Stupid is as Stupid spouts off on the radioFollow

Varus doesn't live in Kansas.

Varus reminds me of the Henry Rollins riff on meth cooking, El Camino driving rednecks from San Bernadino who don't breed so much as lay eggs for their lizard spawn to crack out of.

I doubt varrus is that study-worthy.

Swallowing light.

Why not have a system that proactively screens both sets of people rather than waiting to react to a tragedy?

If you search everyone, by definition you're searching the potential threats.

Edited, Nov 23rd 2010 1:27pm by Jophiel

Awesome...now if only the servers would come up so I can do it.

Hi, that was phase 3 of the invasion, so it's been in for a week or two now. In fact, by the time you log in today, you've likely missed your chance as the world will have changed.

A better method of securing our airports would probably be to hire competent employees

Do I look like I play WoW?

Um... Yes. Or is the definition of "compare" different for you than it is for me? In both cases, someone stood up (or sat down as the case may be) against a rule/regulation/law/whatever that they thought was unfair and unreasonable. And in both cases, their act prompted a large reaction among others who felt the same way, but hadn't acted or who's acts hadn't been noticed and in turn sparked a debate much much bigger than the person him/herself.

The specifics are obviously different, but in the context of the point I was making (that solitary acts of defiance often do become the "straw" that tips an issue), it's absolutely fair to compare them.


As to the larger issue, Varus' use of "white" as a qualifying condition of screening aside, the principle concept has validity. We should be focusing our searches not on everyone, or "randomly", but on those most likely to be a threat. That means people on various watch lists should be scanned. People who match certain flight pattern criteria should be scanned. We should be doing less random scans (although they should still do some of those), and more targeted scans.

The US citizen who flies the same commuter route twice a month is a pretty low probability risk. The guy with the 1 month old passport from Saudi Arabia, with a one-way ticket should probably be scanned. It's not about race or skin color or religion, but about patterns. Where is someone from? What is their past flight history? How many bags are they carrying? There are dozens of factors you can use to make assessments and from which you can make intelligent choices with regard to how we utilize the limited resources we have available to us.


The problem is that political correctness is so strong that even the suggestion that someone might be profiling passengers forces official policies to do ridiculous things like make searches random, or on all people. Sorry, but profiling is exactly what we should be doing. And in addition to the data profiling, we should have trained people who's sole job is to stand back and watch the people looking for suspicious behavior. People who aren't working the security checks and thus have the ability to take in the whole area, watch for patterns of movement, conversation, and behavior and make judgments based on those things.

Of course, they'd be accused of profiling as well. But at the end of the day, it's what we should be doing. It's what every rational security expert says we should be doing. You don't eliminate the body scanners and pat downs, but you use them more effectively. What people are opposed to is the idea that TSA seems to be moving in a direction of simply running every single person through these things (at great expense btw) rather than utilizing some human intelligence principles in order to make things a ton more efficient.

Edited, Nov 23rd 2010 3:28pm by gbaji