The new liquid explosives scanners being tested at the international security screening barrier at Melbourne Airport from today and at Sydney from next Monday should reduce the hassles for travellers, but Australian airport security remains a wide-open politically driven farce.
There will be tens of thousands of opportunities at all domestic and international terminals in Australia today for baggage handlers, cleaners, caterers, retailers, refuellers, police officers and security company staff to pass bombs, guns, knives, and vials of germs to passengers once they have passed through the security checks that divide landside from airside.
That is because they are not subject to the same comprehensive security screening as passengers, or, for some bizarre logic never explained by the government, for pilots and flight attendants.
Frightened. Of course not. The circus has just about run its course, especially in the US, where the legally mandated s-xual molestation of adults and children who refuse to be “stripped” by radiation-emitting body scanners has suddenly focused public attention on the political investment in airport security paranoia.
Late on Friday the Infrastructure and Transport Minister, Anthony Albanese, ruled out the physical “patting down” of s-xually sensitive areas of passengers who declined secondary screening by “strip machines”, which will also be tested soon at Australian airports at the insistence of US authorities.
The US media is full of accounts of males and females being felt in order to distinguish body parts from explosive devices. Middle America is clearly shocked by 9/11 being used to allow strangers to violate their physical privacy.
But in Australia, those who object to being “imaged” by machine will be ejected from the terminals. The “no fry, no fly” rule. It beats the pants off the US lunacy, well summarised in this satirical, but factually accurate YouTube.
Albanese’s office has been unable to answer questions for four days about the logic of leaving extensive loopholes in terminal security in place in Australia, yet subjecting pilots, who can destroy a jet airliner with their bare hands, and passengers, to the totally useless procedures currently required to cross the landside/airside divide.
The “no fry, no fly” edict will raise even more questions. While there is no risk to air travellers from the tiny background radiation dose experienced in a body scanner, there is an issue for those like the untrustworthy pilots who on domestic deployments, could theoretically by zapped as much as four times a day when on duty.
Even using the figures bandied about by the Transportation Security Administration in the US, this could amount to the equivalent of two medical imaging scans per year of their working life, in addition to their enhanced exposure at altitude to elevated levels of background radiation exposure.
The medical risks are so significant they are widely believed to be behind the TSA banning those that man the X-ray emitting scanners from wearing dosimeters that could gather evidence to be used against it for knowingly exposing employees to harmful levels of radiation.
Australian authorities, like those in the US, have also conceded that it is impossible to scan all air freight or parcel consignments for bombs or chemical, biological or radioactive waste-based devices.
Which is an admission that renders the current system wide open in terms of preventing terrorist attacks.
The only system that works is the multilayered, profile-driven and labour-intensive processes used at Israeli airports, and at El-Al check-in areas at some external airports.
Combined with excellent intelligence gathering and policing, Israel has made its airports secure, but not its pizza shops, public areas, or buses.
America is finally turning against the security madness, 99% of which is politically inspired theatrics.
Our masters in security matters in Washington DC have blinked. How long before we follow?
As a victim of childhood sexual abuse I am seriously concerned that my days of air travel are numbered. I suffer from body image issues (as many vicitms do) and the thought of the full body scan is horrifying enough, let alone the US-style pat down search So if we are going to a “no fry, no fly” rule, even with Mr Albanese’s assurances about not ‘patting down’ sensitive areas, I can see that my plans for any type of air travel will have to be made with very extensive preparations – logistically and psychologically.
No risk from the tiny radiation dose???
You obviously know something about the biological effects of radiation that no one else does. Exactly when was it determined that the threshold model of radiation exposure was correct compared to the linear model?
Exactly when was it determined that small radiation dose effects are not cumulative?
I notice that anyone with any knowledge about radiation in the US is saying that the dosage effects of these devices is unknown. Only the makers and politicians are saying they are safe.
JohnD,
I was taking those views very seriously too. Especially in relation to those working the scanners, or those who might cross the landside/airside divide and its canners multiple times a day.
As these devices fall in price and rise in application, to individual shops, to malls, to sporting venues, railway stations and public places of congregation and commerce in general, these tiny does will proliferate on a massive scale.
But only if we let it happen. (I do accept that if I fly once a month, and was to be scanned twice in that process, the difference in total radiation compared to living for most of the year on a thorium ‘rich’ granite soil pastoral property at more than 700 metres altitude would not be significant, but no, I’m not an expert in radiation. )
Passenger screening is about being seen to do something, no matter how ineffectual, even counter productive, rather than look at the obvious, the current ludicrously wide open ‘sterile’ areas, frequented by hordes of minimum wage, often illegal, contracted employees run by lowest tender shell companies to clean, provend, and collect garbage from planes, which then sit on the tarmac, unchecked and uncheckable, for hours before the next couple of hundred passengers take to the sky.
If someone is intent on dying to bring down a plane, they are going to put several kilos of explosive in their unscreened hold baggage, not try to carry a few ounces on their body.
The only passenger with ill intent ever stopped was by El-Al, a generation ago, using well trained officers backed by intelligence resources, operating on the individual level.