The TSA is winning the war on Americans minds as commuters are being tricked into giving away their rights without a fight.

The above video warns that facial recognition body scanners are coming to a train station near you...

"Soon you might have to pass through one of these to get to your train or subway."

Last week, the TSA Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority 'voluntarily' asked commuters to walk through facial recognition body scanners before being allowed to board a train.

If you watched the video you might have noticed that the mass media (CBS) did not interview a single person who was concerned about their privacy. Instead, they quoted passengers who think body scanners are a good thing.

Nothing suspicious about that, right?

CBS warned that if the LA Metro installs body scanners next year, commuters won't be able to opt-out.

According to an article in the LA Times, the LA Metro has begun piloting biometric body scanners that send short-wave radio frequencies through commuters bodies to search for bombs and weapons.

A 'pilot program' is really a government euphemism for gauging the public's response to another intrusive police search.

https://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2017/08/tsa-facial-biometric-body-scanners-and.html

The TSA began a new screening policy for paper products at airport checkpoints in Missouri last month, and now the agency's branch in Sacramento, California, is testing out more invasive searches for books and food items.

In the new system, passengers are required to take all reading material and food out of their carry-on luggage and place it in a separate bin. TSA screeners can "fan" through travelers' books to see if anything is hidden in the pages, but agency officials insist they will not pay attention to the content. Critics have long argued passengers selected for extra screening are not chosen as randomly as the TSA claims, and book content — particularly of a political or religious nature — could re-ignite that debate.

http://theweek.com/speedreads/702737/tsa-going-look-through-books-but-promises-not-notice-what-youre-reading

Air travel already features some attributes of a police state. Metal detectors. Bomb-sniffing dogs. Pat-downs. A gloved TSA agent peering at your toothpaste. But it could get worse. What if your check-in also involved a face recognition scan?

Decades ago, Congress mandated that federal authorities keep track of foreign nationals as they enter and leave the United States. If the government could record when every visitor stepped on and off of U.S. soil, so the thinking went, it could easily see whether a foreign national had overstayed a visa.

But in June of last year, without congressional authorization, and without consulting the public, the Department of Homeland Security started scanning the faces of Americans leaving the country, too.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/06/21/dhs_s_biometric_exit_program_is_starting_to_scan_americans_faces_before.html

Soon, it may be hard for visa holders to board an international flight without submitting to a facial geometry scan. The TSA began testing facial recognition systems at Dulles Airport in 2015, then expanded the tests to New York’s JFK Airport last year. Face-reading check-in kiosks will be appearing at Ottawa International Airport this spring, and British Airways is rolling out a similar system at London’s Heathrow Airport, comparing faces captured at security screenings with a separate capture at the boarding gate. Now, a new project is poised to bring those same systems to every international airport in America.

Called Biometric Exit, the project would use facial matching systems to identify every visa holder as they leave the country. Passengers would have their photos taken immediately before boarding, to be matched with the passport-style photos provided with the visa application. If there’s no match in the system, it could be evidence that the visitor entered the country illegally. The system is currently being tested on a single flight from Atlanta to Tokyo, but after being expedited by the Trump administration, it’s expected to expand to more airports this summer, eventually rolling out to every international flight and border crossing in the US.

https://www.technocracy.news/index.php/2017/04/18/facial-recognition-technology-us-airports-fast-tracked-trump-administration/

Say hello to America’s shadow government: a corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country. This shadow government represents the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of American citizens. No matter who sits in the White House or who allegedly represents us in Congress, this shadow government is here to stay. Indeed, as leaked documents by the FBI reveal, this shadow government—also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group”—essentially runs the government out of Washington DC. And as the Wikileaks data concerning the CIA’s tapping into all of our electronic devices reveals, everything we’re doing is being watched by government eyes.

https://www.newsbud.com/2017/04/04/the-path-to-total-dictatorship-americas-shadow-government-its-silent-coup-2/

The decision to alert local and airport police raises a question of just how intimate the agency’s employees may get. On its website, the TSA says employees “use the back of the hands for pat-downs over sensitive areas of the body. In limited cases, additional screening involving a sensitive area pat-down with the front of the hand may be needed to determine that a threat does not exist.”

Now security screeners will use the front of their hands on a passenger in a private screening area if one of the prior screening methods indicates the presence of explosives, according to a “security notice” that the Airports Council International-North America (ACI-NA) sent its U.S. members following a March 1 conference call with TSA officials.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-06/tsa-warns-local-police-about-its-new-airport-pat-downs

Anyone who declines use of the TSA's existing conventional scanner screen will be subject to the new pat-down. The TSA currently screens about 2 million people daily at U.S. airports. The agency doesn’t track how many passengers are subject to pat-down searches after they pass through an imaging scanner.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-03/tsa-launches-invasive-pat-downs-more-intimate-contact

For some 15 years, airport security has become steadily more invasive. There are ever more checkpoints, ever more requests for documents as you make your way from the airport entrance to the airplane. Passengers adapt to the new changes as they come. But my latest flight to Mexico, originating in Atlanta, presented all passengers with something I had never seen before.

https://fee.org/articles/welcome-aboard-but-first-us-marshals-will-scan-your-retina/

The Department of Justice on Monday announced the indictment of six current and former TSA Officers in Puerto Rico, along with another half dozen other individuals, on charges related to a scheme to smuggle more than 20 tons of cocaine through airports over nearly 20-years.

According to a DOJ press release, the defendants were part of a scheme that helped transport more than 20 tons of cocaine though the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport from 1998 through 2016. The defendants are accused of allowing “drug mules” to check suitcases containing between 8 – 15 kilograms of cocaine through security gates in order to transport the cocaine.

