Penn speaks

[mamajoan]

Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller, had a run-in with airport security back in November and made a fuss. His account of the incident is in his online journal, here. And then he posted a follow-up a few days later, here.

It's entertaining stuff to read, but also kind of alarming. I dunno. The way they fawn over him because he's a celebrity, yet at the same time they clearly want to shut him up and keep him from making a stink or suing ... the way the PR lady says that she made a CD-ROM from the videotape of Penn's encounter with the federal security guy and disseminated it, and apparently she thinks this is supposed to reassure Penn, when all it makes me think is that they're trying to show off, "hey look this is us groping a big celebrity!" Ugh, the whole thing is just icky. Makes me glad I won't be flying again for quite a while. (Next time I fly, it'll most likely be with a very small baby. I wonder whether that'll make the airport staff more, or less, obnoxious. Sigh.)

Comments

[darthfi.livejournal.com]

Wow. We're far more used to airport security here, and, I suppose partly because our security people are also used to it, it's much politer. No-one would dream of touching you without permission - they usually ask or semi-ask about the wand, even - and I believe that you HAVE to be frisked by a person of the same sex. But then I grew up in a country where to get into the airport you had to have a hand scanner run over all your items - including handbags - whether you were flying or not. I think I've been patted down once and that was thorough and very polite.

I freaked out a National Guardsman (a heavily armed National Guardsman) at SFO by asking him if they were on guard permanently now. Don't think it occured to him that people from Ireland are a lot more used to seeing armed men with BIG guns (no handweapons though) - when I was a kid, I had to hang around outside home for half an hour when coming home from school because the army (aka the nice men in khaki with BIG guns) were delivering money to the bank downstairs. (Which they've done in Ireland for as long as I can remember, say since I was 4 at least, due to the IRA's propensity for knocking off banks to fund their nasty little habits.) Which meant that I have no problem going up and asking a man with a large deterrent in his hand what's going on.

Anyway, the point is that having grown up in a country where terrorism has been a threat for a lot longer, there's a massive difference in attitude in security people and those who face them. As far as we're concerned, they're doing a job to keep us safe. As far as they're concerned, they're doing a job to keep us all safe, and I don't see the power trip thing going on very often.

Sounds like the US airport guys are rather different - of course, you've only had this situation for less than two years. No more "so long, farewell" choruses to me at the gate. (Which was always the thing that weirded me most about US airports - that anyone could reach the gate.)

There's nothing worse than someone with little power using it to make himself feel big.

[kenboy.livejournal.com]

More obnoxious. Because once you get to the metal detectors, you're going to find out that you have to take your baby out of the carrier so that it can go through the x-ray machine.

'Cause, you know, most terrorists really are single moms traveling with babies.

Seriously, my wife and I just flew from Buffalo (where we left our little guy with her folks) to New Orleans, via Charlotte, for a badly needed vacation. Going through security in Buffalo was insanely slow, and my wife set off the metal detectors with her boots, forcing a hand-check by a nice enough lady, but costing us another five minutes. In retrospect, it looked like MANY of the people being hand-checked were innocent-looking women, including a few grandmotherly types. The TSA person told me that for some reason, they were getting a LOT of hits from women's footware. Flying back, when she set off the detector again in New Orleans, an even nicer TSA person told me that women's shoes, especially boots, all have metal in them, so they're setting off the metal detectors, which nowadays forces the security people to not just wand you, but also to take your shoes from you and run them through the shoe-bomber-checking-out-machine, adding to the delay.

The whole thing just strikes me as ridiculous. Why on earth can't the government do some simple database mining, which would let them know, for instance, that my wife was born in Buffalo, married (to me) 4 1/2 years ago, had a baby 14 months ago, has no criminal record, and after law school, worked at CBS for x years and at SurveyUSA for y, all of which works out to a risk score of "17," which is exactly 33 points too few to trigger a manual search, which means she is simply waved through? While, meantime, the guy behind me, who is 23, single, and has an assault conviction, he comes up as a 83, and gets hand-searched?

