"....We have a list of names, people who are involved in terrorist action," he explains, "and, of course, we are checking all the names... We are running them through the computer."posted by ericb at 10:24 AM on December 31, 2009 [7 favorites]
They run every name through. Every person who goes to the airport, they have already checked that name. "The moment that you buy the ticket, we have your name, we have your passport number, and we can check it," Dror says.
They check you again when you drive to the airport in Tel Aviv. What looks like a tollbooth is actually a security gate. Guards with automatic weapons eyeball everyone. If you drive through too quickly, there’s another guard further down the road. And the rings of security tighten as you arrive.
Before you even enter the terminal, you’ve been through three rings of security. The minute you buy your ticket, your name is sent to Israeli intelligence and to Interpol, so they know quite a bit about you before you even get to the airport.
The second ring is a gate with armed guards inspecting your car.
The third ring: Men with jackets and sweaters, concealing their weapons, who will watch you come in.
Three checks, and you haven’t even entered the terminal yet – which is where the real security begins.
Security there is a far cry from American airports, like LaGuardia in New York. There is no curbside check-in in Israel. You can’t run to the counter at the last minute, or pay for your ticket in cash, unless you want to be questioned for hours.
In the States, the National Guard is everywhere. In Israel, the security is almost invisible. You won't see anyone with a uniform.
"Why should we? It is not a fighting place," says Efraim Sneh, Israel’s minister of transportation.
But that doesn't mean nobody there has a weapon. In fact, about 50 percent of the people working at the airport are involved in security, and many of them are very well armed. Some of them, you can spot, like the guys looking for bombs behind vending machines and in trash cans every few minutes. Others, you’d never spot unless they have reaon to spot you.
But more likely than not, the first security official you will encounter is a young woman in her early 20s, a student probably, fresh out of the army. She will want to ask you a few questions. Merav Rosen is a supervisor. She’s 28 and has worked at Ben Gurion seven years.
What is she looking for?
"Anything out of the ordinary, anything that does not fit," she says. "People that ask too many questions, people who seem to be lying, to be hiding something from us. We look for the extraordinary, what is not normal, what we don’t know as normal."
Before she started working at the airport, Rosen was in the Israeli army, in intelligence. She and the people working under her are profilers. That’s what they’re called. They question passengers, sometimes extensively, to see if they match secret profiles of suspected terrorists.
"Profile" may be a dirty word in the United States. But Sneh's reaction is: "We have to secure our passengers, our airplanes, and words do not scare us. Bombs do."
..."It is quite intrusive, the questions we ask," explains Rosen. "And, sometimes, people are not happy to answer them. But we try to explain that this is the situation, and in Israel, we can’t afford to miss." ...
Surprisingly, this is pretty much what happens when you pass through a border patrol checkpoint coming out of El Paso, Texas. They're looking, I assume, for illegal aliens and drugs, so they have checkpoints set up on all the main roads leading out of the city.The Border Patrol can afford to screw up a few times: if a few people sneak in with drugs and illegal aliens, it's not the end of the world: they are just there to create enough of a threat to smugglers to deter a flood of smuggling into the country. On the other hand, airport security must have a 100% prevention rate.
"A body scanner at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport would not necessarily have detected the explosives which the would-be syringe bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had sewn into his underwear. A Dutch military intelligence source told De Telegraaf newspaper that Al Qaeda has its own security scanners and has been practicing ways of concealing explosives.posted by ericb at 11:37 AM on December 31, 2009
The terrorist group has even carried out test runs at smuggling explosives through European airports, the paper reports.
On Monday Schiphol's operational manager Ad Rutten said the explosives carried by the 23-year-old Nigerian Abdulmutallab may well have been detected had he been scanned by one of the airport's 15 body scanners. Schiphol was the first airport to run a trial of body scanners, which use sound waves to see through passengers' clothing. At present the scanners are only an optional alternative to the conventional metal detector, as European privacy laws prevent them being made compulsory.
Since the attempted attack on the flight from Schiphol to Detroit, Schiphol has been operating tightened security measures. Around 50 extra security staff have been hired in to carry out the tightened checks on passengers to the United States. All passengers to the US are now being body searched at the gate. The airport says that while the chance of discovering any concealed explosives is still not 100 percent, it is at least much higher than it was.
American Airlines Flight 11: "Ong said the four hijackers had come from first-class seats: 2A, 2B, 9A, and 9B. She said the wounded passenger was in seat 10B."posted by ericb at 1:54 PM on December 31, 2009 [2 favorites]
American Airlines Flight 77: "Two hijackers, Hani Hanjour and Majed Moqed were identified by clerks as having bought single, first-class tickets for Flight 77 from Advance Travel Service in Totowa, New Jersey with $1,842.25 in cash."
