Showing posts with label Airport scans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Airport scans. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Politically Correct Security

So we have a big furor at airports right now about the new full body scanning machines about to be installed. Many people are accepting them but just as many are against the idea.
I am not sure about them yet, except to say that apparently you must stand inside this full body imaging device scanner for a full minute. They are saying that any radiation you get is harmless. Hmmm. Didn't Phillip Morris tobacco corporation once tell us that about their product?
AND, now they say these scanning devices cannot see into body cavities.
Of course drug smugglers have been doing this for years - Women can insert more than a tampon into their vaginas and men, gay or not, can hide plenty of drugs or whatever in their rears. Not to mention that a common smuggling technique is to load the drugs into a condom, swallow the latex and poop it out later. What's to stop a bomber from going into the aircraft washroom and doing the same? Then combining the chemical elements to implement a mid air explosion?
The reaction so far from people seems just silly.
One person said, the people who scan you will be able to see my naked body, and they will be snickering. What? Pride and a haughty spirit goeth before a fall out of the sky? Another says he doesn't want a 10 dollar an hour person perving over seeing his wife. (Some might say at $10 an hour a guy needs SOME perks!) Invasive they all say. Intrusive. Insensitive.
And we ALL need to get scanned by these $250,000.00 machines because we mustn't offend that nervous, sweating guy with the black beard and wild eyes who doesn't speak English and has a bulky bum!
Of course al Qaida is politically correct too because they bomb everybody who is within range!

But instead of being scanned, we will be given the choice of the 'pat down' by a security officer. Lots of turmoil about that as well. This goes back to my $10 an hour comment too. One man PREcomplained, what if the guy doing the pat down is gay? Or a lesbian touching my wife! OMG what if the wife smiles? Another said, as long as the hand search is done appropriately.
What IS appropriate?
You can pat me down but don't feel anything intimate. Didn't the last guy have a cloth tube of explosive sewn into the inside crotch of his underwear? What's that, Sir? It's my penis, Officer. Okay then. Sure.
And none of this takes into account that a suicide bomber doesn't have to hold the explosives ON his body. The assumption still in effect is that you don't put luggage on a plane and then not get into that plane. Like what happened years ago. Airline staff are fine tuned to watch for that today.
But this guy is a suicide bomber, he's going to his 72 virgins anyway. How well is baggage scanned today? Watch the process as you check in, your luggage goes onto a speeding belt, and by the time you are walking to the plane it is being loaded into the soft, underbelly of the aircraft already! The terrorist just needs to poop out the trigger mechanism.
Or better still and altitude bomb. You know how that works, don't you? The chemicals are set into a piece of your your luggage, when the plane rises through an altitude of say, 10,000 feet, a trigger is set. The plane cruises to it's destination at about 30,000 feet. Then when the aircraft descends below 10,000 feet it will now set off the explosion.

Mind you, all this new concern neglects to mention that the 9/11 bombers and our latest Nigerian had VISAs to enter America. The prerequisite form of security of course, is to be aware way ahead of the boarding date of potential threats; who those passengers are, and what is their history and intent. But as President Obama said, the effort by the CIA was not acceptable.
The passenger on a watch list was not investigated properly, information coordinated or implemented properly. Even as far as to say the CIA was negligent.

So now we have a huge event coming up in Vancouver, Canada, the Olympic Games. And a security cost that started out as about 200 million dollars now seems destined for over a billion. Dollars.
And Canadians, as we all know are polite and easy to get along with, and are also politically correct. Sometimes they don't even sing Oh Canada for fear of offending someone within earshot in Greenland. And they are training their security people right now. Nice Canadians are being instructed to never touch a man's turban. And never EVER scan a man's wooden leg! Really? They said that? Yes really! No mention what to do if a person shows up in a full burqa. Person I said because who knows who is really under there?
And here's the rub - if people in an event line get impatient or irritable, security is instructed to let them through without any checking. Nice Canadians don't want anyone mad at them.
I was anxious when I heard that a foreign security might be working in Canada for these games, but I think I'd just as soon have the American Army checking me into the events.

So who wins?
Al Qaida seems to be ahead so far. The Western world is being hamstrung in spite of it's wonderful billion dollar space technology at the cost of a few brainwashed dupes, a few gallons of chemicals or some plastic explosive.

It seems the only safe way to fly in our future will be on a charter flight with a Krazy-glued nudist club.