Sen. Rand Paul Introduces TSA Reform Legislation 585
OverTheGeicoE writes "Over a month after Sen. Rand Paul announced his desire to pull the plug on TSA, he has finally released his legislation that he tweets will 'abolish the #TSA & establish a passengers "Bill of Rights."' Although the tweet sounds radical, the press release describing his proposed legislation is much less so. 'Abolition' really means privatization; one of Paul's proposals would simply force all screenings to be conducted by private screeners. The proposed changes in the 'passenger Bill of Rights' appear to involve slight modifications to existing screening methods at best. Many of his 'rights' are already guaranteed under current law, like the right to opt-out of body scanning. Others can only vaguely be described as rights, like 'expansion of canine screening.' Here's to the new boss..."
Re:It WAS privatized before TSA (Score:5, Informative)
The TSA wouldn't bother me so much if (a) it was just the airport and (b) they operated with professionalism. BUT in reality the TSA is expanding its operations to our streets, with random stops-and-searches along interstates (border states), bus stops, train stations, and publicly-open facilities like malls, unemployment centers, hotels, post offices, and most recently: Chicago parks.
As for (b) I have close to 1000 stories about the TSA groping women's breasts, men's penises, forced strip searches of elderly women, dumping urine or feces bags on the floor, forcing a woman to demo a breastpump (else they'd steal the ~$100 device), tackling a woman like she in a football game, holding a man in St. Louis because he was carrying ~$3000 in cash (not a crime), detaining a Senator because he opted-out of being groped & wanted to be scanned, forcing a woman to stand inside a glass jail for over an hour because she had milk for her child (which was then dumped & she missed her flight), and on and on and on.
Re:A lot later than that. (Score:4, Informative)
Right, what pilot could possibly go crazy and do stupid stuff?
Well, apart from ones on Jet Blue....
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-jetblue-pilotbre85e19b-20120615,0,7994226.story [chicagotribune.com]
But, anyway...
Re:A lot later than that. (Score:3, Informative)
All undercover TSA agents and any armed pilots use ammunition specifically designed to not rupture the hull.
Re:A lot later than that. (Score:5, Informative)
"Pilots can't simultaneously defend the cockpit and fly the plane. If somebody on the plane is going to be armed, it needs to be somebody who can spare enough attention to police the situation."
Complete bullshit. Not only are there 2 pilots, for some decades now there has been a little device called an "autopilot".
And autopilots are sophisticated enough that today, they can even land the plane without the pilot having to touch a control.
YES THEY DO (Score:5, Informative)
Top 5 Contributors, 2007-2012, Campaign Cmte
Alliance Resource Partners
$40,650
Koch Industries
$17,000
Mason Capital Management
$16,800
Murray Energy
$14,613
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00030836 [opensecrets.org]
Even more:
http://images.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/fecimg/?C00462069 [nictusa.com]
YOU need to wake up to the fact he wants to turn everything over to unregulated corporations.
Do we need a 3rd party? yes. heel a 4th and 5th party!
That does not me we should blindly jump on board anyone who shows up as 3rd party. Since you are ignorant of who donate money to them, I don't think it's not too far of a stretch to say you are blindly jumping on his bandwagon simply because it's a new band wagon.
The question is: Have you rapped yourself so emotionally into the Paul's that you won't change your view in light of the new evidence?
Bad reason for creating it in the first place (Score:4, Informative)
The TSA was created in the aftermath of 9/11 attacks, with the reasoning that failures in airport security were at partly to blame for those attacks succeeding. But the reason the hijackers succeeded (or partly succeeded in the case of United 93) was because they exploited existing assumptions about what airline hijackers do.
