2nd Elderly Woman Says TSA Exposed Her

December 6, 2011

CBS News

By CBS

“A friend of mine thinks the TSA is doing their job – he wants more security at the airports and thinks they are making it more safe to travel. I’m concerned most Americans are just as brainwashed as my friend.” –KTRN

A second elderly woman is alleging that TSA agents at a screening checkpoint at JFK Airport invaded her privacy.

Lenore Zimmerman, 85, told the New York Daily News that she was forced to undergo a strip search at Kennedy Airport last Tuesday – a report the TSA disputes.

On Monday a TSA official reiterated that no strip search of Zimmerman had been conducted, telling CBS News that the woman “did not undress other than removing the back brace. … She did not remove anything further,” and adding, “She did not remove her underwear.”

Now 88-year-old Ruth Sherman spoke to CBS Station WCBS after hearing about Zimmerman’s story, claiming to have had a similar ordeal at the same JetBlue terminal one day earlier.

Sherman, of Sunrise, Fla., was returning home from a Thanksgiving holiday in New York when TSA screeners wanted to check the bulge from Sherman’s colostomy bag.

“This is private for me. It’s bad enough that I have it,” she told WCBS correspondent Dave Carlin. “I had to pull from my sweatpants and I had to pull my underwear, my underwear down.

“You don’t do that anybody,” she added. “I felt like I was invaded.”

Sherman said she initially complained to JetBlue and told her family, but is now going public.

Both she and Zimmerman said seniors are often too cooperative and afraid to speak up when humiliated.

Click here for the full report.

Ventura, Miffed By Court, Says He’s Off To Mexico

November 7, 2011

Yahoo News

By BRIAN BAKST

Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura is so upset by the dismissal of his airport security lawsuit that he threatened Friday to apply for dual citizenship so he can spend more time in his beloved Mexico — or run for president of what he labeled “the Fascist States of America.”

Ventura sued the federal government in January, alleging that airport scans and pat-downs amounted to unreasonable search and seizure. A district judge in St. Paul threw out his lawsuit Thursday, ruling it should have been filed in a Circuit Court of Appeals.

Outside the federal courthouse in St. Paul, with a crew from his “Conspiracy Theory” cable TV show filming, Ventura said he hadn’t decided whether to continue pressing his lawsuit. He said he wanted to make his case before a jury not a panel of judges.

Ventura has said a titanium hip implanted in him in 2008 sets off metal detectors and that agents previously used hand-held wands to scan his body. He said he was subjected to a body pat-down after an airport metal detector went off last November. Ventura said he hasn’t flown since and won’t fly commercially again.

Ventura, a political independent who served one term as governor, teased that he might have to run for president to change the policy and a court system he regards as broken. Moments later, he vowed to apply for Mexican citizenship so he can live there more months of the year.

Click here for the full report.

Man With 4th Amendment on Chest Sues Over Airport Arrest

March 15th, 2011

AOL News

By: Lauren Frayer

A college student who was arrested for stripping down at airport security to reveal the Fourth Amendment written across his chest is now suing the U.S. government for violating his rights as ordained in — you guessed it — the Fourth Amendment.

Aaron Tobey’s dramatic strip-protest is one of the latest in a series of stunts by American travelers fed up with airport security procedures some consider too invasive. A YouTube video of a California man’s airport security pat-down, in which he warns the agent not to “touch my junk,” went viral last year. John Tyner’s infamous quote has been made into T-shirts and bumper stickers and even became the colloquial title of proposed legislation, the Transportation Security Administration “Don’t Touch My Junk” bill.

The Constitution’s Fourth Amendment outlaws “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Tobey, a 21-year-old University of Cincinnati architecture student, had those very words scrawled across his chest and abdomen when he stripped down to his underwear at a Richmond, Va., airport back in December. He was heading to his grandfather’s funeral at the time. Tobey was arrested and cited for disorderly conduct.

The misdemeanor charge has since been dropped, but Tobey is still suing. The defendants listed in his legal filing are Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the head of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, the Richmond airport authority and several security officers there. He’s seeking $250,000 in damages and reimbursement for legal fees.

“This action seeks vindication of the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of Aaron Tobey, who … was arrested without probable cause, falsely imprisoned and maliciously prosecuted,” the legal complaint states. The civil lawsuit was filed on Tobey’s behalf by the Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties group.

“Tobey was unduly seized by government agents in violation of the Fourth Amendment, despite the fact that he did nothing to disrupt airport routine,” John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, said in a statement on his group’s website.

Neither federal officials nor Richmond airport authorities could immediately be reached for comment. Tobey also did not respond to an e-mailed request by AOL for an interview.

Both Tobey and “Don’t touch my junk” Tyner exercised their right to opt for a thorough pat-down from TSA agents rather than walk through sophisticated X-ray machines and imaging scanners newly introduced at airport security checkpoints. Some cite health or privacy concerns about the machines.

