TSA chief: ‘Small knives can’t bring down a plane’ […of course]

“A small pocket knife is simply not going to result in the catastrophic failure of an aircraft…”

Knives on planes controversy: John Pistole, TSA chief, defended decision Thursday on Capitol Hill

wptv.com | Mar 14, 2012

By Thom Patterson CNN

(CNN) — As the airline industry piles on against him, the man who ordered knives to be allowed on U.S. commercial airliners defended his decision Thursday on Capitol Hill.

“It is the judgment of many security experts worldwide, which I agree with, that a small pocket knife is simply not going to result in the catastrophic failure of an aircraft, and an improvised explosive device will,” Transportation Security Administration director John Pistole told lawmakers. “And we know, from internal covert testing, searching for these items which will not blow up an aircraft can distract our officers from focusing on the components of an improvised explosive device.”

After his testimony at the Homeland Security subcommittee hearing, Pistole was expected to face questions from lawmakers who are concerned about traveler safety in a post-9/11 era.

Supporters believe the rules should be more passenger-friendly and focus on larger threats. Critics believe even small knives pose too much of a risk for airline crews, arguing that box-cutter knives were used in the 9/11 attacks.

In the nine days since the TSA opened a can of worms by announcing it would ease the ban on small knives in airline cabins, the list of groups concerned or opposed to the idea has grown to include airlines, airport screeners, federal air marshals, flight attendants and pilots.

Committee member Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-California, is expected to join critics during the hearing. Swalwell co-authored a letter to Pistole saying he was “mystified” by the move, calling Pistole’s decision “another example of a questionable TSA policy.”

“We’re unaware of a single incident involving these knives”

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, supports the rules change. Commercial aviation must be secure from threats as the highest priority, but Pistole also has a priority to make the TSA both “more passenger-friendly and threat-focused,” McCaul said in a recent statement.

Former TSA head Kip Hawley — who agrees with the change — said sharp objects can no longer bring down aircraft.

The TSA made its decision after a threat assessment determined that allowing small knives in cabins would not result in catastrophic damage to aircraft. But after consulting with Federal Air Marshal Service leaders, the agency opted to continue excluding knives that most closely resemble weapons, specifically knives with blades that lock in place, or have molded hand grips. Box cutters and razor blades also would remain on the prohibited items list. The rules are to go into effect on April 25.

The agency is aligning its knife policy with the International Civil Aviation Organization, which includes the United States and 190 other member nations. The group says each member exercises its own discretion about how to deal with the issue of knives in the cabins.

Under the new rules, knives with blades that are 2.36 inches (6 centimeters) or shorter and less than a half-inch wide will be allowed in airline cabins so long as the blade is not fixed or does not lock into place.

The rules also allow passengers to carry up to two golf clubs, certain toy bats or other sports sticks — such as ski poles, hockey sticks, lacrosse sticks and pool cues — aboard in carry-on luggage.

Airlines for America, the airline trade association, said Monday that “additional discussion is warranted” before small knives are allowed on planes.

Many critics of the new rules contend that in addition to adding an unnecessary threat to the safety of airline crews and passengers, the changes won’t make a difference in the TSA’s ability to concentrate on other threats.

Knives are probably the most common items surrendered by passengers at screening points, aside from liquids. Travelers surrender about 35 knives at Baltimore-Washington International Airport on an average day and about 47 per day at Los Angeles International Airport, officials say.

CNN’s Catherine E. Shoichet contributed to this report.

FBI stages another fake bombing with mentally disabled stooge-asset to maintain fear levels and bolster the illusion they are keeping us safe

Bank of America at 303 Hegenberger Road in Oakland, CA Photo: Google Maps

An undercover FBI agent posing as a go-between with the Taliban in Afghanistan had been meeting with Llaneza since Nov. 30 and accompanied him to the bank, according to an FBI declaration filed in federal court. The declaration said the FBI had built the purported bomb, which was inert and posed no threat to the public.

sfgate.com | Feb 8, 2013

by Jaxon Van Derbeken and Bob Egelko

A mentally disturbed man who said he believed in violent jihad and hoped to start a civil war in the United States was arrested early Friday after trying to detonate what he thought was a car bomb at a Bank of America branch in Oakland, prosecutors said.

Matthew Aaron Llaneza, 28, of San Jose was taken into custody near the bank at 303 Hegenberger Road at 12:30 a.m. after pressing a cell phone trigger device that was supposed to set off the explosives inside a sport utility vehicle and bring down the four-story building, said U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag‘s office.

An undercover FBI agent posing as a go-between with the Taliban in Afghanistan had been meeting with Llaneza since Nov. 30 and accompanied him to the bank, according to an FBI declaration filed in federal court. The declaration said the FBI had built the purported bomb, which was inert and posed no threat to the public.
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Llaneza appeared before a federal magistrate in Oakland on Friday on a charge of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction, which is punishable by life in prison. He is due to return to court for a bail hearing Wednesday. Assistant Federal Public Defender Joseph Matthews, who was assigned to represent him, declined to comment.