Prior to 9/11, the primary purposes of a hijacking were to gain publicity and to use the passengers and crew as hostages. The terrorists would issue demands (usually for release of prisoners allied with them), maybe force the pilot to fly the plane around from airport to airport. Maybe (but not often) they might pick out a passenger belonging to a group they hated (members of the US military, or Jews) and kill him. But overall, if everyone cooperated, they'd come out of it alive, albeit after some miserable days or weeks -- TWA Flight 847 [wikipedia.org] in 1985 being the archetypal example. This is the way the public perceived it, and it was the basis for official government policy: cooperate and negotiate, because the hostage are valuable to the terrorists. If the hostages are dead, the terrorists have nothing to bargain with, and the government has no reason not to go in with guns blazing.
Based on this, all the 9/11 attackers had to do was present the passengers and crew with a situation where the perceived risks of resisting were greater than the perceived risks of cooperating. Without the knowledge that their situation did not match the pattern and that cooperation would result in everybody being killed, a credible threat to the life of just one person would have been enough. The hijackers could have accomplished this with their bare hands by ganging up on a single vulnerable person (elderly or very young), holding him/her, and threatening to strangle them. No pilot was going to say "Go ahead, break the old lady's neck, the cops can arrest you when we land in LA." Having box cutters made things easier, but not having them (because airport security would have confiscated them) would not have stopped them.
The way people perceive the situation is different now, and indeed the perception changed during the hijackings, once the passengers aboard United 93 found out what what the hijackers actually intended. Now, a hijacking couldn't succeed unless the hijackers were heavily armed, because the assumption among everyone else would be that cooperation means dying.
My point here (sorry for the rambling) is that the assumption behind creating the TSA is "if we'd only had it on 9/11, the attacks would have been prevented", and that's not true. Likewise, if the 9/11 attacks were attempted using the same tactics today, they'd fail, TSA or no TSA.
Re:A lot later than that. (Score:5, Informative)
All undercover TSA agents and any armed pilots use ammunition specifically designed to not rupture the hull.
Nonsense. They carry regular jacketed hollowpoints, just like any other police officers, or civilians for that matter. A gunshot in a pressurized plane just pokes a small hole which the plane's normal pressure-maintenance systems can easily compensate for.
The abstract doesn't even imply it was planted (Score:5, Informative)
While you don't know me from anyone and I've never published any papers I did work as a metallurgist in a steel rod rolling mill for a little while in the early 1990s and in an electricity generating company after that. I've seen a lot of steel lose strength as it heats up, both the obvious red hot stuff (rod rolling from 600mm thick to 5mm), in boilers (a bit cooler) and in a crude oil heater in an oil refinery (just hot enough to lose strength and split).
Now you make thermite with metal dust, which means any metal dust made any way (eg. huge building collapse) is superficially going to look similar and unfortunately going to behave a similar way in a fire (see also flour dust explosions). In the case of a building made of steel and aluminium with a lot of organic material (wood, paper, plastics) and you grind it all up with a huge collapse then it is no surprise that it ends up as the material described in the abstract and we can all be thankful that the dust did not ignite after the buildings fell or there would have been an even larger death toll. I did some stuff with powered metal in the late 1980s at University, and the really fine stuff has to be handled very carefully due to the fire and explosion risk. The titanium powder came packed inside two tins, with the outer tin filled with an inert gas. Something like that would make a bigger bang, or actual thermite would have melted a lot more than what actually happened, or if that dust ignited there would have been a huge fireball.
Cherry picking key words appears to have led you to the wrong conclusion. There's conspiracy theorists that think a government is so powerful and omniceint that only an act of government can possibly hurt them. The real world doesn't work like that. Governments are made up of real fallible people, especially governments where Horse Judges are appointed to key positions.
What I get from that abstract is the sense that things could have been even worse. I do not see anything in it that implies that thermite was planted. Is there something in the entire paper that clearly implies that instead of just that the dust from a building made of steel and aluminium contains steel and aluminium? Have you read and understood the paper?
Re:A lot later than that. (Score:5, Informative)
Blowing out a window's less dramatic than the movies make it out to be. Seriously.