Solution recommended: We can do this you know. The very first thing everyone who wants to fly has to do is run an ad for two weeks in a paper declaring that any bailout of any major airlines is not to be paid for by your taxes and therefore you are repudiating the debt. Anyone who then is harmed by that debt cannot come back on you. You gave fair notice in a public forum for your repudiation of any debt incurred in your name. Next, There are miriad airports that are small, medium and regional that would love the income. If you know you are going to need to fly somewhere than run an ad for a private pilot and plane and see how many seats they have, take the price of your ticket and multiply it by the number of seats and offer the pilot that much to fly you and those other passangers to your destination. He can do that from a private airport not controlled by the major airlines. Then run an ad for your destination in the paper of your nearest metro city and tell others that there are 4 seats available to take them there. Or you could run an add after talking to a charter company and get prices and see if comparable. . Trust me, most would much rather do that then get sexually, criminally and feloniously assaulted by some smelling agent of the federal government. If that is what we have to do then lets do it.
In fact, I am looking into a way to do exactly that with the help of some people who are interested in coming together with their expertise in setting up totally unique and unusual ways to get around all this garbage. We do not have to do it their way any longer for anything. All we have to do is be creative and think outside the box and create and rebuild our own world without them. It can be done.
Our only limitation is our imaginations and I don't know about you, but mine is pretty good. There are many things I can "imagine", that they cannot. They lack creativity and spontaneity. Non cooperation harms them, not us. We can keep going with private planes to get to our destinations. We don't need these damn airlines. Let American Airlines go down if they won't pull the TSA from thier airport in dallas. Fine by me. Same with Delta in Georgia. In fact, they could relocate to India, or to Indonesia. Good bye and good riddance, then we can start again. Kick them all out of here and let us begin again without the psychos.
Amid Airport Anger, GOP Takes Aim at Screening
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Amid-airport-anger_-GOP-takes-aim-at-screening-1576602-108259869.html
By: Byron York, Chief Political Correspondent, Washington Examiner
November 15, 2010
Did you know that the nation's airports are not required to have Transportation Security Administration screeners checking passengers at security checkpoints? The 2001 law creating the TSA gave airports the right to opt out of the TSA program in favor of private screeners after a two-year period. Now, with the TSA engulfed in controversy and hated by millions of weary and sometimes humiliated travelers, Rep. John Mica, the Republican who will soon be chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, is reminding airports that they have a choice.
Mica, one of the authors of the original TSA bill, has recently written to the heads of more than 150 airports nationwide suggesting they opt out of TSA screening. "When the TSA was established, it was never envisioned that it would become a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy which was soon to grow to 67,000 employees," Mica writes. "As TSA has grown larger, more impersonal, and administratively top-heavy, I believe it is important that airports across the country consider utilizing the opt-out provision provided by law."
In addition to being large, impersonal, and top-heavy, what really worries critics is that the TSA has become dangerously ineffective. Its specialty is what those critics call "security theater" -- that is, a show of what appear to be stringent security measures designed to make passengers feel more secure without providing real security. "That's exactly what it is," says Mica. "It's a big Kabuki dance."
Now, the dance has gotten completely out of hand. And like lots of fliers -- I spoke to him as he waited for a flight at the Orlando airport -- Mica sees TSA's new "naked scanner" machines and groping, grossly invasive passenger pat-downs as just part of a larger problem. TSA, he says, is relying more on passenger humiliation than on practices that are proven staples of airport security.
For example, many security experts have urged TSA to adopt techniques, used with great success by the Israeli airline El Al, in which passengers are observed, profiled, and most importantly, questioned before boarding planes. So TSA created a program known as SPOT -- Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques. It began hiring what it called behavior detection officers, who would be trained to notice passengers who acted suspiciously. TSA now employs about 3,000 behavior detection officers, stationed at about 160 airports across the country.
The problem is, they're doing it all wrong. A recent Government Accountability Office study found that TSA "deployed SPOT nationwide without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment." They haven't settled on the standards needed to stop bad actors.
"It's not an Israeli model, it's a TSA, screwed-up model," says Mica. "It should actually be the person who's looking at the ticket and talking to the individual. Instead, they've hired people to stand around and observe, which is a bastardization of what should be done."
In a May 2010 letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Mica noted that the GAO "discovered that since the program's inception, at least 17 known terrorists ... have flown on 24 different occasions, passing through security at eight SPOT airports." One of those known terrorists was Faisal Shahzad, who made it past SPOT monitors onto a Dubai-bound plane at New York's JFK International Airport not long after trying to set off a car bomb in Times Square. Federal agents nabbed him just before departure.
Mica and other critics in Congress want to see quick and meaningful changes in the way TSA works. They go back to the days just after Sept. 11, when there was a hot debate about whether the new passenger-screening force would be federal employees, as most Democrats wanted, or private contractors, as most Republicans wanted. Democrats won and TSA has been growing ever since.
But the law did allow a test program in which five airports were allowed to use private contractors. A number of studies done since then have shown that contractors perform a bit better than federal screeners, and they're also more flexible and open to innovation. (The federal government pays the cost of screening whether performed by the TSA or by contractors, and contractors work under federal supervision.)
TSA critics know a federal-to-private change won't solve all of the problems with airport security. But it might create the conditions under which some of those problems could indeed be fixed. With passenger anger overflowing and new leadership in the House, something might finally get done.
Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blogposts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
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