Court records and lawyers in a 2011 criminal case against Llaneza in San Jose described him as delusional and suicidal. He told police in that case that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. His attorney in the San Jose case said a judge had verified in two court hearings that Llaneza was getting mental health treatment.

Echoes of N.Y. case

His arrest came a day after a New York man, Quazi Nafis, pleaded guilty to attempting to detonate what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb at the Federal Reserve Bank in Manhattan in October, in a case unrelated to Llaneza’s. The FBI said an undercover agent had provided Nafis with 20, 50-pound bags of fake explosives.

In Llaneza’s case, the FBI declaration said he told the supposed Taliban representative in their Nov. 30 meeting that he wanted the bank bombing to be blamed on anti-U.S. government militias. He said he supported the Taliban and believed in violent jihad, the agent said, and hoped the bombing would prompt a government crackdown, a right-wing response and, ultimately, civil war.

He chose the Bank of America branch because of its name and because Oakland has been a center of recent protests, the declaration said. It said Llaneza told the agent he would “dance with joy” when the bomb exploded.

Bank cooperation

Anne Pace, a spokeswoman for Bank of America, said the bank was “cooperating fully with law enforcement” and declined further comment.

Llaneza and the agent met several times in December and January, and the FBI, following Llaneza’s suggestion, rented a storage unit in Hayward, the declaration said.

On Thursday night, agents said, Llaneza drove an SUV from the storage unit, hauling a dozen 5-gallon buckets of chemicals, prepared by the FBI to look like explosives, to a parking lot in Union City, where he assembled the bomb in the agent’s presence.

He then drove to the bank, parked the SUV under an overhang near a support column of the building, retreated on foot to a safe distance, and pressed an FBI-constructed cell phone triggering device that was supposed to ignite the bomb, the FBI said. Agents them moved in and arrested him.

The FBI did not say how it first contacted Llaneza, but he had been subject to law enforcement monitoring since serving a jail sentence in the 2011 criminal case in San Jose involving assault weapons charges.

In April 2011, San Jose police were called to a trailer where Llaneza lived with his father, Steve, according to court records. Described as suicidal and combative, and shouting “Allahu akbar” – “God is great” – he was held for observation for 72 hours.

Two days later, his father told police he had found an AK-47 assault rifle and a 30-round extended ammunition clip in the trailer. Officers found two more 30-round clips and other items, including a military-style camouflage sniper suit.

Llaneza was not arrested immediately, but a judge ordered him into custody when he appeared in court in May 2011. He pleaded no contest five months later to transportation of an assault weapon and was sentenced to six years in jail, with all but one year suspended, after agreeing to seek mental treatment. With credit for good behavior, Llaneza was released on Nov. 30, 2011.

Santa Clara County prosecutors objected to the sentence, which they considered too light, said Deputy District Attorney Alaleh Kianerci. She said he got the jail term under California’s realignment law, which took effect in October 2011 and sends most low-level felons to county jail instead of state prison. Under the previous law, she said, prosecutors would have sought at least a four-year prison term.

“Obviously he was a threat to the community,” Kianerci said. “We couldn’t keep him in custody forever, so we are lucky law enforcement was monitoring him.”

She said Llaneza was hearing voices and was apparently suicidal when he was taken to a hospital.

Father’s concern

The prosecutor said Steve Llaneza told police that his son, a native of Arizona, had been living with his mother there, had been in the Marines before being kicked out, and was familiar with weapons. He had worked as a window washer in Arizona before losing his job in May 2010 and was taking medication for bipolar disorder.

The father told police he was concerned about his son, who had recently converted to Islam.

While the AK-47 and the clips were purchased legally in Arizona, bringing them into California is illegal. Matthew Llaneza told police he had bought the rifle to protect himself from people who were after him, and mentioned previous suicide attempts.

“Someday you are going to find me dead in the desert,” he told San Jose officers.

Treatment needs

Llaneza was a different, more stable person when he was in custody and on medication, said Cameron Bowman, his lawyer in the San Jose case. He said he verified that Llaneza had been in the Marines, but that his claims to have been an armorer and a sniper were “his own fantasies – he had a lot of fantasies.”

“When I met him, I thought he was a very troubled person, with clear mental problems,” Bowman said. “I think that the court was trying everything possible to get him into treatment, get him supervised by professionals. I saw him as somebody who is at least bipolar, probably schizophrenic, and not somebody who should be turned out to the streets.

“This new case shows he was not getting the mental health treatment he needed.”

Newtown residents join gun control march in Washington

People walk from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument in Washington, Saturday, Jan. 26, 2013, during a march on Washington for gun control. Susan Walsh / AP

NBC News | Jan 26, 2013

By Becky Bratu

Residents of Newtown, Conn., the scene of a school massacre in which 20 children and six adults were killed last month, joined thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington on Saturday for a march supporting gun control.

Similar organized demonstrations were planned in support of gun control in about a dozen other places across the United States, according to organizers.