United Airlines Flight 93: "Al-Haznawi and al-Ghamdi boarded the aircraft at 07:39 and sat in first class seats 6B and 3D respectively. Al-Nami boarded one minute later and sat in first class seat 3C. Jarrah boarded at 07:48 and sat in seat 1B."
United Airlines Flight 175: " Banihammad boarded first and sat in first class seat 2A, while Mohand al-Shehri was seated in 2B. At 07:27, Shehhi and Ahmed al-Ghamdi boarded, and sat in business class seats 6C and 9D respectively. A minute later, Hamza al-Ghamdi boarded, and sat in 9C."
Terrorists are cheap, seems to be the assumption. Every terrorist plot that has gone forward involving airline hijacking or suicide bombing has been with coach tickets (someone can probably confirm of deny this, but this seems to be the case).What a bizarre thing to say. After 9/11 everyone was talking about how the hijackers took first-class tickets, which are closer to the pilots.
You're implying that "crazy" means there's no hope. I like to think we haven't given up trying to understand what makes "crazy" people (like sociopaths) tick. At the same time, you could easily make the case that they are disillusioned or hold a distorted view of reality, which is enough to diagnose an illness as per the DSM. Not that the DSM is the end-all-be-all, but suppose you were able to intervene as a clinician/psychologist with someone who was a self-confessed would-be terrorist. How would you proceed?What makes you think there's anything "wrong" with them at all? Maybe they're just pissed off?
If you read my whole comment, I think I anticipated your point here: "People are very good at pattern matching, but forming that pattern is the difficult part since there are so few 'terrorists.' But training a person to identify the behavior of someone as out of place, nervous, inappropriate, or jittery is pretty easy as most people show up to the job interview with these skills.So terrorists pop some xanax and ecstasy before the flight. If AQ knows all their bombers have to do is seem calm to successfully blow up a plane, then don't you think they'll train them to seem calm and probably drug them before their missions?
[A] trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side? "The whole time, they are looking into your eyes – which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. ..."If potential terrorists are studying your physical security then they'll figure out ways to evade it. If they're studying interview techniques then they'll likely get nervous and rely on canned responses. So telling people that your staff are human lie detectors is a win-win solution. It's like a magician's patter. It encourages your target to focus on the wrong things
"The misconception: We know how the hijackers seized the planes. Within days of Sept. 11, Americans believed they knew how the planes were grabbed: Terrorists had taken control by stabbing pilots, passengers, and flight attendants with box cutters and knives.posted by ericb at 4:46 PM on December 31, 2009 [1 favorite]
What's wrong with the story: It's incomplete and misleading. We don't really know what happened on the planes. The cockpit voice recorder survived neither New York crash and was damaged beyond salvage in the Pentagon crash. The Flight 93 voice recorder doesn't start until several minutes after the hijackers took the plane. What little we know about tactics and weapons comes from phones calls made by passengers and flight attendants. As Edward Jay Epstein has pointed out, the evidence is incredibly paltry. No one on United Flight 175, which crashed into the World Trade Center, reported anything about weapons or tactics. One flight attendant on American Flight 11, which also crashed into the World Trade Center, said she was disabled by a chemical spray, while another flight attendant said a passenger was stabbed or shot. On the Pentagon plane, American Flight 77, Barbara Olson reported hijackers carrying knives and box cutters but did not describe how they took the cockpit. And on United Flight 93, passengers reported knives but also a hijacker threatening to explode a bomb. The box cutter-knives story isn't demonstrably false, but it serves to divert attention from the other weapons and to mask the fact that we don't have any idea how the hijackings happened."*
"Traditionally, they've hired private security companies, who then hire the people who operate the equipment. The contracts usually go to the lowest bidder. It's those people who are often criticized as the weakest link in the system. Pay is low, and turnover high-- 500% at one airport-- and their training is often minimal. Federal inspectors have repeatedly been able to easily get weapons and potential bombs past them."At Boston Logan 'Globe Aviation Services' was the private security firm at terminal B and 'Huntley Security' at terminal C (contracted by the FAA). The planes (American Flight 11 and United Flight 175) which slammed into the two towers of the World Trade Center originated from these terminals. Both contractors had poor histories of security lapses.
