TSA Trying to Sell Use of Biometrics By Saying It Would ‘Lower the Stress of Traveling’
Transportation Security Administration chief David Pekoske indicates the biometrics will eventually not be optional....
Transportation Security Administration chief David Pekoske indicates the biometrics will eventually not be optional....
Pekoske said he would respond to Sen. Hawley's February letter tomorrow - the day after the hearing....
"She didn't know what to say. She does not want to fly again ever. She didn't know what they were looking for. She was scared"...
...The federal government cannot force states to adopt these identification standards, but it can gain compliance in other ways. In October, it began requiring that visitors to military bases, nuclear plants and federal facilities produce a driver’s license from a state that complies with the law, or show another form of government ID, like a passport.
Earlier, Rebecca Roering, an assistant TSA federal security director at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the agency suffers from low morale. She said this is in part the result of agency leadership, composed of too many former commercial airline executives “placing more emphasis on customer service and passenger wait times than on security and detection rates.”
I hated it from the beginning. It was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show. I confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security. I was even required to confiscate nail clippers from airline pilots—the implied logic being that pilots could use the nail clippers to hijack the very planes they were flying. Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security.... I quickly discovered I was working for an agency whose morale was among the lowest in the U.S. government. In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency’s day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds..... and goes on to the disgusting:
On July 25, 2011, the Federal Court of Appeals ruled that the TSA must act "promptly" to hold a public comment period and adopt rules and regulations regarding its use of body scanners in U.S. airports. Nearly a year later, the TSA has yet to comply...
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