In addition to the 100 people who traveled together from Newtown, organizers told The Associated Press participants from New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia would join the demonstration.

Alongside Mayor Vincent Gray, a crowd that stretched for about two blocks marched down Constitution Avenue toward the Washington Monument, where speakers called for a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition. Some of the demonstrators held signs that read “We Are Sandy Hook.”

Education Secretary Arne Duncan addressed the crowd, saying he and President Barack Obama would work to enact gun control policies, the AP reported.

“This is about trying to create a climate in which our children can grow up free of fear,” he said, according to the AP.

“We must act, we must act, we must act,” Duncan said.

According to the AP, demonstrators held signs that read “Ban Assault Weapons Now,” “Stop NRA” and “Gun Control Now.” Other signs carried the names of victims of gun violence.

The silent march is organized by Molly Smith, artistic director of Washington’s Arena Stage, and her partner.

“With the drum roll, the consistency of the mass murders and the shock of it, it is always something that is moving and devastating to me. And then, it’s as if I move on,” Smith told the AP. “And in this moment, I can’t move on. I can’t move on.

“I think it’s because it was children, babies,” she told the AP. “I was horrified by it.”

The event is co-sponsored by One Million Moms for Gun Control, an independent organization that is also responsible for similar demonstrations in cities such as San Francisco, Chicago and Austin, Texas.

The Newtown massacre has reignited the debate over firearms in the United States, and last week Obama laid out a series of measures intended to curb gun violence, most significantly proposals to limit the size of ammunition magazines, ban assault weapons and require universal background checks on firearm purchases. That plan won little praise from Republicans.

Earlier this month, New York lawmakers approved the toughest gun control law in the nation, expanding the state’s existing assault weapons ban and addressing gun ownership by those with mental illnesses.

Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood Propped Up by US Since 2007 Under Bush

landdestroyer.blogspot.com | Jan 24, 2013

by Tony Cartalucci

In 2007, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “To Check Syria, U.S. Explores Bond With Muslim Brothers.” And even then, it was noted that the Brotherhood held close links with groups the US recognizes and lists as terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Al Qaeda.

The report gives a disturbing foreshadowing of US support that would eventually see the Muslim Brotherhood rise as both a political and terroristic power across the Arab World, after decades of hard-fought attempts to crush the sectarian extremist organization everywhere from Tunisia to Syria, from Egypt to Libya, to Jordan, and beyond. In fact, the 2007 Wall Street Journal article specifically noted that the US partnership could “destabilize governments in Jordan and Egypt, two US allies where the Brotherhood is a growing opposition force.”

Egypt is now run by a sectarian-extremist Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship, after the US incited unrest there in 2011, while Jordan is seeing increasing unrest led by the Jordanian arm of the Brotherhood.

What is also disturbing about the 2007 report, is that it shows how allegedly “Bush-era” policies transcended the 2000-2008 administration and continued in earnest under President Obama.

The report, written by Jay Solomon, echoes similar foreshadowing of the coming violent sectarian bloodbath now engulfing Syria, found in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker piece titled, “The Redireciton: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?”

Full story

. . .

Related

‘CIA favors Brotherhood as Egypt dictatorship benefits US’

Pentagon Prosecutor To Drop Conspiracy Charges Against Alleged 9/11 Plotters

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Ap

Miami Herald | Jan 10, 2013

by Carol Rosenberg

The Pentagon’s war crimes prosecutor has decided to no longer seek a conspiracy conviction at the Sept. 11 death penalty trial, a move designed to shore up the case after a federal court undercut the authority of the Guantanamo war court three months ago, the Defense Department said Wednesday.

The announcement means that reputed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four alleged accomplices would still face a capital trial at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba. The next pre-trial hearing is Jan. 28.

But the Pentagon would allege seven rather than eight war crimes, notably 2,976 counts of murder — one for each person killed when terrorists hijacked passenger planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001. Other alleged crimes include terrorism and hijacking aircraft.

A senior Pentagon official, retired Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald, has yet to sign off on the move. But the Defense Department statement made clear that the 9/11 prosecutor was trying to drop the conspiracy charge to make the case less vulnerable to civilian court challenge.

“This action helps ensure the prosecution proceeds undeterred by legal challenge,” Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins said the statement, which was released Wednesday afternoon.

At issue is the Oct. 16 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that overturned Guantanamo’s best-known conviction — that of Osama bin Laden’s driver. The federal court said the Pentagon had no authority to prosecute the driver, Salim Hamdan of Yemen, on a charge of “providing material support for terrorism” because his alleged crimes took place between 1996 and Nov. 24, 2001, when he was captured in Afghanistan.

Congress for the first time defined “providing material support for terrorism” as an international war crime in 2006.

Now, the federal court is hearing a similar case that argues “conspiracy” also was not an international war crime at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks. That case is an appeal by Ali Hamza al Bahlul, a Yemeni who is the only prisoner among Guantanamo’s 166 captives currently serving a judicially imposed life sentence.

