TSA Tacitly Admits $1 Billion Dollar Body Scanner System Is Critically Flawed
March 8, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
March 8, 2012
Info Wars
By Paul Joseph Watson
“The TSA’s response to Jon Corbett’s video is laughable. The scanners do not work.” –KTRN
The Transportation Security Administration has tacitly admitted that the critical flaws brought to light in a viral You Tube video yesterday which exposed how airport body scanners could easily be beaten are accurate, rendering the entire $1 billion dollar program virtually worthless.
Engineer Jon Corbett of the popular blog TSA Out of Our Pants! posted a video yesterday that demonstrates how the TSA’s radiation firing body scanners can easily be bypassed. The clip has already received over 700,000 views.
The video shows Corbett carrying a metal case through the scanner, away from his body in his side pocket. Corbett explains that because metallic objects appear as black on the image the scanners produce, the machines do not pick up such objects if they are obscured by the background, which is also black.
The video went viral and despite You Tube slapping an age-restricted censor on the clip, the story was picked up by dozens of major news outlets, forcing the TSA to respond.
On the TSA’s official blog, the agency attempts to discredit Corbett by describing him as “some guy” who launched a “crude attempt to allegedly show how to circumvent TSA screening procedures.”
However, nowhere in the response does the TSA actually address or attempt to disprove Corbett’s demonstration that the body scanner can be easily fooled.
In labeling Corbett’s successful effort to evade the body scanner as “crude,” the TSA has inadvertently admitted that its $1 billion dollar body scanner system can be defeated by “crude” methods.
Body scanners are “one layer of our 20 layers of security,” the blog states, before adding, “our nation’s aviation system is much safer now with the deployment of 600 imaging technology units at 140 airports.”
Click here for the full report.
YouTube Restricts Video Of Engineer Proving How Useless TSA Scanners Are
March 7, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
March 7, 2012
Activist Post
By Steve Watson
“This is really disturbing. Watch how easy this guy gets through the naked body scanner with a metal object in his pocket. He does it not just once, but twice. Here is just one more example that the TSA is not here to protect us.” –KTRN
Google/YouTube has placed restrictions on yet another video that exposes the fraudulent claims of the TSA and highlights how the federal agency’s security theatre is part of a wider social manipulation agenda.
Engineer Jon Corbett of the popular blog TSA Out of Our Pants! posted a video yesterday that demonstrates how the TSA’s radiation firing body scanners can easily be bypassed.
The video shows Corbett carrying a metal case through the scanner, away from his body in his side pocket. Corbett explains that because metallic objects appear as black on the image the scanners produce, the machines do not pick up such objects if they are obscured by the background, which is also black.
Corbett has been rallying against the TSA for some time and has had several run ins with agents at airports. Corbett was also the first person in the country to sue the TSA for invasion of privacy. His case is still ongoing and is headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The scanners are now effectively worthless, as anyone can beat them with virtually no effort.” Corbett writes on his blog. “The TSA has been provided this video in advance of it being made public to give them an opportunity to turn off the scanners and revert to the metal detectors. I personally believe they now have no choice but to turn them off.” he adds.
Within hours of the video being uploaded, blogs and news sites, including Yahoo News and the Mail Online had begun to pick up an the video, saying it was sure to go viral.
Now, despite the fact that the video contains no nudity, violence, abuse or other explicit content, YouTube has placed it behind an age restriction wall, meaning anyone who wants to view it on YouTube has to login or sign up for an account and verify their age.
“This video is not intended to teach anyone how to commit criminal acts, nor is intended to help “the terrorists” — if I could figure this out, I’m sure they’ve long figured it out, and by exposing it to the public, we now have an opportunity to correct it.” Corbett writes on his blog.
Click here for the full report.
TSA Forces New Mom To Pump Milk Out Of Her Breasts In Public Restroom
March 4, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
March 5, 2012
Natural News
By Mike Adams
“If anyone thinks the TSA is protecting people who fly, think again and read this article from Mike Adams. This is beyond ridiculous.” –KTRN
As NaturalNews readers already well know, the real agenda of the TSA has absolutely nothing to do with airport security (TSA security is a joke) and everything to do with “prisoner training” the public. It’s all about humiliation and dehumanization. It’s about teaching the slave citizens that they are animals to be ordered around by a bunch of lawless government tyrants who only impersonate actual law enforcement officers (TSA “officers” are not sworn officers in any way, and they have no law enforcement training).
