Friday, March 15, 2013

TSA’s Blogger Bob: bombs too hard to spot unless they look like Road Runner cartoon

The Washington Post "addresses" a few TSA matters

Posted: 14 Mar 2013 07:15 PM PDT


In a post today by the normally clear-eyed Jonathan Capehart — and in The Washington Post, no less — you will see plenty of admiration for the way the TSA handles children and the elderly (they get to keep their shoes and jackets on!) as well as cheery support for the some-animals-are-more-equal-than-others Pre-Check program:

Anyway, all I'm asking is that the TSA treat the rest of us the way it treats little kids and old folks. Since 2011, youngsters under age 12 have been allowed to keep their ubiquitous light-up shoes on. And those age 75 and older have been able to keep their footwear on since 2012.[. . .]

But there is a way around the shoe rule and others that would transport you back to the golden days of air travel when you could breeze through security and go right to your gate. It's called TSA Pre. If the agency approves you after you've undergone its voluntary risk assessment, you get to keep your shoes, belt, and jackets on, and your laptop and plastic goody bag of 3 oz. toiletries get to stay in your carry-on.

Looks like I better sign up for this thing.

To Capehart and the TSA apologists alike (who, to my profound disappointment, are well represented in the article's comment section): I must remind you that just because the intrusive and often-painful gropings of sex organs (which in many instances are both abusive and, according to FBI definitions of sexual assault and rape, illegal), the needless and forced removal of prostheses and artificial limbs, or any one of countless debasements and offenses to human dignity have not happened to you personally, doesn't mean that they haven't happened to other people all over the country.

Innocent people who merely want to get from Point A to Point B.

As we have said so many times we're feeling metaphorically hoarse — as well as afflicted with serious writer's cramp —  the TSA is an agency rife with criminals, from thieves to child-porn aficionados to rapists to drug-smugglers to (yes) muderers and spouse-abusers.

On top of all that, the agency itself is an unjustifiable use of tax dollars. It should be disbanded.

Furthermore, TSA Apologists, although you may have "breezed through" what is rightly described as, and proven by security experts worldwide to be, pure Security Theatre, those of you who are in possession of a modicum of conscience and a decent level of sympathy toward your fellow human beings should take a moment or two and read about at least some of the agency's victims. Click the tab at the top of this page, where resides an ever-growing Master List of documented abuses and crimes.

Read it and realize that your tax dollars support an indefensible, ineffective, fascistic agency that violates your Constitutional rights and emphatically does not make us safe. Reinforced and locked cockpit doors; alert, non-compliant passengers; and good, solid police work on the ground — long before a terrorist even gets near an airport — are what protect us from that which is statistically speaking, an event so rare that one has a greater chance of being struck by lightning – four times more likely, in fact– than being involved in a terrorist attack.

(Photo: veggiefrog/Flickr Creative Commons)

TSA's Blogger Bob: bombs too hard to spot unless they look like Road Runner cartoon

Posted: 14 Mar 2013 05:44 AM PDT


Indeed, bombs are too hard to detect by the TSA's force of unskilled workers who take money for violating American's dignity, genitals, and Fourth Amendment rights.

The LAX Millennium Bomber plot was discovered, over the phone, by a guy in Seattle — a highly trained FBI agent who heard a guy who had a passport saying he was born in Montreal but speaking with a French-Algerian accent.

That's how you discover people intending to do harm:  With old-fashioned police work. With highly trained intelligence officers.

And you do it long before a plotter ever hits the airport, by using probable cause to root out actual plots; you don't treat every American, including U.S. Senators, like a potential al Qaeda member.

That's just idiocy.

Well, it's idiocy for everyone but those profiting from the existence of the TSA, like Michael Chertoff and the the quisling Blogger Bob, quoted in this New York Post story by Philip Messing and Dan Mangan:

The TSA whined yesterday that it's just too darn hard for agents to find bombs — unless the terrorists use explosives straight out of a Looney Tunes cartoon.

That was the agency's sorry excuse to explain how Newark Airport screeners were completely outmatched by an undercover fed who stuffed an IED in his pants and slipped through two layers of security.

"It's not like they're using a cartoonish bundle of dynamite with an alarm clock strapped to it," Bob Burns of the TSA Blog Team posted on the agency's Web site.

"The items are extremely hard to spot."

The Post exclusively revealed last week how the screeners colossally failed a Feb. 25 test at the Terminal B checkpoint, allowing a fed to get an improvised explosive device through a magnetometer and a secondary pat-down.

(Photo courtesy of Warners Bros.)

TSA: hostile work environment in Syracuse

Posted: 14 Mar 2013 04:58 AM PDT


In another case of whistleblowing, a TSA administrator in Syracuse, New York has accused his supervisor of creating a hostile work environment.

The administrator's name is Wayne Sparks. A few years ago, he started complaining about fraud, waste, and abuse at Syracuse area airports. Although he went up the chain of command, his claims didn't go over so well with his boss, Daniel Liddell:

In 2009, the TSA's Office of Inspection found that Liddell, Syracuse's federal security director, created a hostile work environment by threatening to fire employees, publicly belittling them, and routinely using profanity when he yelled at them, according to an email about the report from Wayne Sparks, TSA's administrative officer in Syracuse.

The inspectors found that Liddell "is militaristic, inflexible, a poor listener, and impatient with employees," Sparks wrote in the email, which he sent to two U.S. senators in the hope they would intervene. Sparks recently provided the email to The Post-Standard.

The Office of Inspection returned to Syracuse in 2010 and found improvement, Sparks said. But after that, conditions returned to the way they were and in some cases got worse, he said.

"They treat these people (federal security directors) like princes within the government," said Sparks, who's been assigned to Syracuse for five years. "They let them do whatever they want."

I applaud Sparks for speaking up, but you have to admit there's a certain poetic justice here: Liddell created hostile conditions for his employees. Kind of like the conditions the TSA creates for passengers.

There's the familiar bullying, verbal harassment, power-tripping, and, of course, retaliation. The difference is the TSA agents being bullied were able to leave — which they did, in droves:

In the month leading up to Liddell's departure, eight to 10 TSA screeners either quit or were fired as a result of Liddell's decisions, Sparks said. That resulted in a turnover of about 9 percent of the workforce within a month in Syracuse, he said.

Passengers, alas, aren't so lucky. Neither are taxpayers.

Needless to say, the TSA had no comment.

 

 

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