The conundrum created by the conspiracy charge, and its proposed withdrawal, provided critics with another opportunity to question the war court that President George W. Bush created and President Barack Obama had reformed.

“Each time the government overreaches, eventually the courts push back. The latest move by the prosecution makes clear that it recognizes the fragility of the entire process,” said Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch.

“The military commissions, even absent conspiracy charges, are still fundamentally flawed,” she added.

Those charged are: Mohammed, 47, a Pakistani who in a transcript of a secret 2006 military hearing at Guantanamo bragged that he devised the Sept. 11 attacks “from A to Z”; two alleged deputies in the “enterprise,” Ramzi bin al Shibh, 40, and Walid bin Attash, 34, both Yemeni; Mustafa al Hawsawi, 44, a Saudi, and Ammar al Baluchi, 35, a Pakistani.

Conspiracy is the No. 1 alleged crime on the Pentagon’s Sept. 11 charge sheet — and lays out 167 specifications, a narrative that spanned five years of meetings, training, travel and terror that began in 1996 with bin Laden’s declaring a jihad against America and Mohammed met with bin Laden to propose a plot of hijacking airplanes into buildings.

The Saudi and Baluchi, who is Mohammed’s nephew, are allegedly implicated in the conspiracy by allegedly helping the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers with wire transfers and travel arrangements to reach U.S. soil.

“Withdrawal of the conspiracy charge essentially removes the heart of the body of charges currently pending against Mr. al-Hawsawi,” said Navy Cmdr. Walter Ruiz, his military defense attorney.

The Defense Department did not release the new narrative that the prosecution would be pursuing.

The move left a number of open questions, chief among them whether the Justice Department would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take on the Hamdan case. It has until Jan. 14 to file a petition with the justices.

In a federal filing on Wednesday in the Bahlul case, Justice and Defense Department attorneys argued that the Hamdan ruling was wrong. But they said, given that decision, the court should rule swiftly and overturn Bahlul’s conviction, in what appeared to be a bid to move the issue along to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“In short, particularly with respect to conspiracy, it is plain that Congress authorized the military commission here to try Bahlul for this offense,” the government lawyer wrote.

Bahlul’s Pentagon paid appellate attorney, Michel Paradis, said he would not discuss the development because the prisoner had asked him not to make comments on the case.

Illuminati

Skull and horns of Iblis: Such Tattoos are prevalent in the US or Russia

It seems that ,the present terrorist, found dead in, the Peshawar terrorist attack, with skull and horns of Iblis, tattooed on his back, & with a Russian background is a disciple of this order. After all the new world order, needs to establish its writ by terror alone. while, the grand masters, of the masonic lodges, behind the curtains, preach the mysteries of unknown.

opinion-maker.org | Dec 19, 2012

By Naveed Tajammal

If you take the term, Illuminati’ from the Arabic point of view, it better interprets, its meaning, illum’ means light/knowledge, and ’i’ of the, and ‘nati’ denotes, Satan, ‘Iblis’ and his associates, which would mean, knowledge of Lucifer and his associates. It is a human failing to go in the riddles of unknown, and more they be twisted, the better liked.

The west is ever obsessed to own all past knowledge, hence takes credit for all, and everything eventually has to be linked with Latin or Greek Languages and its related Literature and Mythology. Such is the case here too, hence ‘Illuminati’ is declared to be the plural of Latin word, ‘illuminatus’ or enlightened. To keep the Greeks happy, The birth of Illuminati is attributed to ‘Pythagoras’ the Greek [570 BC] born on the Greek island of ‘Samos’, but it is stated that he was taught to perform the miracles, by a Greek mystic,’Pherecydes’, who technically introduced Pythagoras, to the Doctrines of the Illuminati, meaning thereby, that, it had existed in some form before too.

Pherecydes, introduced Pythagoras to the high priests of Egypt, and after pherecydes died, the pupil sailed off to Egypt, and were he met, the inner circle who taught, him, the mysteries, and advanced mathematics, Which were the high priests of ‘Heliopolis [city of Sun or Ain Shamsi, one of the oldest cities of ancient Egypt],and ‘Memphis,[south of Cairo] and Thebes [Waset / the city of the scepter],the pupil was, also taught Astronomy by the Chaldean’s, The Geometry by the Phoenicians, and the Occult knowledge by the Persian ‘Magi’. Here in Persia Pythagoras also met ,’Zarathustra’ the prophet of the Zoroastrians.

To make Pythagoras, the part of Latin world it is attributed that, he moved with his disciples and knowledge to ‘Croton’ in south Italy, and Illuminati is re-born, here, and Pythagoras became the First Grand-master. And he would address the public from behind a screen / curtain, only those who had graduated in the levels of mystery had access to him, and were so called the ”Mathematikoi” or the Mathematicians, those who were ;listeners only were termed as,’akousmatikoi’. A secret language, and numerical codes, symbolic messages, initiation rites, special handshakes, compasses & set squares, tools of mathematics were the symbols-as seen in the Masonic lodges.

