TSA makes disabled boy, 4, take off leg braces.

unozero

unozero

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Just when I thought I was out of the Transportation Security Administration business for a few columns, they pull me back in.

Did you hear about the Camden cop whose disabled son wasn't allowed to pass through airport security unless he took off his leg braces?

Unfortunately, it's no joke. This happened to Bob Thomas, a 53-year-old officer in Camden's emergency crime suppression team, who was flying to Orlando in March with his wife, Leona, and their son, Ryan.
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http://www.philly.com/inquirer/home_region/20100215_Daniel_Rubin__Another_case_of_TSA_overkill.html
 
Uh oh, they have to take em off!
Just put em back on after they are done. Why do people have to bitch about everything?
 
Imagine how humiliating it could have been if he was a little older,Maybe he was embarrassed hard to tell


"well your just gonna have to crawl through the Screen too bad!"
 
So really the issue here is they shouldn't have made him walk through on his own. They were perfectly within their place to remove the leg braces.

Edit: or this:

TSA policy should have allowed the parents to help the boy to a private screening area where he could have been swabbed for traces of explosive materials.
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I don't think so.


when it comes to Airport Secuirty we need to be more like Israel.
 
I wouldn't want to make a call like that, but imagine if some terrorist dude has a son with leg braces. i'd rather have one small moment of embarrassment than 250 dead people. also people circumnavigate rules all the time. i'm sure there have been plenty of parents that have stashed illegal goods in their son's wooden/prosthetic legs even though we are talking about braces
 
Haha, I flew to New York 2 weeks after the Christmas Bomber incident. I had a broken ankle, and rolled through security in a wheel chair I found left by the airport elevator. They never checked the metal wheel chair or made me get out of it as I passed through the metal detector. They did not look at my aluminum crutches which I brought onto the plane with me. They also did not look at my bag of 5 syringes and dozens of pills. They did not look at my medical papers. I had forgotten a camera in my pocket. The wand picked it up and I showed it to them, but nobody looked at it or scanned it. Nothing was swabbed.

At the secondary screening area, my carry on bag was searched along with everyone else. This involved looking in the top box of chocolates in a stack of 3 boxes I was carrying and asking if I had a receipt for a can of soda. I did not, but got to keep the soda. The syringes, crutches, wheelchair, and pills again did not raise an eyebrow.
 
lol Dan, you shoulda brought a video camera too and recorded secretly the whole procedure
 
Dude, it's a middle-aged white guy on the "Emergency Crime Suppression" (read: SWAT) team. I somehow doubt he's a guy to be profiled as 'potential terrorist.' Same goes for screening a ****ing 4-year-old because he has a similar name to a 'suspected terrorist.' It's idiotic judgment calls by individual TSA officers who are too stupid, vindictive, or shitheaded to realize that screening a god-damn kid with leg braces is pointless. Get out a ****ing wand, it's not like there's a lot of volume to hide shit in inside those braces.

EDIT: Dan, that's flying to New York, most countries aren't nearly as asshole-ish about airport security as the US.
 
I'd rather not "expose" lax airport security. I think airport security is bullshit as it is. I commend Europe for not giving a **** about TSA rules. Trying to scan everyone as though they could be terrorists is a terrible waste of resources and time. Every life saved by draconian security measures costs millions of people millions of hours and millions of dollars. Why aren't deaths from obesity or car accidents targeted the same way? Would the beefed up security measured have prevented the 911 hijackings? It is still pretty easy to slide a thin blade behind a belt buckle. Using more common sense and cheaper methods (like talking to people about their trip as they wait in line) or identifying potential hijackers before they get on the plane would make more sense. As it stands now, airport security is all about giving travelers the perception of safety (and paying the associated costs) rather than actually promoting security.
 
Dan said:
I'd rather not "expose" lax airport security. I think airport security is bullshit as it is. I commend Europe for not giving a **** about TSA rules. Trying to scan everyone as though they could be terrorists is a terrible waste of resources and time. Every life saved by draconian security measures costs millions of people millions of hours and millions of dollars. Why aren't deaths from obesity or car accidents targeted the same way? Would the beefed up security measured have prevented the 911 hijackings? It is still pretty easy to slide a thin blade behind a belt buckle. Using more common sense and cheaper methods (like talking to people about their trip as they wait in line) or identifying potential hijackers before they get on the plane would make more sense. As it stands now, airport security is all about giving travelers the perception of safety (and paying the associated costs) rather than actually promoting security.
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your post "smoke and mirrors"

thats how i read it but yeah your 100% correct
 
For ****'s sake, of all the things to whine about, why is airport security such a popular one? It takes maybe a minute of your precious ****ing time before you can get on a plane. Christ.

This story is just about one dumb**** screener anyway... not the fault of the the TSA. There's dumb****s everywhere.

****.
 
Cause people traffic weapons in a four year olds person, who is incapable of carrying the heavy and bulky equipment due to his size and physical strength.
 
Warped said:
I wouldn't want to make a call like that, but imagine if some terrorist dude has a son with leg braces. i'd rather have one small moment of embarrassment than 250 dead people.
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The likeliest of scenarios, I'm sure.
 
It's all so we have the illusion of safety. Without that, people who think every brown person is a terrorist will abstain from spending money on flights. It's all a ploy to convince us that flying is completely safe, given their extraordinary safety precautions.

Like Dan pointed out, if you want to get a small blade on a plane, you can...I'm willing to bet most of us here can out-think the friendly people at security gates.
 
Letters said:
For ****'s sake, of all the things to whine about, why is airport security such a popular one? It takes maybe a minute of your precious ****ing time before you can get on a plane. Christ.
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You've clearly never flown during a busy season. I had to wait in line at a security checkpoint for 45 minutes and ended up missing a plane. In addition to costing taxpayers time though, you forgot to mention the billions of dollars of taxpayer money it takes to fund this bullshit. Then when you consider how many terrorists still make it onto the planes, its just ****ing retarded to have this much security at airports. Like Dan said, we could be spending this money on solving actual problems like traffic accident deaths, or obesity problems.

STARTLING FACT: Terrorism doesnt actually result in that many deaths!

Car crashes result in FOUR HUNDRED TIMES THE AMOUNT OF DEATHS than terrorism does. It doesnt even make sense that we vamp up airport security because thats an incredibly small fraction of the ways that terrorists can make attacks. Whats next? A bus gets hijacked and blows up a building, now we need the TSA on buses?
 
toaster leigh said:
Since this is what the casual and uninformed observer associates with "better" security, it'd be quite difficult to scale back and move toward more practical security measures (like the examples Dan gave) without people generally believing that they're getting more lax about it.
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That’s true. In order for there to be any implementation of practicality, the public has to start understanding that all this extra security is primarily just to make them feel better. But your right when you say people will see any kind of reduction in security as a matter for concern. It will be a while until people stop being so anal about it.
 
You know I found this quite humorous as I work at the airport(I'm a ramp rat). While cleaning a plane I found one of those knitting needles or whatever or the floor, how do they allow those things? They could be used easily as a weapon......and they make people do stupid shit like this at screening points, OH BOY!
 
Naph said:
Cause people traffic weapons in a four year olds person, who is incapable of carrying the heavy and bulky equipment due to his size and physical strength.
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You never know, dude.
People are crazy as ****.
 
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