The current and former TSA defendants (“TSA defendants”) are accused of smuggling multi-kilogram quantities of cocaine while acting as TSA Officers employed at the San Juan airport. Their duties called from them to conduct security and baggage screenings on outbound flights leaving the airport. They are accused of pushing the luggage through the security screenings and onto outbound flights without detection, despite knowing they contained multiple kilograms of cocaine.

http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/tsa-officers-charged-in-scheme-to-smuggle-20-tons-of-cocaine-through-airport/

NEWLY RELEASED DOCUMENTS from the Transportation Security Administration appear to confirm the concerns of critics who say that the agency’s controversial program that relies on body language, appearance, and particular behaviors to select passengers for extra screening in airports has little basis in science and has led to racial profiling.

Files turned over to the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act include a range of studies that undermines the program’s premise, demonstrating that attempts to look for physical signs of deception are highly subjective and unreliable. Also among the files are presentations and reports from the TSA and other law enforcement agencies that put forth untested theories of how to profile attackers and rely on broad stereotypes about Muslims.

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/08/tsas-own-files-show-doubtful-science-behind-its-behavior-screening-program/

Straphangers on their way to and from work Wednesday were surprised to see Transportation Security Administration officials, who usually screen luggage in airports, checking bags at local subway stations.

The TSA launched a pilot partnership with the NYPD Wednesday morning to enhance security on city trains, a spokeswoman for the TSA said. About a dozen stations are covered daily, according to the NYPD.

The Administration has nicknamed the teams, which randomly screen passengers' bags using chemical swabs, "VIPR"s (pronounced viper): Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response.

Read full article »»

The balance between freedom and security has been tilting, with the weight of the scales tipping towards restrictive security controls since September 11, 2001. After the largest criminal attack ever committed in the United States, we saw sweeping legislation in the form of Patriot Act, which, in effect, suspended many constitutional protections for anyone suspected of being a threat.

The so-called no fly list(s), maintained by government agencies like TSA, CIA and FBI, also result from the terrorist attacks of 2001, and the names on the various lists have grown from just a few thousands suspected terrorists in 2001 to millions of people, including American citizens, today.

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The Obama administration will announce Friday a new screening system for flights to the United States under which passengers who fit an intelligence profile of potential terrorists will be searched before boarding their planes, a senior administration official said.The new plan is designed to catch terrorism suspects about whom the U.S. may know bits of information but not full names or other identifying data that would lead to their names being placed on a no-fly list.

In many cases, the U.S. might learn of a possible attack by someone about whom it has only fragmentary information -- a partial name, nationality, certain facial features or details about recent travel.

Such information will be forwarded to airlines and foreign governments by the Department of Homeland Security as it is received and will be used to guide them in deciding which travelers to subject to special screening, the official said.

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With airport security all the rage, companies that manufacture whole body imaging technologies and body-scanners stand to make a bundle as a result of last December's aborted attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

Like their kissin' cousins at the Pentagon, poised to bag a $708 billion dollar windfall in the 2011 budget, securocrats over at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) stand to vacuum-up some $56.3 billion next year, a $6 billion increase.

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“Meet Mikey Hicks,” said Najlah Feanny Hicks, introducing her 8-year-old son, a New Jersey Cub Scout and frequent traveler who has seldom boarded a plane without a hassle because he shares the name of a suspicious person. “It’s not a myth.”

Michael Winston Hicks’s mother initially sensed trouble when he was a baby and she could not get a seat for him on their flight to Florida at an airport kiosk; airline officials explained that his name “was on the list,” she recalled.

The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.

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Yet the rush toward full-body scans already seems unstoppable. They were mandated today as part of the "enhanced" screening for travelers from selected countries, and hundreds of the machines are already on order, at a cost of about $150,000 apiece. Within days of the bombing attempt, Reuters was reporting that the "greater U.S. government shift toward using the high-tech devices could create a boom for makers of security imaging products, and it has already created a speculative spike in share prices in some companies."

Which brings us to the money shot. The body scanner is sure to get a go-ahead because of the illustrious personages hawking them. Chief among them is former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff, who now heads the Chertoff Group, which represents one of the leading manufacturers of whole-body-imaging machines, Rapiscan Systems. For days after the attack, Chertoff made the rounds on the media promoting the scanners, calling the bombing attempt "a very vivid lesson in the value of that machinery"—all without disclosing his relationship to Rapiscan.

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Whole body scans of healthy people will create more problems than they solve by exposing healthy people to radiation. The risk for radiation over-exposure may be small for a single subject, but the number subject exposed to airport body scans will increase the risk by the millions. A normal CT scan of the chest is the equivalent of about 100 chest X-rays. Some scanners are equivalent of 440 conventional X-rays. The traditional X-ray machine detects hard and soft materials by the variation in transmission through the target. The backscatter X-ray detects the radiation that reflects back from the target. Several studies have suggested that people have been unnecessarily exposed to radiation from CTs or have received excessive amounts of radiation. A person undergoing a backscatter scan receives approximately 0.005 – 0.009 millirems of radiation. 1 mrem per year is a negligible dose of radiation, and 25 mrem per year from a single source is the upper limit of safe radiation exposure. Widespread overuse of body scanners and variations in radiation caused by different machines could subject many to radiation doses that could ultimately lead to thousands of new cancer cases and deaths.

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In the wake of public outcry against the Transportation Security Administration for serving civil subpoenas on two bloggers, the government agency has canceled the legal action and apologized for the strong-arm tactics agents used.

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TSA Threatens Blogger Who Posted New Screening Directive »»

A path has been cleared for the government to publicly roll out dangerous full-body scanners after the failed terrorist attempt on flight 253. Neocons are quaking for the government to implement the human x-ray machines on a nationwide scale, radiating travelers with unhealthy amounts of ionic radiation all for the sake of preventing the next Mutallab from boarding another U.S. airliner.

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