airline security
 

back before the tsa, airline passenger screening was under the auspices of the faa. there were then and there are now certain profiles used in the screening of passengers. these profiles are for obvious reasons on a need to know. these profiles do not include anything racial. they do include many of the same things mentioned in the isreali article. so rest assured there is much more involved in our security at the airport than what you read in the media. im retired from a major airline and spent 40 years very involved in this area.

The Israeli system is an effective one but I don't think it would "scale up" well in the U.S. market. I think this market is just too huge for such a system to work. Not that I agree with the way we're doing it now....

I keep hearing the refrain "it won't work here", and I don't believe it. You are being checked in now, one by one, as you enter the airport and go through security. It can be done, if we would only train the personnel.

But you would have to replace all of those tsa drones with a highly qualified, motivated and train staff....with brains. And..you'd have to hire a huge number of them.

RichieLion, you are 100 percent correct. We could indeed profile terrorists without profiling ones cultural or religious affiliation. There is one big problem, as I see it, when we talk about the Israeli security system. They only have to secure one major airport (Tel Aviv), and maybe a half a dozen minor airports. We have hundreds of airports across this country of ours. Also the Israeli officer that is interrogating the passenger is highly trained in the art and science of profiling individuals. How much of a tax increase would we be willing to pay for the additional training, it would take to place these highly trained interrogators in our airports?

That is a good question; but these imaging machine costs millions of dollars and have to be serviced; and we're also paying a TSA staff of 50,000, or so, who make good salaries and benefits and will soon be union employees with even bigger perks. I don't think we'd need more personnel, just better trained personnel.

And while we are focused on looking for bombs in airline
 

related travel...the terrorists are focused where?

Just think for a moment of all the other means available to them in the so many vulnerable aspects of our open life style here in America.

My fear is while we are so intensely focused on airline security there may be less scrutiny in and around other vulnerable venues.

Profiling is a definite legitimate means to an end. To not profile to satisfy any notion of political correctness is just outright stupid!!.

btk

Once they get a union, we'll never be safe. Just think of everything that is government run and unionized. Many do not do well what they are paid to do.

Yoda