Full Article

9/11 Truth group adopts stretch of highway in St. Louis

A Missouri state transportation official is wary of potential negative publicity but says that doesn’t outweigh the advantages of clean roads.

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS | Dec 13, 2012

By Adam Edelman

A half-mile stretch of highway running through the city has been adopted by The St. Louis 9/11 Questions Meetup Group, which will have its name posted along the segment it’s committed to keep litter-free.

A conspiracy-touting group alleging that 9/11 was an “inside job” has been granted permission to adopt a stretch of highway in Missouri, the state’s Department of Transportation confirmed Thursday.

Under the state’s Adopt-a-Highway program, the small but controversial organization — called the St. Louis 9/11 Questions Meetup Group — will have its name posted on a sign along a half-mile stretch of highway in St. Louis, according to an official at the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT). The sign will go up in January.

In return, the group will maintain and keep clean the stretch of highway.

According to the group’s website, members of the group claim to be “residents of the Greater St. Louis Area (and other areas) concerned about the many disturbing aspects of the 9/11 attacks, adding that, “we have many disagreements, but we agree that 9/11 is worth inquiring into. We are inclusive as opposed to exclusive. Generally, we believe that when gravity causes an object to move, the object goes down, not upwards and outwards in an arc.”

On its website, the group sells T-shirts that say “The 9/11 debacle was an Inside Job!” along with other shirts featuring photos of the collapse of the World Trade Center with text that raises questions about the details of the destruction. The group’s organizer, Donald Stahl, could not be reached for comment.

Tom Blair, a MoDOT assistant district engineer, said he’s wary of any negative publicity the controversial group will bring to the state, but that the value of clean roads — and the savings the program brings to taxpayers — ultimately outweigh any bad attention.

“Well, I’m concerned about the attention, but we need the program,” Blair said. “I’m concerned any time negative attention goes to the program, but it’s a solid program and it’s important to remember that. And anyone, whatever their motivations, can apply for it, as long as they just pick up the trash.”

According to the MoDOT website, approved groups adopt a stretch of highway at least a half-mile long and agree to collect litter at least four times a year. The state saves about $1 million a year from the volunteer efforts, Blair said.

To make flying as dangerous as driving, a 9/11 event would have to occur every month, or How the TSA Kills People

A U.S. Transportation Security Administration employee passes a metal-detecting wand over a traveler’s chest at O’Hare International Airport. Photograph by Tim Boyle/Getty Images

Airport Security Is Killing Us

businessweek.com | Nov 18, 2012

by Charles Kenny

This week marks the beginning of the busiest travel time of the year. For millions of Americans, the misery of holiday travel is made considerably worse by a government agency ostensibly designed to make our journeys more secure. Created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Transportation Security Administration has largely outlived its usefulness, as the threat of a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland continues to recede. These days, the TSA’s major role appears to be to make plane trips more unpleasant. And by doing so, it’s encouraging people to take the considerably more dangerous option of traveling by road.

The attention paid to terrorism in the U.S. is considerably out of proportion to the relative threat it presents. That’s especially true when it comes to Islamic-extremist terror. Of the 150,000 murders in the U.S. between 9/11 and the end of 2010, Islamic extremism accounted for fewer than three dozen. Since 2000, the chance that a resident of the U.S. would die in a terrorist attack was one in 3.5 million, according to John Mueller and Mark Stewart of Ohio State and the University of Newcastle, respectively. In fact, extremist Islamic terrorism resulted in just 200 to 400 deaths worldwide outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq—the same number, Mueller noted in a 2011 report (PDF), as die in bathtubs in the U.S. alone each year.

Yet the TSA still commands a budget of nearly $8 billion—which is why the agency is left with too many officers and not enough to do. The TSA’s “Top Good Catches of 2011,” reported on its blog, did include 1,200 firearms and—their top find—a single batch of C4 explosives (though those were discovered only on the return flight). A longer list of TSA’s confiscations would include a G.I. Joe action doll’s 4-inch plastic rifle (“it’s a replica”) and a light saber. And needless to say, the TSA didn’t spot a single terrorist trying to board an airline in the U.S., notes Bruce Schneier.

How TSA Kills People

Flying and Driving after the September 11 Attacks

Business Week On TSA: Airport “Security” Is Making Americans Less Safe

According to one estimate of direct and indirect costs borne by the U.S. as a result of 9/11, the New York Times suggested the attacks themselves caused $55 billion in “toll and physical damage,” while the economic impact was $123 billion. But costs related to increased homeland security and counterterrorism spending, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, totaled $3,105 billion. Mueller and Stewart estimate that government spending on homeland security over the 2002-11 period accounted for around $580 billion of that total.

The researchers quote Rand Corp. President James Thomson, who noted most of that expenditure was implemented “with little or no evaluation.” In 2010, the National Academy of Science reported the lack of “any Department of Homeland Security risk analysis capabilities and methods that are yet adequate for supporting [department] decision making.” In short, DHS (and the TSA in particular) is firing huge bundles of large denomination bills completely blindly.

