organization:transportation security administration

Homeland Security Goes Abroad. Not Everyone Is Grateful. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/world/americas/homeland-security-customs-border-patrol.html

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An estimated 2,000 Homeland Security employees — from Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agents to Transportation Security Administration officials — now are deployed to more than 70 countries around the world.

Hundreds more are either at sea for weeks at a time aboard Coast Guard ships, or patrolling the skies in surveillance planes above the eastern Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea.

The expansion has created tensions with some European countries who say that the United States is trying to export its immigration laws to their territory. But other allies agree with the United States’ argument that its longer reach strengthens international security while preventing a terrorist attack, drug shipment, or human smuggling ring from reaching American soil.

“Many threats to the homeland begin overseas, and that’s where we need to be,” said James Nealon, the department’s assistant secretary for international engagement.

#Etats-unis

Terrorisme : les systèmes d’analyse des comportements sont inefficaces
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2017/02/09/terrorisme-les-systemes-d-analyse-des-comportements-sont-inefficaces_5077173

Des documents rendus publics montrent que les outils censés détecter les « comportements à risque » dans les aéroports américains fonctionnent mal. L’American Civil Liberties Union a publié, mercredi 8 février, une série de documents accablants pour la Transportation Security Administration (TSA), agence publique chargée de la sécurité dans les transports aux Etats-Unis. Depuis 2007, celle-ci a mis en œuvre un programme, le Behavior Detection and Analysis (anciennement SPOT, pour Screening of Passengers (...)

#SNCF #CCTV #comportement #surveillance #voyageurs #discrimination #ACLU

##voyageurs

Study: TSA full-body scanners failed to detect guns, explosives | TheHill
▻http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/215577-study-discarded-tsa-scanners-missed-weapons

The Transportation Security Administration’s full-body scanners failed to detect a number of potential weapons, including knives, guns and explosives, according to a study released this week.

The controversial scanners, which captured explicit images of passenger’s bodies, provided “weak protection against adaptive adversaries,” researchers from the University of California, San Diego; the University of Michigan and Johns Hopkins University concluded.

“It is possible to conceal knives, guns, and explosives from detection by exploiting properties of the device’s backscatter X-ray technology,” the authors of the study wrote.

At Airports, a Misplaced Faith in Body Language - NYTimes.com

▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/science/in-airport-screening-body-language-is-faulted-as-behavior-sleuth.html?emc=e

Like the rest of us, airport security screeners like to think they can read body language. The Transportation Security Administration has spent some $1 billion training thousands of “behavior detection officers” to look for facial expressions and other nonverbal clues that would identify terrorists.

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But critics say there’s no evidence that these efforts have stopped a single terrorist or accomplished much beyond inconveniencing tens of thousands of passengers a year. The T.S.A. seems to have fallen for a classic form of self-deception: the belief that you can read liars’ minds by watching their bodies.

#df #aéroports #transport_aérien #body_language

#G4S: From Israeli Settlements to Lebanese Banks
▻http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/g4s-israeli-settlements-lebanese-banks

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A stranded traveler looks for his carry-on bag with the help of Los Angeles Airport Police officer which he left behind at the screeners during the shooting a day after a shooting that killed one Transportation Security Administration worker and injured several others at Los Angeles International Airport November 2, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo: AFP - Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images) A stranded traveler looks for his carry-on bag with the (...)

#Lebanon #Articles #Boycott #Israel #occupation

TSA Behavior Profiling Not Effective, GAO Report Finds - ABC News
▻http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/11/tsa-behavior-profiling-not-effective-gao-report-finds

Behavioral screening at airports across the county has wasted up to $1 billion since 2007 and cannot be proven effective, according to the Government Accountability Office.
GAO released its report on the Transportation Security Administration’s Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques program, also known as SPOT, where agents profile cagey looking people and engage them in conversation in an attempt to determine whether they are up to no good.
The report found that the available evidence and data show that the program cannot be proven effective and that profiling is “probably no better than chance.”
Last May, The Department of Homeland Security Inspector General released a report on SPOT that also found the program is tough to prove effective.

Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American - Salon.com
▻http://www.salon.com/2013/04/16/lets_hope_the_boston_marathon_bomber_is_a_white_american

Though FBI data show fewer terrorist plots involving Muslims than terrorist plots involving non-Muslims, America has mobilized a full-on war effort exclusively against the prospect of Islamic terrorism. Indeed, the moniker “War on Terrorism” has come to specifically mean “War on Islamic Terrorism,” involving everything from new laws like the Patriot Act, to a new torture regime, to new federal agencies like the Transportation Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security, to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to mass surveillance of Muslim communities.

By contrast, even though America has seen a consistent barrage of attacks from domestic non-Islamic terrorists, the privilege and double standards baked into our national security ideologies means those attacks have resulted in no systemic action of the scope marshaled against foreign terrorists. In fact, it has been quite the opposite — according to Darryl Johnson, the senior domestic terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, the conservative movement backlash to merely reporting the rising threat of such domestic terrorism resulted in DHS seriously curtailing its initiatives against that particular threat. ( Irony alert : When it comes specifically to fighting white non-Muslim domestic terrorists, the right seems to now support the very doctrine it criticized Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry for articulating — the doctrine that sees fighting terrorism as primarily “an intelligence-gathering, law-enforcement, public-diplomacy effort” and not something more systemic.)

TSA harassment sends rape victim to emergency room — RT
►https://rt.com/usa/news/tsa-rape-room-wife-179

What would have likely been a routine flight out of a Florida airport this weekend ended with a woman being sent to the emergency room after TSA agents insisted on groping a traumatized rape victim in a security pat-down that put her in the hospital.

A user of the online Web forum FlyerTalk.com writes that his wife was admitted to the ER for treatment after agents with the Transportation Security Administration cited an “anomaly” in her bra as a reason to subject her to an intrusive closed-door screening on Sunday at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

The woman, described by her husband as the victim of brutal rape, was reportedly being transferred to a psychiatric ward for further treatment after what the man says was a “horrific experience.”

Ex-TSA agent: We steal from travelers all the time — RT
►https://rt.com/usa/news/tsa-stealing-from-travelers-358

A TSA agent convicted of stealing more than $800,000 worth of goods from travelers said this type of theft is “commonplace” among airport security. Almost 400 TSA officers have been fired for stealing from passengers since 2003.

­Pythias Brown, a former Transportation Security Administration officer at Newark Liberty International Airport, spent four years stealing everything he could from luggage and security checkpoints, including clothing, laptops, cameras, Nintendo Wiis, video games and cash.

Pat-downs for babies: The diapered threat | The Economist
►http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2011/05/pat-downs_babies?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/thediaperedthreat

LAST MONTH, we gaped in awe at the spectacle of America’s Transportation Security Administration performing an “enhanced” pat-down on a six-year-old. The TSA didn’t blink an eye—airport security officials were just “following procedure,” according to an agency spokesman. Now the TSA has gone even further: last week, a pastor travelling through Kansas City International Airport took this now-famous photo of TSA employees patting-down a baby:

►http://yfrog.com/gzlb9nkj

►http://a.yfrog.com/img611/8493/lb9nk.jpg

#tsa

Un million de terroristes | AgoraVox
►http://www.agoravox.fr/article.php3?id_article=44335

Consécutivement aux attentats du 11-Septembre 2001, l’administration Bush Jr recourut massivement aux listes noires d’individus « suspectés » de quelconques liens avec le terrorisme ou le trafic de drogue. Pour peu qu’un citoyen américain ou un ressortissant étranger figure que dans les bases de données du Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), du Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) ou du Transportation Security Administration (TSA), le cauchemar américain s’abattra froidement sur le nouvel ennemi public numéro X : il sera bipé par tous les portiques aéroportuaires voire reçu par le SWAT après l’atterrissage, aura toutes les peines du monde pour obtenir un prêt bancaire, louer un appartement ou une voiture, réserver un billet d’avion, etc. A moins d’être une Very VIP, il ne pourra espérer être retiré de cette terrorist watchlist, héritage jurisprudentiel des années 60-70

#liberté #sécurité