Something like that. People can feel free to opt out of the system for freakish privacy concerns, but far as I'm concerned, I just want to get on my damned flight without having to get to the airport two hours before it leaves!

[darthfi.livejournal.com]

Sorry mate, but if we want to fly further than Western Europe from the UK, we have to be there at least two hours in advance. It's allegedly an hour before for UK-Ireland and UK-Western Europe or internal UK flights, but in practice, it's a damn good idea to get there earlier. And this has been in practice long before September 11.

As for profiling - sorry again, but if you're that dedicated to a "cause", you WILL spend years building up a "safe" profile. Also profiling brings on massive security concerns regarding personal information.

And as far as the baby goes - I'm afraid that's an old ploy on smuggling arms/explosives/whatever.

Metal in shoes? The only pair I own that have enough metal to set off an airline alarm are metal-shanked because they're also riding boots. I think someone's been feeding you a bullshit line about women's shoes. I suspect it's far more likely that they had a tip-off, real or false, that there was a specific profile for female suspects.

On top of that, when it comes to security, it's a fairly new concept on this level to US airports. I remember not being believed about 5 or 6 years ago, after the Good Friday agreement when they took the security checks away from the entrance to Dublin airport. My US friend absolutely refused to believe that I grew up in a country where being checked just going into a public building was obligatory.

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

It's true about the baby "ploy." Heck, it goes back at least as far as GWTW, where Scarlett hides valuables in the baby's diaper.

Re: metal in shoes, I think it's more that people are still scared from the would-be "shoe bomber" last year. I got picked out to be searched several times over my recent trip to Japan and Hawaii, and at least once they made me take off my shoes so they could be run through the scanner thingie.

And there *are* some public buildings in the U.S. that you can't enter without being checked -- courthouses, for example.

But kenboy is right in general about the apparent ridiculousness of the searches in airports. There's no rhyme or reason to it; they *say* it's random, and that makes no sense when you think about it either. And they can get VERY tetchy when someone even seems to be less-than-thrilled about cooperating; I read a story recently about a guy whose very pregnant wife was singled out for searching, and they made her remove her bra (that underwire can be dangerous, you know) right out there in public. And when she started to cry because of the stress and embarrassment, her husband got annoyed and said some stuff -- and he got arrested!!! For simply SAYING that it sucked that his pregnant wife was being upset and humiliated in public!

I don't at all deny the need for security. It's just that there's no logic to it, it's all knee-jerk reactionary, and frankly, they're doing it in the wrong places anyway. The next big terrorist attack isn't going to be committed by people who just sauntered onto an airplane like the 9/11 guys did. It's going to take advantage of one of the many *other* security holes in our country, holes that we're busily ignoring while we go to Orwellian extremes to make our airports *look* safer.

[kenboy.livejournal.com]

Right, exactly The flying-the-plane-into-the-building thing isn't going to work again, because the passengers will sacrifice themselves to stop the terrorists. The next thing will be plastic explosive at the football game (not the Superbowl...why deal with all the extra security when you can get 80,000 people on any given Sunday, so to speak? How hard would it be to get a bunch of jobs in a stadium? Or at a mall? Or just one job, or a ticket, for that matter, somewhere deep below the waterline on a cruise ship?

Meantime, granny gets patted down at the gate because the computer randomly spat out her name. I'm not saying the best idea is to use profiling to just hassle the passengers with Muslim-sounding names -- in a world of easy to obtain fake ID's, what's the point -- but they've got to use some sort of intelligence in deciding what to spend time on and what not to. We're all supposed to pretend everything is fine because the federal government took over airport security and mandated that all bags be screened for explosives. Please. When's the last time someone used checked luggage to blow up a plane? Lockerbie? Seriously, I think it's happened exactly once since then, and that was in 1986.

We're an open society, and I don't think people will stand for anything else, really. If all the law enforcement money is being spent at the airports, of course the terrorists are going to go somewhere else. Why on earth wouldn't they?