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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

For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.”

Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.

This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for “testing, training, and evaluation purposes.” The agency says, however, that those capabilities are not normally activated when the devices are installed at airports.

Body scanners penetrate clothing to provide a highly detailed image so accurate that critics have likened it to a virtual strip search. Technologies vary, with millimeter wave systems capturing fuzzier images, and backscatter X-ray machines able to show precise anatomical detail. The U.S. government likes the idea because body scanners can detect concealed weapons better than traditional magnetometers.

This privacy debate, which has been simmering since the days of the Bush administration, came to a boil two weeks ago when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that scanners would soon appear at virtually every major airport. The updated list includes airports in New York City, Dallas, Washington, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, has filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to grant an immediate injunction pulling the plug on TSA’s body scanning program. In a separate lawsuit, EPIC obtained a letter (PDF) from the Marshals Service, part of the Justice Department, and released it on Tuesday afternoon.

These “devices are designed and deployed in a way that allows the images to be routinely stored and recorded, which is exactly what the Marshals Service is doing,” EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg told CNET. “We think it’s significant.”

William Bordley, an associate general counsel with the Marshals Service, acknowledged in the letter that “approximately 35,314 images…have been stored on the Brijot Gen2 machine” used in the Orlando, Fla. federal courthouse. In addition, Bordley wrote, a Millivision machine was tested in the Washington, D.C. federal courthouse but it was sent back to the manufacturer, which now apparently possesses the image database.

The Gen 2 machine, manufactured by Brijot of Lake Mary, Fla., uses a millimeter wave radiometer and accompanying video camera to store up to 40,000 images and records. Brijot boasts that it can even be operated remotely: “The Gen 2 detection engine capability eliminates the need for constant user observation and local operation for effective monitoring. Using our APIs, instantly connect to your units from a remote location via the Brijot Client interface.”

This trickle of disclosures about the true capabilities of body scanners–and how they’re being used in practice–is probably what alarms privacy advocates more than anything else.

A 70-page document (PDF) showing the TSA’s procurement specifications, classified as “sensitive security information,” says that in some modes the scanner must “allow exporting of image data in real time” and provide a mechanism for “high-speed transfer of image data” over the network. (It also says that image filters will “protect the identity, modesty, and privacy of the passenger.”)

“TSA is not being straightforward with the public about the capabilities of these devices,” Rotenberg said. “This is the Department of Homeland Security subjecting every U.S. traveler to an intrusive search that can be recorded without any suspicion–I think it’s outrageous.” EPIC’s lawsuit says that the TSA should have announced formal regulations, and argues that the body scanners violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable” searches.

TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz told CNET on Wednesday that the agency’s scanners are delivered to airports with the image recording functions turned off. “We’re not recording them,” she said. “I’m reiterating that to the public. We are not ever activating those capabilities at the airport.”

The TSA maintains that body scanning is perfectly constitutional: “The program is designed to respect individual sensibilities regarding privacy, modesty and personal autonomy to the maximum extent possible, while still performing its crucial function of protecting all members of the public from potentially catastrophic events.”

Source: CNet

A Transportation Security Administration agent has been arrested for allegedly stealing nearly $500 dollars from a wheelchair bound passenger as she passed through a security checkpoint at Newark Airport.

Leroy Ray allegedly went into the disabled woman’s bag as it passed through the X-ray machine.

Ray was caught on surveillance video on February 3, 2010, reaching into the woman’s bag to steal an envelope of cash, according to a criminal complaint.

The fiftyish year old woman, investigators said, was from North Jersey and was flying out of Newark to visit relatives overseas.

She apparently checked her purse several minutes after going through security, found the missing money, and went back to complain.

The victim reported $300 dollars in cash in a white envelope was missing as was $195 dollars that was in a zippered pocket of the bag.  When the woman returned to the C-1 checkpoint to complain, Ray allegedly left his post and quickly left the area.

When Ray returned to the checkpoint, he allegedly saw the woman there and then went to the Lost and Found office to turn in the envelope, the feds alleged.

TSA’s own Inspections Division helped uncover the alleged wrongdoing.

The TSA emailed NBC New York a statement “TSA will continue to move swiftly and decisively to end the federal career of any employee who engages in illegal activity on the job.”