The latest example of all this involves a Hawaiian mother who recently attempted to board an airplane in Lihue, Hawaii. She was carrying a breast pump and several empty bottles to hold her breast milk later on. For those who may not know, many new moms frequently use breast pumps to fill bottles with their own natural mother’s milk which they later give to their children.
Remarkably, upon seeing these empty bottles, the TSA agent in charge lapsed into a power trip frenzy and told her that she could not carry empty bottles on the airplane!
Now the TSA targets empty bottles, too. Hold on a second. First we’re told we can’t carry FULL bottles of water or other liquids because, we’re told, those liquids could be mixed together using some totally fictitious laboratory process to make a liquid bomb. Now we’re told we can’t carry EMPTY bottles on the airplane, too? How’s that? Are we soon going to be told that empty bottles pose a threat to national security because they might contain invisible bomb materials that nobody can see?
(Where does the TSA invent all this crap, anyway? Sometimes I think they just sit in the back room and play a break-time game called “Who can come up with the zaniest rule that the intimidated travelers will follow?”)
So — get this — the woman was told by the TSA that she would have to fill the empty bottles with breast milk before she could board the plane. This is apparently the TSA’s whacked-out logic on making sure none of those dangerous “empty bottles” get on the airplane, for whatever reason.
Except there is no “breast milking station” at the airport, of course. So where did the TSA direct this woman to go pump her breast milk? You guessed it — the public restroom.
Click here for the full report.
DHS Launches Insurgent-Tracking Drones Over American Soil
February 10, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
February 10, 2012
InfoWars
By Paul Joseph Watson
The Department of Homeland Security plans to spend up to $50 million dollars on a spy system that has been used to hunt insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan for the purposes of “emergency and non-emergency incidents” within the United States.
The DHS is seeking four contractors to provide “aerial remote sensing” services, using LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) technology fitted to drones or manned aircraft that will provide surveillance capability for “homeland security missions,” as well as “management of emergency incidents by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) regional offices, joint field offices and by state and local government.”
“DHS believes these airborne images are essential for homeland defense missions, such as planning for National Special Security Events (Super Bowls or a national political conventions come to mind); enhancing border, port and airport security; as well as performing critical infrastructure inventories and assessments,” reports Government Security News, adding that the technology will be used for “emergency and non-emergency incidents nationwide.”
The DHS expects successful contractors to “ensure imagery can be acquired, processed and delivered in 48 hours or less and the ability to support simultaneous missions in multiple geographic locations.”
LIDAR spy technology, which uses ultraviolet, visible, or near infrared light to track objects or people from the sky, has been used in Iraq and Afghanistan to track insurgents. The US military has praised the technology for its proficiency in providing “battlefield surveillance” and being able to easily locate enemy combatants due to it being “especially useful at seeing through foliage.” LIDAR can be deployed using both manned and unmanned aircraft.
The U.S. Air Force “has already deployed an unknown number of LIDAR aircraft to map all of Afghanistan,” reports MSNBC, with the 3-D laser mapping technology also being adapted to work aboard U.S. Special Forces helicopters such as the Blackhawk or Chinook to help hunt insurgents.
According to Raytheon, one of the companies that develops LIDAR, the technology is adept at tracking “people in crowded environments for safety and security,” because unlike traditional surveillance methods, LIDAR is honed to measure characteristics of individuals and keep them tracked within a “grid cell” so they cannot evade detection.
Under the terms of the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act, the whole of America has been defined as a battlefield, with the government reserving the power to have “belligerents,” including American citizens, arrested and detained indefinitely without trial.
Click here for the full report from InfoWars.
TSA Discovery Prompts New York Bomb Scare – Six Hours Later
February 1, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
February 2, 2012
CNN
By Mike M. Ahlers
“Way to go TSA. You are doing great work.” –KTRN
A New York airport screener who removed two pipes from a traveler’s bag and set them aside Monday morning prompted a security scare six hours later when the next shift saw the pipes and feared they might be pipe bombs, local and federal officials said.