Tobey claims he was handcuffed and held for 90 minutes after stripping off his clothing during the pat-down. He still made his flight.

Click here for the full report from AOL News

NBC Anchor Brian Williams Gets Groped by TSA

January 5th, 2010

Politico

By: Patrick Gavin

In the last quarter of 2010, we heard plenty of horror stories about folks being “groped” as they went through airport security (remember the “don’t touch my junk” guy?).

Being a network news anchor doesn’t allow one any special exemptions, apparently.

NBC’s Brian Williams was a guest on CBS’s “Late Show with David Letterman” Monday and confessed: I’ve been groped.

“Air travel is such a joy in this country,” Williams told Letterman. “You get the enhanced schmegeggy right there. … That’s an aviation term. For some reason coming back, I always get it at [Los Angeles International Airport]. I get nailed.”

Letterman, confused, needed elaboration. “What are you saying? What happens there?”

“They go, they go right in. This new thing, they go right after Dave and the twins. … Either you go in the little thing and you put your arms up and parade around, and somebody in a booth somewhere looks at you naked through your clothing, or you can get the prod of your schmegeggy.”

Click here for the full report from Politico

TSA Head Urges Complete Airport Security Overhaul

December 21st, 2010

Natural News

By: Jonathan Benson

Even the current head of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) now admits that airport security as we know it is largely a failure. In light of the fact that reactionary security changes have done nothing to thwart supposed terrorist plots and everything to target innocent Americans, some government officials, as well as TSA administrator John Pistole, are now recommending that the airport security paradigm be altered to become a more “intelligence-based” system rather than a technology-based one.

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, airport security measures have escalated to the point that everyday Americans are now subjected to being herded like cattle through intense security lines where X-ray machines blast them with extreme doses of ionizing radiation and TSA agents invasively grope their every bodily crevice in search of hidden weapons and explosives. But none of this has effectively prevented a single terrorist attack.

“Let’s be honest: We’ve been lucky the last few times,” explained Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Senate Homeland Security Committee chairman, in a Boston Globe report. “With the Christmas Day bomber over Detroit and the Times Square bomber and the air cargo attempt, they did not succeed, but that’s because of their own inadequacies, not because we were able to stop them.”

Rather than continue to add to the list of security restrictions and requirements at airports — which since 2002 has cost American taxpayers over $57 billion — officials are now suggesting that intelligence programs that analyze individual passenger data be used instead. However what types of information officials plan to collect and analyze is unclear, and such a proposition could be an even worse invasion of privacy than current protocols.

Click here for the full report from Natural News

The Push for Full-Body Scans at Airports

January 13, 2010

Mother Jones

By James Ridgeway

Scan, baby, scan. That’s the mantra among politicians at all levels in the wake of the thwarted terrorist attack aboard a Detroit-bound passenger jet. According to conventional wisdom, the would-be “underwear bomber” could have been stopped by airport security if he’d been put through a full-body scanner, which would have revealed the cache of explosives attached to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s groin.

Within days or even hours of the bombing attempt, everyone was talking about so-called whole-body imaging as the magic bullet that could stop this type of attack. In announcing hearings by the Senate Homeland Security Commitee, Joe Lieberman approached the use of scanners as a foregone conclusion, saying one of the “big, urgent questions that we are holding this hearing to answer” was “Why isn’t whole-body-scanning technology that can detect explosives in wider use?” Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff told the Washington Post, “You’ve got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren’t easy to get at. It’s either pat downs or imaging, or otherwise hoping that bad guys haven’t figured it out, and I guess bad guys have figured it out.”

Since the alternative is being groped by airport screeners, the scanners might sound pretty good. The Transportation Security Administration has claimed that the images “are friendly enough to post in a preschool,” though the pictures themselves tell another story, and numerous organizations have opposed them as a gross invasion of privacy. Beyond privacy issues, however, are questions about whether these machines really work—and about who stands to benefit most from their use.

As I documented in my book The Five Unanswered Questions About 9/11, airport security has always been compromised by corporate interests.When it comes to high-tech screening methods, the TSA has a dismal record of enriching private corporations with failed technologies, and there are signs that the latest miracle device may just bring more of the same.

Click here for full report

ACLU Official Says It Is Not Realistic to Screen ALL Air Passengers

January 12,2010

CNS News

By Matt Cover

Former FBI agent Mike German, now a terrorism expert with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said that using the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) of 400,000-plus names to screen airline passengers was not realistic, and added that it was “fundamentally ridiculous” to think the list was not flawed.

German, speaking Monday at a Capitol Hill conference sponsored by the Arab American Institute to examine President Obama’s new airline screening policies, said the terrorist watch-listing system was “broken.”

