Traveling today from Beaver Creek back to Boston and thinking about “Security Breach Allows Unchecked Passengers on Flights at JFK: Officials” (NBC):
Eleven people walked through an unscreened security lane at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Monday morning and apparently boarded flights, authorities said.
Three of the 11 were later identified through video and were believed to have boarded a flight to California, where they were to be screened upon arrival, the Port Authority said. The eight other passengers remained unidentified, it said.
Here’s my dumb question for today: What is the point of screening these folks after they’ve arrived at their destination? To make sure that they don’t have weapons to use for hijacking their Uber?
Secure next flight. Or are you saying they were screened at the baggage claim?
Vince: if they were connecting, sure. But if California was in fact their final destination why not just make sure that they left the airport?
Closing the barn door after the horse is gone. You are trying to attach sense to a bureaucratic imperative. That’s asking to much. 99% of screening is just security theater anyway. The TSA (rudely) swabbed my 95 year old MIL for explosives. Never in all of recorded history has a 95 year old Jewish grandmother been a suicide bomber. It turns out that glycerin (found in hand sanitizers) is one of the things that leads to false positives. Also nitroglycerin, a favorite heart medication of old people. So the TSA spends a lot of time swabbing down old men with heart conditions.
TSA making a show that they can exercise their authority over the peons. Just like Eric “respect my authoritay” Cartman. Nothing more.
What if the passengers had just said “No thanks”, and left the airport? Does the TSA ever have the right to keep you from leaving the airport? As far as I understand things they can only stop you getting on a plane, or arrest you for contraband. You could sue for false imprisonment.
The reason they “were to be screened upon arrival” is unspecified.
You are assuming that their final destination was CA.
Does any place (in the US) screen before leaving the airport.
I’ve never seen it. Even for foreign countries, I’ve on!Y had to go through customs.
I flew this week from a midwestern regional airport. Both my wife and I were pulled out during screening to have our shoes specially examined (even though we are TSA precheck), which is fine with me as it felt random and random is good. But somehow they missed the large kitchen knife that I had forgotten was in my work carry-on.
There’s no point to asking that question. We all should know by now that NOTHING the TSA does makes any sense. It’s an unaccountable bureaucracy given free rein to spend our tax dollars pretending to keep aviation secure, despite their consistent track record of failure and ineptitude.
Screening those passengers after they arrived and deplaned was, like much of the TSA’s secret operating procedures, completely pointless as far as actual security is concerned. But neither that reality, nor the fact that the pointlessness is obvious to anyone with half a brain, matters to TSA leadership.
When the TSA fails, its first priority is circling the wagons to ensure that whoever failed is completely shielded from any responsibility or accountability. That’s necessary to maintain the pretense that the TSA is incapable of error. Then they devise and mete out suitable punishment– to every subsequent passenger. That usually means adding a new “layer” of reactive screening that irrevocably increases the hassle and intrusiveness to passengers (which is how the TSA defines “security”), regardless of whether it actually improves security.
Thus, the intrusive hassle of a post-flight screening appropriately punished the passengers for the TSA’s failure.
That said, the TSA does seem to have achieved a few things over the last 15 years. They have very successfully conditioned Americans to unquestioningly submit to arbitrary and increasingly intrusive invasions by uniformed “officers.” And once-proud Americans who earlier would have been outraged at being treated like convicted felons in prison now quietly accept such treatment as routine, normal, and perhaps even reassuring. If I didn’t know better, I might suspect that conditioning Americans to unhesitatingly surrender their liberty and privacy at the command of a uniformed “officer” was the TSA’s real purpose.
@Ted:
“If I didn’t know better, I might suspect that conditioning Americans to unhesitatingly surrender their liberty and privacy at the command of a uniformed “officer” was the TSA’s real purpose.”
What is it you know that we don’t know?
It seems to me that if those passengers were carrying forbidden items, they could still have faced criminal or civil action.
Probably these people would be looked up in various Bad Dude databases and might be nailed for outstanding warrants etc.
if you don’t screen them, you can’t learn anything. if you do screen, you might learn something. If the current mechanism is “accepted”, then the after-the-flight screening is consistent.
It’s legal to have weapons to hijack Uber. Just not to hijack an airline.