The incident at New York’s LaGuardia Airport began at 11:30 a.m. when a screener discovered unidentifiable items inside a passenger’s carry-on bag. The officer screened the item for explosives, determined them not to be a threat and cleared the passenger through the checkpoint, a Transportation Security Administration official said.
But the officer prevented the metal item from going through because of its “material and appearance,” a TSA official said.
When the next shift arrived, one officer saw the items and mistakenly believed they were test objects, used to check screener proficiency. When that officer later learned they were not test items, the officer alerted others, and the TSA contacted the Port Authority Police Department, responsible for protecting the airport.
“No one could give a good account of what it was, so we did the safe thing and called (the) NYPD bomb squad,” Port Authority Police Department spokesman Al Della Fave told CNN.
Click here for the full report.
Ron Paul Blasts “Bureaucratic Monster” TSA
January 30, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
January 31, 2012
Info Wars
By Steve Watson
“What other presidential candidate is speaking out about the TSA? It makes you wonder why people are voting for anyone other than Ron Paul.” –KTRN
GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul slammed the TSA during a CNN interview Sunday night, refusing to back down a week after the incident involving the detainment of Senator Rand Paul by the federal agency in Nashville.
Speaking with Candy Crowley on CNN’s “State of the Union”, Paul dubbed the TSA a “bureaucratic monster” that “totally voids the concept of the fourth amendment.”
“They trap us into it,” Paul told Crowley. “There’s no way you can travel if you don’t do it. So I’ve said, you know, when you look at some of these pictures of probing groin areas and breast areas and all this, and old women having to take their clothes off, if we as a people are so complacent that we can look at that and say, oh, that’s OK, they’re making us safe.”
“It doesn’t make us safe. It undermines our liberties and there’s a much better way of giving us security at the airports than accepting the bureaucrats and the politicians in Washington. That is totally unacceptable from my viewpoint.” Paul said.
Last week the Congressman raised a quarter of a million dollars in an impromptu ‘End the TSA’ money bomb, following the incident where his son Rand Paul refused to be subjected to a full body pat down after a glitch set off a body scanner at Nashville airport.
The Congressman was adamant that under his presidency transportation security would be very different.
Click here for the full report.
TSA Is Now NOT Planning To Test Employees For Radiation
January 20, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
January 20, 2012
Info Wars
By Steve Watson
“HAHA Sorry, TSA worker. It seems your employer (the government) doesn’t care about your health and safety after all. Oh, by the way, thanks for asking my grandma to take out her colostomy bag – it was serious threat to the passengers on board the plane. Keep up the great work.” –KTRN
Despite numerous reports this week suggesting that the TSA is to buy equipment to test employees for radiation exposure, the agency itself says it has no intention of doing so.
The LA Times reported that the agency was planning to equip its security officers with individual radiation dosimeters, to test the levels of radiation they were being exposed to from backscatter x-ray body scanners.
“After years of rebuffing health concerns over airport scanners, the Transportation Security Administration plans to conduct new tests on the potential radiation exposure from the machines at more than 100 airports nationwide,” the report read.
Details of the tests were reportedly leaked via a request sent to government vendors to provide wearable dosimeters.
However, a post from the TSA’s official blog says that the Times report “missed the mark”
“Why the confusion you might ask? TSA routinely puts out Requests for Information (RFI) that are basically market research, asking industry to tell us what else is out there.” the blog post noted.
“In this case, TSA put out an RFI to gather information on available tools to continue to monitor our technologies. This is simply designed to ask industry what new technology might be available.”
The blog then repeated the claim that the body scanning machines have been tested and approved.
“Truth is, we continuously test all of the technology we use and post the results to our website for all to see,” said a Jan. 17 post by Blogger Bob Burns on the agency’s web site.
“Based on all of our previous testing, as well as monitoring from independent sources, we’re confident that all of our equipment meets national safety standards, and is safe for all passengers and our workforce,” said Burns.
Click here for the full report.