“One of the most disappointing things about the whole review of this situation was this idea that the terrorist watch-listing system is not, itself, broken, which is fundamentally ridiculous,” said German.

“There are, as you say, 400,000 names on these, Terrorist Screening Center names, actually the number the [Justice Department] IG [Inspector General] put in his last report was 1.1 million identities,” German said. “I know that there is a distinction between names and identities and actual people, but we’re still talking about 1.1 million identities on this Terrorist Screening Center list and the number on the no-fly list is a small subset of that.”

According to Timothy J. Healy, director of the Justice Department’s Terrorist Screening Center, “the terrorist watch list is made up of approximately 400,000 people, ranging from suicide bombers to financiers. A small portion of the list is exported to TSA [the Transportation Security Administration] to create the No Fly list. In order to be placed on a No Fly list, a known or suspected terrorist must present a threat to civil aviation or national security.”

“Consequently, the No Fly list is a very small subset of the terrorist watch list,” Healy told the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Dec. 9. “It contains approximately 3,400 people. Of those, approximately 170 are U.S. citizens,”

Thus, the 3,400 people on the No Fly list represent less than 1 percent, or 0.85 percent, of the 400,000 people on the full “Terrorist Watchlist.”

Healy testified in the committee a little more than two weeks before Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a plane from Amsterdam to Detroit and tried to detonate explosives he had smuggled aboard in his underwear.

In his testimony, Healy had stressed the smallness of the “No Fly” list, a theme that had also been sounded a year before by then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

German said on Monday that the terrorist watchlist system has been broken “for years,” pointing out that names were added to the list incorrectly while others were kept on the list after investigators had cleared them of any involvement with terrorists.

A law enforcement officer stands guard near Northwest Airlines Flight 253, parked at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus, Mich., on Sunday, Dec. 27, 2009. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
“You don’t have to look to the ACLU to say that this system is broken, and it’s not that it just broke this time,” he said. “The IG at the Department of Justice has been looking at this for years and he has one report after another that says that this is fundamentally flawed.”

“There were people who were put on the list appropriately because they were under investigation, but when the investigation cleared them, they weren’t taken off the list,” said German. “There were people who were known terrorists, there were people who he [the IG] identified as known terrorists who were not on the list.”

German described the watchlist system as one of “tremendous false positives,” a fact that makes using the entire list as a tool to keep terrorists off of airplanes problematic.

“The whole listing process is broken and needs a fundamental overhaul,” said German. “We’re creating a system of tremendous false positives. We’ve created a system that creates hundreds, and probably hundreds of thousands, of false positives every day.”

The former counter-terrorism instructor offered that for the list to be effective officials need to “re-do” it to include only people the FBI and other national security agencies are not currently investigating.

“Putting 1.1 million people on a no-fly list when the evidence for putting them on there is in question, I think, isn’t the answer – it’s completely re-doing that list so that it only focuses on known terrorists,” he said. “There shouldn’t be anybody on that list who the FBI is not currently, and the other agencies, currently hunting down.”

German said that this method would not deny anyone their “right to fly” who is not under suspicion of being a terrorist.

“There shouldn’t be somebody sitting on the list who we’re saying is a terrorist – and perhaps denying their right to fly – and nobody’s actually looking for them,” he said.

After the briefing, German noted that the list has included well-known figures such as singer Cat Stevens and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), using those famous errors to make the point that trying to keep all 400,000 names on the TSDB list from entering the country would be impossible.

“If you look today at how many completely innocent people that’s impacted, people who have a name that looks like [a terror suspect’s], when you’re talking about 1.1 million names, I mean, how many names are there?” said German.

“At some point, when being one letter off or two letters off or having the first name, middle name, last name transposed in some order, you’re having an exponentially large impact on people who are totally innocent,” he said. “For every investigator who’s asked to go out and check on one of those false positives — we’re building up this system of false positives and that is actually undermining the effectiveness of our state and local law enforcement and federal law enforcement.”

The Real Purpose of Body Scanners

January 7,2009

Prison Planet

By Steve Watson

The clamor to ramp up airport security with invasive naked body imaging scanners has nothing to do with ensuring the safety of travelers. Rather it is part of an ongoing incremental push to break the will of the people and encourage mass subservience and meek obedience.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the body scanner push is that people are willingly accepting it. As Bloomberg news reports today, “Passenger acceptance of airport body scanners has increased following the failed terrorist attack,” with 92% of passengers at Manchester airport in northern England now agreeing to pass through the machines in a voluntary trial, compared with 75 percent before the incident.

The same report indicates that Around 90% of Muslims and Orthodox Jews were opting to use the scanners even prior to the Detroit incident rather than risking physical contact via pat downs and strip searches.

Travelers in Canada have indicated acceptance of the scanners, saying that they would “do anything for safety” and describing them as “a necessary evil”.

Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of Germans favour airports using full-body scanners, despite claims that they are an invasion of personal privacy, a new poll has shown.