There is lethal collateral damage associated with all this spending on airline security—namely, the inconvenience of air travel is pushing more people onto the roads. Compare the dangers of air travel to those of driving. To make flying as dangerous as using a car, a four-plane disaster on the scale of 9/11 would have to occur every month, according to analysis published in the American Scientist. Researchers at Cornell University suggest that people switching from air to road transportation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks led to an increase of 242 driving fatalities per month—which means that a lot more people died on the roads as an indirect result of 9/11 than died from being on the planes that terrible day. They also suggest that enhanced domestic baggage screening alone reduced passenger volume by about 5 percent in the five years after 9/11, and the substitution of driving for flying by those seeking to avoid security hassles over that period resulted in more than 100 road fatalities.

That’s not to say TSA employees bear responsibility for making the roads more dangerous—they’re just following incentives that reward slavish attention to overbearing and ambiguous rules over common sense. And don’t blame the officials of Homeland Security, either. They’re merely avoiding the far greater backlash associated with doing nothing than with doing something—even if nothing is probably the right course in a lot of cases. Instead, the blame lies somewhere among the politicians, the media, and the electorate, who will happily skewer officials over a single fatal plane incident while ignoring car crashes, gun homicides, and even bathtub accidents, which kill far more Americans than terrorism does.

If Americans really care about saving lives this Thanksgiving travel season, for goodness’ sake, don’t beef up airport security any further. Slashing the TSA will ensure that more people live to spend future holidays with loved ones.

Federal government allows people on No-Fly lists to pilot planes

Loophole Lets No-Fly List People Pilot Planes

fox8.com | Nov 8, 2012

By Pat McReynolds

Phoenix, AZ (KPHO) — The federal government deems them too dangerous to walk onto a commercial plane, but a hole in the law still allows homegrown threats to man the controls.

A CBS 5 Investigation has learned that nothing is stopping U.S. citizens currently on the no-fly list from learning how to fly.

In the weeks following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the federal government understandably moved to ban foreigners on the no-fly list from enrolling in any type of U.S. flight school.

Most of the terrorists who piloted the planes that horrible day learned how to fly at schools in the United States.

Hani Hanjour, the man believed to be at the controls of the plane that targeted the Pentagon, trained in Phoenix.

A loophole in U.S. Homeland Security still allows those who might have sinister intentions to pilot planes.

They are prevented from being a passenger on a plane or, at best, they must pass through several layers of security before they are ever allowed on board. But if they simply have a driver’s license, the federal government allows them to grab the stick and learn how to fly the plane themselves.

Steve Raether has been a flight instructor for more than 20 years.

“In light of incidences like Oklahoma, the Oklahoma bombing, you would think, well, maybe we have some security risks right here at home that we need to be concerned with,” Raether said.

Raether points out this risk is probably smaller because the planes students train on are smaller, but the knowledge gained can easily transfer to larger threats like private jets or cargo planes that are not as tightly controlled.

“The basic understanding about pointing an airplane in the right direction is fairly simple,” Raether said.

“(The loophole) does need to be closed,” Jim Tilmon said. “There’s no doubt of that in my mind.”

Tilmon is a former commercial pilot and security consultant.

The loophole took him by surprise.

“I think everybody that takes flying lessons should be vetted,” Tilmon said. “I don’t care who it is. It doesn’t matter to me where they are from or what they look like, or male or female, or anything else.”

The TSA seems to agree. A statement to CBS 5 News reads, in part:

“At the secretary’s direction, TSA is giving consideration to amending these regulations and we will work with the FAA and the FBI to address these concerns.”

The TSA did not release a timetable on when that change might happen.

Tilmon said while closing the loophole may seem like a simple matter, he said government agencies are too big to move with the speed this threat requires.

“I don’t dream that any system is going to be perfect,” Tilmon said. “For every loophole that’s closed, we’ll discover two more.”

The TSA does collect certificates from all flight students and says it scrutinizes them for potential threats, but the students are allowed to undergo training while that vetting process takes place.

7 Technologies That Will Make It Easier for the Next President to Hunt and Kill You

wired | Nov 6, 2012

by Noah Shachtman

Robotic assassination campaigns directed from the Oval Office. Cyber espionage programs launched at the president’s behest. Surveillance on an industrial scale. The White House already has an incredible amount of power to monitor and take out individuals around the globe. But a new wave of technologies, just coming online, could give those powers a substantial upgrade. No matter who wins the election on Tuesday, the next president could have an unprecedented ability to monitor and end lives from the Oval Office.

The current crop of sensors, munitions, control algorithms, and data storage facilities have helped make the targeted killing of American adversaries an almost routine affair. Nearly 3,000 people have been slain in the past decade by American drones, for instance. The process will only get easier, as these tools of war become more compact, more powerful, and more precise. And they will: Moore’s Law applies in the military and intelligence realms almost as much as it does in the commercial sphere.