In screening more than 2 million passengers a day nationwide, the TSA’s Ann Davis told us 23 security officers have been “removed/terminated for theft from the check point or checked baggage” since the beginning of 2007.

Ray, an eight-year veteran of the TSA who also appeared to hold a job with a private security firm, had no comment on leaving the federal courthouse.

But his attorney, Brian Hill, said “I’ve known him for a long time and everything about these allegations appear to be out of character for him.”

Ray, 45, was released on $1000 bail after an appearance in federal court in Newark.

Meanwhile, fliers at Newark Liberty Airport today were aghast at the charges.

“I watch it like a hawk,” said Lynne DeSherbinin of Norwalk, Conn. of her possessions, just before catching a flight out of Newark.

But another flier, Jose Ramirez, of Piscataway, N.J. admitted “They’re federal employees so you wouldn’t expect like that to happen to you.”

Source: NBC New York

Cops: New high-tech screener triggered fight over manhood insult

A Transportation Security Administration screener is facing an assault rap after he allegedly beat a co-worker who joked about the size of the man’s genitalia after he walked through a security scanner. The May 4 confrontation involved Rolando Negrin, 44, and other TSA employees who had previously taken part in a training session at Miami International Airport, according to the below Miami-Dade Police Department reports. Negrin, pictured in the mug shot at right, and his co-workers had been training with new “whole body image” machines–the controversial kind that provide very revealing images of a traveler–when Negrin walked through the scanner. “The X-ray revealed that [Negrin] has a small penis and co-workers made fun of him on a daily basis,” reported cops. Following his arrest, Negrin told police that he “could not take the jokes anymore and lost his mind.” After work Tuesday evening, Negrin confronted fellow TSA screener Hugo Osorno in an airport parking lot. Negrin wanted to “resolve a problem,” and get Osorno, 34, to “finally respect him.” Instead, Negrin allegedly pulled out a police baton and began striking Osorno, while demanding an apology. A witness told cops that Negrin told Osorno, in Spanish, “Get on your knees or I will kill you and you better apologize.” When Negrin, wearing his TSA uniform, arrived for work yesterday, he was arrested on an aggravated battery count and booked into the Miami-Dade lockup. Osorno, police reported, suffered “bruises and abrasions on his back and arms” during the attack.

See Arrest Report (4 pages)

Source: The Smoking Gun

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

Source: Washington Post

Retired Major General Robert Harding was nominated earlier this month to head the Transportation Security Administration after serving more than three decades in the military, including a stint as deputy to the Army’s chief of intelligence and director for operations in the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Aviation security has received heightened attention in recent months after a Nigerian man tried to blow up a U.S. commercial airliner flying from Amsterdam to Detroit last Christmas with a bomb hidden in his underwear.

Harding said that while the Israeli security system was smaller, it offered a blueprint for trying to thwart terrorism plots in the aviation system, which has remained a target for militant groups like al Qaeda.

“We should move even closer to an Israeli model where there’s more engagement with passengers,” Harding told the Senate Commerce Committee that is considering his nomination. “I think that increases the layers and pushes the layers out.”

He said the TSA had about 2,000 behavioral detection officers and that expanded training was needed.

The top TSA position has been filled by an acting administrator since Obama took office in January 2009. His first pick for the job, Erroll Southers, withdrew from consideration when Republicans questioned whether he would try to unionize the workforce that screens travelers and luggage at U.S. airports.

Southers also came under fire for testimony he gave to the Senate about a reprimand he received in the 1980s.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, questioned Harding about the potential for the 48,000 screening officers unionizing.

“Previous TSA administrators have said that they would be very, very concerned about collective bargaining, not allowing the flexibility that you need to be able to deploy forces to a certain area of an airport or to a certain airport,” she said.

Harding said all sides agreed on the need for the TSA to have “flexibility” to move screeners quickly to respond to a crisis and that he and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano agreed security was the foremost priority.

“Again, we both agree, senator, that we would never bargain away security, but we probably also both agree that I would really need to do I think an in-depth and thorough review before I inform the secretary of my recommendation,” Harding told the panel.

See also: Britons queued at Ben Gurion airport as Israeli officials cloned passports (Guardian UK)