is designated, so that means the passenger himself will know in advance whether he'll be searched. It seems like a ridiculous system.
One would think that they'd be smart enough to not mark it directly. Are they actually marked in an obvious fashion?

According to the article, the person's boarding pass is marked with "SSSS" to signify that he will be searched. Unless it's some kind of funky UV ink, that suggests to me that it's marked on the ticket for the security people to see.