For decades, political scientists have wrung their hands about an “Imperial Presidency,” an executive branch with powers far beyond its original, Constitutional limits. This new hardware and software could make the old concerns look more outdated than horses and bayonets, to coin a phrase. Here are seven examples.

Photo: François Proulx/Flickr

Drone Autonomy

There’s a standard response to skeptics of the killer flying robots known as drones that goes something like this: Every time a drone fires its weapon, a human being within a chain of command (of other human beings) made that call. The robot never decides for itself who lives and who dies. All of that is true. It’s just that some technical advances, both current and on the horizon, are going to make it less true.

On one end of the spectrum is the Switchblade, AeroVironment’s mashup of drone and missile. Weighing under 6 pounds and transportable in a soldier’s backpack, the drone carries a function whereby an operator can pre-program its trajectory using GPS; When it reaches the target, it explodes, without its operator commanding it to. On the other end is the Navy’s experimental UCLASS, which by 2019 ought to yield an armed drone with a 62-foot wingspan that can take off and land from an aircraft carrier at the click of a mouse, its flight path selected earlier while Naval aviators go get a snack. The Navy has no plans to let the UCLASS release its weapons except at a human’s direction, but its autonomy goes beyond anything the military currently possesses.

All of this stands to change drone warfare — ironically, by changing human behavior. As humans get used to incremental expansions in drone autonomy, they’ll expect more functionality to come pre-baked. That might erode the currently-rigid edict that people must conduct the strikes; at a minimum, it will free human operators to focus more of their attention on conducting attacks. The first phase of that challenge has arrived: the Army confirmed this week that a unit in eastern Afghanistan is now using the Switchblade.

— Spencer Ackerman

Photo: Jared Soares/Wired

‘City-Sized’ Surveillance

Predator-class drones are today’s spy tools of choice; the military and CIA have hundreds of them keeping watch over Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Mexico, and elsewhere. But the Predators and the larger Reapers are imperfect eyes in the sky. They rely on cameras that offer, as the military cliche goes, a “soda straw” view of the battlefield — maybe a square kilometer, depending on how high the drone flies.

Tomorrow’s sensors, on the other hand, will be able to monitor an area 10 times larger with twice the resolution. The Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (“Argus, for short) is a collection of 92 five-megapixel cameras. In a single day, it collects six petabytes of video — the equivalent of 79.8 years’ worth of HD video.

Argus and other “Wide Area Airborne Surveillance” systems have their limitations. Right now, the military doesn’t have the bandwidth to pull all that video off a drone in real time. Nor it does it have the analysts to watch all the footage; they’re barely keeping up with the soda straws. Plus, the camera bundles have had some problems sharing data with some of the military’s other spy systems.

But interest in the Wide Area Airborne Surveillance systems is growing — and not just among those looking to spy overseas. The Department of Homeland Security recently put out a call for a camera array that could keep tabs on 10 square kilometers at once, and tested out another WAAS sensor along the border. Meanwhile, Sierra Nevada Corporation, a well-traveled intelligence contractor, is marketing its so-called “Vigilant Stare” sensor (.pdf), which it says will watch “city-sized fields of regard” for domestic “counter-narcotics” and “civil unrest” missions. Keep your eyes peeled.

— Noah Shachtman

Photo: Darpa

Massive Data Storage

The idea of the government watching your every move is frightening. But not as frightening as the government recording your every move in digital database that never gets full.

This nightmare data storage scenario is closer than you think. A study from the Brookings Institute says that it will soon be within the reach of the government — and other organizations — to keep a digital record everything that everyone in the country says or does, and the NSA is clearly on the cutting edge of large-scale data storage.

The agency is building a massive $2 billion data center in Utah — due to go live in September of next year — and taking a cue from Google, agency engineers have built a massive database platform specifically designed to juggle massive amounts of information.

According to a senior intelligence official cited in Wired’s recent feature story on the Utah data center, it will play an important role in new efforts within the agency to break the encryption used by governments, businesses, and individuals to mask their communications.

“This is more than just a data center,” said the official, who once worked on the Utah project. Another official cited in the story said that several years ago, the agency made an enormous breakthrough in its ability to crack modern encryption methods.

But equally important is the agency’s ability to rapidly process all the information collected in this and other data centers. In recent years, Google has developed new ways of overseeing petabytes of data — aka millions of gigabytes — using tens of thousands of ordinary computer servers. A platform called BigTable, for instance, underpins the index that lets you instantly search the entire web, which now more than 644 million active sites. WIth Accumulo, the NSA has mimicked BigTable’s ability to instantly make sense of such enormous amounts of data. The good news is that the NSA’s platform is also designed to provide separate security controls from each individual piece of data, but those controls aren’t in your hands. They’re in the hands of the NSA.

— Cade Metz

Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired.com

Tiny Bombs and Missiles

Unless you’re super strong or don’t mind back pain, you can’t carry a Hellfire missile. The weapon of choice for drone attacks weighs over 100 pounds, and that’s why it takes a 27-foot-long Predator to pack one. But that’s all about to change. Raytheon’s experimental Small Tactical Munition weighs nearly a tenth of a Hellfire. In May, rival Textron debuted a weapon that loiters in mid-air, BattleHawk, that weighs a mere 5 pounds.

