Airport Screening Procedures

[eion]

Those puffer machines need a serious redesign to address the serious breakdown rates they had. Temple Grandin had an interesting suggestion of how to make the machines easier to repair: put all the delicate electronics in a quick replaceable cartridge, inkjet printer style, and just replace that as needed and send it back to a factory to refurbish.

I think behavioral observation and interviewing in a way similar to the Israeli method would be a great help. Wouldn't have to be on the same scale to have some benefit, just have some specially trained TSA agents walking through the line talking to people and looking them in the eyes, "How are you doing? Where are you coming from? That's a great jacket, where'd you get it?"

[Broomstick]

Given Temple Grandin's success at designing animal control enclosures, maybe we should hire her to design airport security lines. She could utilize the natural way people in crowds move to avoid backups and chokepoints, and find ways of spotting the Bad Guys via behavioral analysis as well as making machine maintenance more efficient.

Of course, we'll have to avoid any reference to the fact a lot of her designs involving getting cattle to calmly walk into slaughterhouses under their own power...

[Zed Snardbody]

Sorry for the delay.

As for the injury rate:

But as painful as the screening process can be for travelers, it's no picnic for transportation security officers, or TSOs. The men and women at the front lines of the battle to keep the skies safe are among the lowest paid of all federal employees, and they have one of the highest injury rates.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =122948752

Lifting and searching all those bags is taking a toll on airport screeners, resulting in injury and illness that is the highest among federal employees.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4441227/

TSA employees had an injury rate last year four times as high as construction workers and seven times as high as miners. They missed nearly a quarter-million work days, which aggravated staffing shortages, caused them to miss training and violated a law requiring that luggage be screened with bomb-detection machines.

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/200 ... aims_x.htm

TSOs report that the “case management” that TSA claims has reduced days lost to on-the-job injuries often consists of inappropriate harassment that has included management illegally contacting TSOs private physician seeking changes to the doctor’s work order for their patient. Decreasing the reporting of injuries is by no means reducing the occurrence of injury.

http://www.afge.org/index.cfm?page=2009 ... entid=1740

As for just doing my job being an excuse, there are portions of the job I refuse to do because they cross my line of whats acceptable, as such I've sacrificed a promotion and about 10 grand a year. As far as I'm concerned a pat down that most travelers will never deal with is not a violation of civil rights, if the body imagers weren't finding things id agree with you. Come December or January depending on the time table its going to start to be a non issue anyway since thats when the roll out of the automated detection system starts its role out. The TSA officer viewing the raw image is going away and its going to be turned over to a computer.



The puffer machines were a huge mistake no one ever thought to test them in real world conditions before they rolled them out. While I don't doubt the ones at the CN Tower work well they probably don't see the traffic a major airport does. We brought in cake the day they dissembled ours they were such a pain in the ass.

[General Zod]

As for just doing my job being an excuse, there are portions of the job I refuse to do because they cross my line of whats acceptable, as such I've sacrificed a promotion and about 10 grand a year. As far as I'm concerned a pat down that most travelers will never deal with is not a violation of civil rights, if the body imagers weren't finding things id agree with you.

Except I've seen a number of claims that suggest the body scanners don't actually find the things they were put in place to find. But then again the report is classified so who the fuck knows? As for the "rights violation" I'm sure people who performed "enhanced interrogations" at abu ghraib didn't think they were violating people's rights either.

[Simon_Jester]

Come December or January depending on the time table its going to start to be a non issue anyway since thats when the roll out of the automated detection system starts its role out. The TSA officer viewing the raw image is going away and its going to be turned over to a computer.

So, Zed... what's this about a computer system for checking the take from the terahertz/backscatter machines, thus removing the human eye from the loop (at least under normal conditions)?

A friend of mine was talking about the idea of doing this a week or so back, but none of us seriously expected to see it implemented.

Of course, that still does nothing for the people with prosthetic medical devices who are getting screwed with, for instance, but it is a step in the right direction.

[Broomstick]

If the rank and file TSA guys have a better solution than the current pornscanner/grope system, and have to spend less time dicking with problems caused by the current system, then they'll have more time to deal in a rational manner with the prosthetic-using disabled. I'm assuming MOST such agents don't really get their jollies out of searching others - mostly I think they want uneventful days on the job, after which they can go home and get the fuck away from the public.

[Zed Snardbody]

Come December or January depending on the time table its going to start to be a non issue anyway since thats when the roll out of the automated detection system starts its role out. The TSA officer viewing the raw image is going away and its going to be turned over to a computer.

So, Zed... what's this about a computer system for checking the take from the terahertz/backscatter machines, thus removing the human eye from the loop (at least under normal conditions)?

A friend of mine was talking about the idea of doing this a week or so back, but none of us seriously expected to see it implemented.

Of course, that still does nothing for the people with prosthetic medical devices who are getting screwed with, for instance, but it is a step in the right direction.

The last picture I posted is an example of whats going to be rolled out. The person is scanned and the output is a generic front and back outline with a dot indicating an anomaly. In the picture the guy left something in his pocket. This is due for a phased roll out starting December or January. The actual image of the scanned person will not be seen by anyone just the outline and a check here dot.