The will of the people is being systematically eroded and incrementally broken down. Airports are serving as reservations where the fundamental right to privacy must be left at the door.

Travelers have been acclimatized over time to know they must remove their shoes, take off their belts, untuck shirts, discard water, baby milk, shampoo and toothpaste. During the flight hands must be visible on laps, and even bathroom visits can now become national incidents as we have recently seen.

A culture of extreme fear has been engendered where the only way to stay safe is to cozy up to big brother, a psychological response akin to that of Stockholm syndrome.

This is where the technological control grid plays such a key role. Imagine if TSA agents were made to take women and children and physically strip search them while they held their hands aloft, the public would balk at such an abuse. However, with the body scanning machines there is a divide that clouds the process in futuristic technology.

Click here to read the full report

Security Industries To Profit From Airport Scanners

January 6, 2010

SpaceWar.com

Airport security buildups geared toward installing more body scanners at departure points have heartened investors who poured money into safety and security industries with the clear aim of profiting from current trends.

Amid low interest rates, investors moved large sums into security industries last year after expert forecasts that demand for equipment, expertise and services related to safety and security could only grow because of continuing threat perceptions worldwide.

Industry researcher Strategic Insight estimates that a record $400 billion moved into security industry bond funds during 2009, MarketWatch.com said.

The London Guardian newspaper said security industries hoped to profit from the current rush to install body scanners at airports and other checkpoints, including buildings, but there was little guarantee the new equipment would eliminate the threat.

The scanner manufacturers claim they would detect materials of the sort Nigerian Abdulmutallab allegedly took onto his Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day, but experts caution that it would depend on a series of factors, not least the vigilance of the scanner operator, The Guardian said.

The body scanners are set to cause further delays in flight operations wherever they are installed, but they can still fail if the operator is not vigilant enough.

“It’s one of the big difficulties with airport security,” The Guardian quoted Flight International Editor Kieran Daly as saying. “You’re asking people to do a job which is not only very important and carries a very high risk if there is a failure, but is also exceptionally tedious.”

Body scanners can handle two to three people a minute, a little faster than a conventional frisk, the newspaper said. Once authorities decide to go ahead with deployment of the scanners, shareholders in the industry can look forward to significant returns on their investment because of the huge outlay of capital required by governments and corporations.

A single body scanner can cost up to $160,000, excluding training and maintenance, compared with $5,000 to 8,000 for a single industry-standard metal detector.

Still, chances of error can never be eliminated, industry analysts said.

Philip Baum, an aviation security expert, told The Guardian, “There is no one answer. The first step of the process should always be the proper use of the human brain: people making an intelligent decision as to which security lane a passenger goes down.”

Controversy also surrounds the kind of scanners being deployed. U.S. manufacturer Brijot told United Press International their machine protects passenger privacy and is better at detecting suspect materials in intimate body areas than most of the scanners currently deployed at airports.

Although Brijot machines are used by the U.S. military and in private palaces in the Middle East, mainly because of their privacy aspect, the manufacturer said it hopes its product will be brought into wider use.

In the meantime, incidents such as the Christmas Day bombing attempt have given new impetus to investors flocking into research and development of more effective anti-terrorist equipment with the hope of lucrative returns.

Click here for the full report.

The Push for Full-Body Scans at Airports

January 06, 2010

Mother Jones

By James Ridgeway

Scan, baby, scan. That’s the mantra among politicians at all levels in the wake of the thwarted terrorist attack aboard a Detroit-bound passenger jet. According to conventional wisdom, the would-be “underwear bomber” could have been stopped by airport security if he’d been put through a full-body scanner, which would have revealed the cache of explosives attached to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s groin.

Within days or even hours of the bombing attempt, everyone was talking about so-called whole-body imaging as the magic bullet that could stop this type of attack. In announcing hearings [2]by the Senate Homeland Security Commitee, Joe Lieberman approached the use of scanners as a foregone conclusion, saying one of the “big, urgent questions that we are holding this hearing to answer” was “Why isn’t whole-body-scanning technology that can detect explosives in wider use?” Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff told the Washington Post [3], “You’ve got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren’t easy to get at. It’s either pat downs or imaging, or otherwise hoping that bad guys haven’t figured it out, and I guess bad guys have figured it out.”

Since the alternative is being groped by airport screeners, the scanners might sound pretty good. The Transportation Security Administration has claimed that the images “are friendly enough to post in a preschool [4],” though the pictures themselves tell another story, and numerous [5] organizations [6] have opposed them as a gross invasion of privacy. Beyond privacy issues, however, are questions about whether these machines really work—and about who stands to benefit most from their use. When it comes to high-tech screening methods, the TSA has a dismal record of enriching private corporations with failed technologies, and there are signs that the latest miracle device may just bring more of the same.

Click here for full report

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