Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Feeling Secure?

I'm going to encounter TSA tomorrow, so I'll have to wear clean underwear, avoid shirts with metal snaps, skip my boots and go with slip-ons, and wear pants tight enough that they don't fall down when I've got my arms up in supplication to get nudie scanned. Then I'll feel secure because we've got folks like Bimbo on the job:

Failed Screening Finally Shows

There is so much wrong with that you hardly know where to start. How does an illegal immigrant get a job in security? What sort of pre-employment screening doesn't stumble at the point of I-9 review for legal residence?

Then we've got him rising to supervisory responsibility, never having been discovered as a non-resident alien. Do you suppose he might have helped a few other illegal Nigerian immigrants climb the security career ladder? Any opportunity for airport infiltration from a nice peaceful place like Nigeria?

But there seems to be only a superficial effort to hide his dual identity since the news story had no problem with finding evidence of both Bimbo and Jerry residing at the same place.

Of course he gets discovered after a mere twenty years. That is simply because he was using a fake ID. Not really a problem you see because the previous owner was a murder victim. He didn't need it any more.

How does one get an ID from a murder victim? I'd say Jerry becomes a "person of interest" on this.

Hey, Secretary Napolitano, got any Bimbos working at DFW?

1 comment:

Ad absurdum per aspera said...

It is my misfortune to go through it several times a month. They are constantly tightening the screws on their flawed approaches to catching a subset of the threats.

The demand that you completely empty your pockets before entering the cyberporn kiosk says it all -- $200k apiece for a machine that apparently cannot tell a weapon from a napkin?

A trip back from Shanghai last year was an interesting study in contrast. It was my first time there, so I arrived 'way ahead of my flight, figuring that a Communist country would have a fairly intrusive approach to security.

What I actually encountered was commonsensical and magnetometer-based. The lines were short, too, both at security and at passport control; their secret appeared to be having enough booths with enough staff to handle the expected number of passengers.

What's more, they were reasonably nice about it all -- quite the contrast to the clumsy authoritarianism of some TSA checkpoints.

Meanwhile, back in the States, we have tragicomic episodes like this:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/05/10/national/a151154D43.DTL

Not sure which makes me feel safer -- that a baby (but not the parents) was on the no-fly list, or that someone who had been put on the no-fly list (even by absurd mistake) made it onto the plane before anyone twigged to it. Not when making the reservation, or checking in and obtaining the physical ticket -- on the plane. What are they using to process all that information they demand -- a Rolodex and an abacus?