As airport security becomes more of a concern during the holiday travel season, travelers will be seeing delays of all sorts. But an hour-long delay for Lafayette Regional Airport users Tuesday morning was of a nature most fowl.

The airport was briefly shut down as authorities investigated a suspicious package that turned out to contain a frozen chicken and a head lamp, said Lt. Craig Stansbury, spokesman for the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office.

Police were called to the airport around 10:48 a.m. Tuesday after a TSA employee saw the package run through the screening process.

According to Stansbury, the outline of the wires from the head-mounted mining light overlapped another image, that of the chicken, during the screening.

The combination made for an odd and not readily identifiable image, so the employee notified other security personnel.

The terminal was evacuated while the package was examined.

Stansbury said bomb dogs and other resources were used to make sure the package did not contain anything dangerous.

The wires coming from the lamp made the chicken look particularly suspicious, he said.

According to authorities, the chicken was reportedly stuffed with crawfish as well,

The all-clear was given around 11:45 a.m., and airport operations resumed as usual.

Source: The Advertiser

Last fall, as he had done hundreds of times, Iranian-American businessman Farid Seif passed through security at a Houston airport and boarded an international flight.

He didn’t realize he had forgotten to remove the loaded snub nose “baby” Glock pistol from his computer bag. But TSA officers never noticed as his bag glided along the belt and was x-rayed. When he got to his hotel after the three-hour flight, he was shocked to discover the gun traveled unnoticed from Houston.

“It’s just impossible to miss it, you know. I mean, this is not a small gun,” Seif told ABC News. “How can you miss it? You cannot miss it.”

But the TSA did miss it, and despite what most people believe about the painstaking effort to screen airline passengers and their luggage before they enter the terminal, it was not that unusual.

Experts tell ABC News that every year since the September 11 terror attacks, federal agencies have conducted random, covert “red team tests,” where undercover agents try to see just how much they can get past security checks at major U.S. airports. And while the Department of Homeland Security closely guards the results as classified, those that have leaked in media reports have been shocking.

According to one report, undercover TSA agents testing security at a Newark airport terminal on one day in 2006 found that TSA screeners failed to detect concealed bombs and guns 20 out of 22 times. A 2007 government audit leaked to USA Today revealed that undercover agents were successful slipping simulated explosives and bomb parts through Los Angeles’s LAX airport in 50 out of 70 attempts, and at Chicago’s O’Hare airport agents made 75 attempts and succeeded in getting through undetected 45 times.

Watch the ABC News report

US scientists warned Friday that the full-body, graphic-image X-ray scanners that are being used to screen passengers and airline crews at airports around the country may be unsafe.

“They say the risk is minimal, but statistically someone is going to get skin cancer from these X-rays,” Dr Michael Love, who runs an X-ray lab at the department of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at Johns Hopkins University school of medicine, told AFP.

“No exposure to X-ray is considered beneficial. We know X-rays are hazardous but we have a situation at the airports where people are so eager to fly that they will risk their lives in this manner,” he said.

The possible health dangers posed by the scanners add to passengers and airline crews’ concerns about the devices, which have been dubbed “naked” scanners because of the graphic image they give of a person’s body, genitalia and all.

A regional airline pilot last month refused to go through one of the scanners, calling it an “assault on my person” and a violation of his right to privacy.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) began rolling out full-body scanners at US airports in 2007, but stepped up deployment of the devices this year when stimulus funding made it possible to buy another 450 of the advanced imaging technology scanners.

A group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) raised concerns about the “potential serious health risks” from the scanners in a letter sent to the White House Office of Science and Technology in April.

Biochemist John Sedat and his colleagues said in the letter that most of the energy from the scanners is delivered to the skin and underlying tissue.

“While the dose would be safe if it were distributed throughout the volume of the entire body, the dose to the skin may be dangerously high,” they wrote.

The Office of Science and Technology responded this week to the scientists’ letter, saying the scanners have been “tested extensively” by US government agencies and were found to meet safety standards.

But Sedat told AFP Friday that the official response was “deeply flawed.”

“We still don’t know the beam intensity or other details of their classified system,” he said, adding that UCSF scientists were preparing a rebuttal to the White House statement.

Some 315 “naked” scanners are currently in use at 65 US airports, according to the TSA.

Source: Agence France-Presse

Police said Wednesday they have warned an airport worker who reportedly made a crude remark about a colleague’s breasts as a newly-installed security scanner took a full body X-ray of her.

Jo Margetson, 29, walked into an X-ray machine at London’s Heathrow Airport by mistake before the incident allegedly took place — and told The Sun newspaper she is now “totally traumatised”.

The reported incident, the first such complaint since the machines were introduced earlier this year, has highlighted privacy concerns about the use of full body scanners at British airports.

Heathrow and Manchester airports has been using them since an alleged bid to blow up a US-bound jet on Christmas Day was foiled, while the US and The Netherlands are among other countries where they are being installed.

When asked about the story, a spokesman for London’s Metropolitan Police said: “Police received an allegation regarding an incident that happened at Heathrow Terminal 5 on March 10.

“A first instance harassment warning has been issued to a 25-year-old male.”

Airports operator BAA, which runs Heathrow, added that it was investigating the allegations.

“If these claims are found to be substantiated, we will take appropriate action,” a spokesman added.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has warned the government that the scanners could run counter to the right to privacy enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.

“When privacy-invading machines like these are installed at our airports, abuses like this are inevitable,” said Alex Deane of campaign group Big Brother Watch.

Source: Rawstory.com

At a meeting in the Vatican at the weekend, the pope made an authoritative – if entirely unexpected – incursion into the raging debate over the planned use of airport body scanners. He told an audience from the aerospace industry that, notwithstanding the threat from terrorism, “the primary asset to be safeguarded and treasured is the person, in his or her integrity”.

Respect for the principles he enunciated “might seem particularly complex and difficult in the present context”, he told his audience, which included airport managers, airline executives, security workers, pilots, cabin and ground staff.

They had to contend with problems arising “from the economic crisis, which is bringing about problematic effects in the civil aviation sector, and the threat of international terrorism, which is targeting airports and aircraft”. But, he warned: “It is essential never to lose sight of respect for the primacy of the person.”

The pope’s words will delight civil liberties campaigners opposed to a device that strips passengers virtually naked.

But those involved in airport security will no doubt point out that, when he himself travels — on Alitalia – the pope and his entourage are simply waved through security controls.

An exception was in 1984 when a permanently installed detection mechanism in Luxembourg alerted security officials to the fact that John Paul II and his aides were packing significant quantities of metal. It had been activated by their crosses.

Source: Pope enters airport body scanners row (Guardian UK)