'''Two of the planes flew out of Logan, but I don't think Logan is weaker than any other airport. The problem is systemic,' [retired FAA special agent Brian] Sullivan said. 'Morale problems are horrendous' among FAA security staff whose job includes trying to prevent terrorists from boarding planes. 'All you need to do is look at turnover and employee satisfaction,' Sullivan added.Poor training, low wages, etc. contributed to a porous security system. Then -- 9/11 happened. As a response, the government got serious and decided that tighter oversight, better training, etc. was needed and shit-canned the security companies and formed the TSA in November 2001.
Sullivan, like many other security specialists, said the weak link in aviation security is the low-paid employees hired to work at security checkpoints by private security firms that are contracted by the airlines.
A former Massport official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that for years airport officials have been concerned about 'the quality of the people hired, basically at the minimum wage, to check your bags. There were a lot of people at Massport who said this was the weak link.'''
"U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta today announced further enhancements to the security and efficiency of the U.S. aviation system including the beginning of a new training program for passenger screeners the deployment of the nation's first fully federalized team of federal screening personnel at Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI) and the deployment of thousands of explosive detection systems to screen all passenger bags by the end of this year.posted by ericb at 6:11 PM on December 31, 2009
...Secretary Mineta announced that the DOT's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has awarded a contract of $105 million to Lockheed Martin Services to begin the training of the airport security screening force. Under the contract each screener will receive a minimum of 40 hours of classroom training five times the amount they received under the previous system. Screeners also will receive 60 hours of on-the-job training and will have to pass a tough final examination as a requirement for graduation.
Secretary Mineta announced additional measures to enhance aviation safety including the full federalization of the security screener workforce at BWI. Under the Aviation and Transportation Security Act all airport security screeners must be federal employees by Nov. 19 and BWI will be the first U.S. airport at which this requirement is implemented. In addition the Secretary said that the TSA will deploy up to 1 100 explosive detection systems and up to 4 700 explosive trace detection machines at the nation's 429 airports to screen all bags for explosives by Dec. 31 2002 as mandated by Congress."
"Another terrorist attack was foiled on 18 April 1986 in what became known as the Hindawi Affair. A pregnant Irish woman named Anne Mary Murphy was about to board an El Al flight at London's Heathrow airport when her bag was found to contain three pounds of plastic explosives. These had been planted by her fiancé Nezar Hindawi who was booked on a different flight. Hindawi was jailed for 45 years, the longest sentence ever delivered by a British court. There was evidence that Syrian officials were involved and as a result, Britain cut off diplomatic relations with Syria."posted by ericb at 9:25 AM on January 1, 2010 [1 favorite]
"A federal customs and border protection official reversed himself today, admitting a passenger from Northwest Flight 253 was placed in handcuffs, searched and released after a canine alerted officers to his carry-on luggage.posted by ericb at 1:35 PM on January 1, 2010
Ronald G. Smith, chief U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer in the Detroit area, sent an email to The Detroit News late Thursday apologizing that the information on the passenger -- which was reported to federal investigators by a pair of Taylor attorneys who were passengers on the flight -- was not made available earlier.
Federal officials had denied the details of the incident despite repeated accounts by attorneys Kurt and Lori Haskell of Taylor who say they saw a man get questioned by federal officials and later led away in handcuffs after a sniffer dog reacted to something in the man's carry-on luggage in the airport's baggage area.
The couple said the man, who appeared to be in his early 30s and of Indian descent, was taken to a room for questioning and later led out of that room in handcuffs.
In the email, which was also sent to the couple, Smith said he had just received a piece of information he did not have previously and hopes 'it will clear up the matter.'
Smith said the man was handcuffed, escorted to a room where he was interviewed and searched. Nothing was found. The man was not arrested or detained and no further information was available about him, Smith said.
'This information is consistent with eyewitness accounts,' Smith said.
...In previous interviews Smith said the Haskells' account was a composite of two events that occurred at the airport around the time passengers got off Flight 253.
The incidents were:
• A man from another flight -- Northwest Flight 249, also from Amsterdam -- was arrested at the jetway as he got off his flight and would have been led handcuffed through the area where the Flight 253 passengers were gathered, Smith said. The name of the man was not released, Smith added, because he was arrested on suspicion of immigration violations, not on a criminal matter.
• A sniffer dog reacted to agricultural or food products inside the bag of a third man, who was off yet another flight, Smith said. He was questioned and may have had some items confiscated but was not arrested, Smith said. Smith could not identify the flight number for the man found with prohibited food or plant products.
Lori Haskell said Thursday that she and her husband stand by their original story and alleged the government was concealing the facts about the incident."
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