TSA Apologises For Strip-Searching TWO Grandmothers At JFK
January 19, 2012 by admin
Filed under News Stories
January 19, 2012
Daily Mail
By DM
“An apology is not acceptable. The people responsible should be sent to jail.” –KTRN
The TSA has finally apologized to two grandmothers who were strip-searched at JFK airport.
Wheelchair-bound Ruth Sherman, 89, was asked to pull down her trousers to show her colostomy bag as she prepared to fly out of the New York airport over the Thanksgiving holidays.
This incident came a week after Lenore Zimmerman, 85, says she was strip-searched after telling agents she didn’t want to go through a metal detector because she has a defibrillator.
In a letter obtained by the New York Daily News, the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that it is not standard procedure to make fliers to show their colostomy bags – as they forced Ms Sherman to do.
Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Betsy Markey wrote: ‘It is not standard operating procedure for colostomy devices to be visually inspected and (the TSA) apologises for this employee’s action.’
Click here for the full report.
Sweating Bullets: Body Scanners Can See Perspiration as a Potential Weapon
December 19, 2011 by admin
Filed under News Stories
December 19, 2011
Pro Publica
By Michael Grabell and Christian Salewski
“If you’re sweating, you could be a terrorist. Going through the body scanners make us nervous – hence the sweat.” –KTRN
While X-ray body scanners used in airports face concerns about potentially increasing cancer cases, a safer type of scanner has been plagued by another problem: a high rate of false alarms.
The scanner, known as the millimeter-wave machine, uses low-level electromagnetic waves that, unlike X-rays, have not been linked to cancer. The Transportation Security Administration already uses the millimeter-wave machine and says both types of scanners are highly effective at detecting explosives hidden under clothing.
But two of Europe’s largest countries, France and Germany, have decided to forgo the millimeter-wave scanners because of false alarms triggered by folds in clothing, buttons and even sweat.
In Germany, the false positive rate was 54 percent, meaning that every other person who went through the scanner had to undergo at least a limited pat-down that found nothing. Jan Korte, a German parliament member who focuses on homeland security, called the millimeter-wave scanner “a defective product.”
While it’s difficult to know for sure if the millimeter-wave machine has a worse false-alarm rate than the X-ray machine, recent tests suggests that it does. The TSA wouldn’t release its results, citing national security. But a British study found the X-ray machine had a false-alarm rate of just 5 percent.
For the millimeter-wave machines, a complicating factor is new privacy software that was installed in many countries after a public outcry over the scanners’ graphic images. The software automates detection and no longer creates an image of a passenger’s body. While false alarms were reported before automation when human screeners interpreted images, the software appears to have made the problem worse.
The privacy safeguards are also an obstacle to lowering the false-alarm rate, researchers say. The machines do not save images or data, which could be used to teach the software how to distinguish real threats from false ones.
The problem of false alarms comes down to fundamental physics. Millimeter waves penetrate clothing and reflect off objects. But because of their frequency, millimeter waves also reflect off water, which can cause the scanner to mistake sweat for a potentially dangerous object, said Doug McMakin, the lead researcher who developed the millimeter-wave scanner at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. (X-rays, which operate at a higher frequency, pass through water more easily.)
Click here for the full report.
TSA Whistleblower: Feds Covered-Up Sexual Assault
November 30, 2011 by admin
Filed under News Stories
November 30, 2011
Info Wars
By Paul Joseph Watson
“Remember when flying used to be enjoyable? Anyone up for a road trip?” –KTRN
The Transportation Security Administration has found itself embroiled in yet another scandal after a TSA whistleblower accused the federal agency of covering up her sexual assault at the hands of a TSA investigator by forcing her to sign a false disavowal.
“Nilda C. Marugame, a TSA worker at Lihue airport, sued the TSA’s governmental parent, the Department of Homeland Security, in Federal Court. Marugame claims a TSA investigator (TSI) “sexually assaulted her” on Aug. 26, 2009,” reports Courthouse News Service.
When Marugame subsequently attempted to notify the Assistant Federal Security Director about the incident, she was immediately suspended for three days and then coerced into signing a statement that erroneously characterized the sexual advances as being consensual.
“She says she is “at least the third woman to report unwelcome sexual advances” from the same man, and that all of his victims were retaliated against with suspension or threats of termination,” states the report.