Normally, a smaller bomb or missile just means a smaller smoking crater. But as the weapons get smaller, the number of robots that can carry them increases. The U.S. military has under 200 armed Predators and Reapers. It has thousands of smaller, unarmed spy drones like Pumas and Ravens. Those smaller drones get used by smaller units down on the military’s food chain, like battalions and companies; if they get armed, then drone strikes can become as routine as artillery barrages. That’s heavy.

— Spencer Ackerman

Photo: Raytheon

‘Tagging and Tracking’ Tech

Right before the Taliban executed him for allegedly spying for the Americans in April 2009, 19-year-old Pakistani Habibur Rehman said in a videotaped “confession” that he had been paid to plant tracking devices wrapped in cigarette paper inside Taliban and Al-Qaida safehouses. The devices emitted barely detectable radio signals that allegedly guided U.S. drone strikes.

The CIA has never copped to using such trackers, but U.S. Special Operations Command openly touts its relationship with manufacturers of “tagging, tracking and locating devices.” One of these firms, Herndon, Virginia-based Blackbird Technologies, has supplied tens of thousands of these trackers as part of a $450 million contract. The company’s 2-inch-wide devices hop between satellite, radio frequencies, CDMA and GSM cellular networks to report the locations of whatever they’re attached to.

If SOCOM has its way, these trackers will only be the start. The command has spent millions developing networks of tiny “unattended ground sensors” that can be scattered across a battlefield and spot targets for decades, if its makers are to be believed. SOCOM is also on the hunt for tiny, plantable audio and video recorders and optical and chemical “taggants” that can mark a person without him knowing it. The idea is for spies like Rehman (if that’s what he was) to more accurately track militants … and get away with it.

— David Axe and Noah Shachtman

Photo: Lockheed Martin

Global Strike

Take the military’s current inventory of Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can scream toward their targets at speeds of more than 500 miles per hour. Not too shabby. But also positively slow compared to a new generation of experimental hypersonic weapons that may soon travel many times that speed — and which the Pentagon and the Obama administration dreams about one day lobbing at their enemies anywhere on the globe in less than an hour. And don’t count on the current president, or perhaps even the next one, on abandoning the project any time soon.

It’s called “Prompt Global Strike,” and the Defense Department has worked for a decade on how to field such radical weapons with a mix of trial and error. Among them include the shorter-range X-51A Waverider, a scramjet-powered cruise missile hurtled at up to six times the speed of sound. Even more radical is Darpa’s pizza-shaped glider named the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, and the Army’s pointy-shaped Advanced Hypersonic Weapon — designed to travel at Mach 20 and Mach 8, respectively. If any of these weapons or a variant is ever fielded, they could be used to assassinate a terrorist while on the move or blast a nuclear silo in the opening minutes of a war. Or inadvertently start World War III.

While the Waverider is launched from a plane and resembles a cruise missile (albeit one traveling intensely fast), the HTV-2 is launched using an intercontinental ballistic missile before separating and crashing back down to Earth. But as far as Russian and Chinese radars are concerned, the HTV-2 could very well be an ICBM potentially armed with a nuke and headed for Beijing or Moscow. The Pentagon has apparently considered this doomsday scenario, and has walked back the non-nuke ICBM plan — sort of — while touting a potential future strike weapon launched at the intermediate range from a submarine. But there’s also still plenty of testing to do, and a spotty record of failures for the Waverider and the HTV-2. Meanwhile, the Russians are freaked out enough to have started work on a hypersonic weapon of their own.

— Robert Beckhusen

Photo: Air Force

Sensor Fusion

The military can listen in on your phone calls, and can watch you from above. But it doesn’t have one thing — one intelligence-collection platform, as the jargon goes — that can do both at once. Instead, the various “ints” are collected and processed separately — and only brought together at the final moment by a team of analysts. It’s a gangly, bureaucratic process that often allows prey to slip through the nets of military hunters.

The exception to this is the Blue Devil program. It outfits a single Beechcraft King Air A90 turboprop plane with a wide area sensor, a traditional camera, and eavesdropping gear — all passing information from one to the other. The electronic ear might pick up a phone call, and tell the camera where to point. Or the wide area sensor might see a truck moving, and ask the eavesdropper to take a listen. Flying in Afghanistan since late 2010, the system has been “instrumental in identifying a number of high-value individuals and improvised explosive device emplacements,” according to the Air Force, which just handed out another $85 million contract to operate and upgrade the fleet of four Blue Devil planes.

There’s a second, more ambitious phase of the Blue Devil program, one that involved putting a lot more sensors onto an airship the size of a football field. But that mega-blimp upgrade never made it to the flight-testing phase, owing to a series of bureaucratic, financial and technical hurdles. But the idea of sensor fusion is not going anywhere. And, let’s be honest: If one of these surveillance arrays catches you in their web, neither are you.

Photo: David Axe