My recent thoughts turned to airline security last night after learning of the flight coming in to Detroit in which a man tried to blow up the plane. (link and link, though I’m sure there’s thousands more now).
I’ve never subscribed to the theory that our US airport security did all that much in terms of preventing actual threats. I’m old enough to remember pre 9/11 flying, and the security measures don’t seem to be doing that much better at stopping potential violent threats. In the past two years I’ve flown to San Francisco, Miami, London, Copenhagen, Sydney, Shanghai and probably a couple other places I can’t recall right now. Most of these trips had several layovers, so I’ve seen security measures at many more airports than just these. A few things initially surprised me soon after 9/11, but fail to surprise me now:
1. How differently my carry-on bags are treated during screening every single time I travel, even at the same airports. I travel with a wide variety of stuff – often a laptop, ipod, chargers, cables, headphones, microphones, video camera, small microphone and other assorted electronic goodies. Sometimes I pack them in checked luggage, but often there’s not room (or I don’t quite trust TSA bag handlers to not take something of value). So it comes on as hand-luggage. A couple of times the cabled mess has triggered a thorough hand search of all the bag contents. While annoying, I understand their need – it’s not clear what the materials are, and if something’s unknown, it’s better to check it out. Annoying, but reasonable. Why that particular mess of cables and such doesn’t trigger the same response at different airports is what’s troubling to me. Each checkpoint area seems to be having their own guidelines as to what is ‘suspicious’ and what isn’t. To be certain, it may be the experience and judgement level of those involved, but based on the behaviour I witness of security checkpoint personnel (see below), I’m not convinced that’s the reason.
2. How lax the staff appear at various screening areas. I don’t particularly want hard-nosed drill sergeants barking orders at me, but I also don’t want people falling asleep. It seems I generally find both extremes at security checkpoints, which annoys me. I’m not saying these are the *only* people – there’s also typically a mix of seemingly decent, diligent people staffing these areas. But that’s not enough. I’ve watched my bags going through x-ray machines, showing a vast array of weird cables and devices (I travel with a lot of weird stuff!) and watched as the person sitting at the x-ray machine simply let it pass right through *without looking at the screen*, either with their head turned while talking to a colleague, or eating.
I’ve observed that behaviour at least 4 times over the last 12-18 months of travel. Coming up with extremely conservative numbers, those particular screeners might be letting 3-5% of the baggage go by essentially unchecked. If 5% of the bags can get by unchecked at a checkpoint, what’s the purpose of having it? The only substantive answer I can arrive at is “theater for the masses”.
My idea centers on this carry-on bag checkpoint process. Specifically, my idea would be to have the bag images be fed to an internet site and allow multiple people to judge whether something was ‘suspicious’ enough to warrant a hand investigation. However, the speed of this might not be enough to work in real time. So, the next step would be to associate a passenger picture with the bags specifically at the checkpoint, and if it’s determined through the ‘crowdsourced’ site that a particular bag should be inspected, the bag’s owner could more easily be tracked down in the airport.
While this seems like it might be a lot more work, personally, I’d trust the accuracy of dozens or hundreds of people of varying backgrounds giving their votes on a bag rather than one person who might not even be *looking* at the bag to pass judgement.
Lastly, is there a way to *report* on TSA or security staff who appear to be negligent at their post? I’d try to take pictures, but I suspect I’d be labelled a terrorist rather than someone who’s simply trying to report on someone not doing their job (which, incidentally, is supposed to be about securing my life and safety).
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Traveling around a bit – Denmark May 18, 19, 20
I’ve been in London most of the last week, and had a great time meeting up with people (DylanS and Sam from the Dojo project, Rajat from Yahoo, some locals putting on a minibarcamp, and others). I’ve done some video and audio of some of these meetings and hope to put them up someplace in the next week or so.
I can’t sleep, have a cold, and am catching a taxi to Heathrow in the next 30 minutes, so I figured I’d just post this quick update here. I’m heading to the GR8 conference in Denmark this morning, and should be there by noonish. If you’re in Copenhagen on Wednesday and care to meet for lunch, let me know. I’ve got no firm plans at this point, and don’t leave Copenhagen until Wed evening (6pm I think). Would love to meet up with some web people from Denmark (PHP, Grails, Ruby, CF, Java, C#, ASP.NET, Flash – even JavaFX!) 
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Apple MacBooks – cracked white top
It happened to me – the infamous white macbook laptop case cracking. I’d read about this a couple years ago, but had forgotten about it. Until last night. I opened my macbook and the case had a crack in it. Specifically, the area to the left of the left shift key had a larger than hairline crack which results in about a 3/4″ stop of the white plastic just breaking off. Sure the thing was still functional, but it annoyed me. And hundreds of other people on forums too.
Thing is, I’m out of town this week. Out of the country really, over in London. And I still need my laptop in the evenings for work (well, all the time for work, really). I went to the ‘genius bar’ and they were booked up. I spoke to someone (didn’t get his name) and he said “drop it off and we’ll have it back to you in probably 3 days”. 3 days!? I said no, not good enough, as I need the laptop for work, and I’m going back to the US soon. He then says he thinks they could do it overnight. I winced, and he went further and said if I could drop it off, they could either fix it today or have it back to me tonight if they couldn’t. *That’s* really what I wanted. I had a few hours to kill in London anyway today, so I could bear without having my laptop for that time period.
The chap really wasn’t sure if they could do it or not, because it’s an American/US style keyboard. I’d forgotten there was a difference. Primarily the US ‘return’ key is longer – that’s the biggest difference I can see. Oh, and the characters over numbers like #@$%, etc – all different on British keyboards.
Anyway, they managed to have it fixed and ready back for me, no charge, in about 4 hours start to finish. Dropped it off at 10, and I had it in my hands at 2:15. They’d actually called about 1:40 to say it was done, but I didn’t get back from the British Museum until 2:15.
Thanks to the great staff at the Regent Street Apple store for making the repair experience of a travelling Yank as pleasant as possible.
Oh, by the way, I walked all the way from Regent Street Apple store to the offices of cardsmadeeasy.com to get some sample business card paper. Nice staff, nice samples, horrid walk. Note to self and others – take the tube next time and save the feet!
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Traveling for a few days – London and Copenhagen
I’ll be traveling the next 10 days, including time in London May 12-17 and Copenhagen May 18-20. If any PHP or web people would like to get together for a drink/meal/chat/podcast/whatever, let me know. I’m planning on attending one of the Dojo dinner activities (I think it’s Thursday May 14) so if you’re already going to that, awesome
Best way to ping me is probably email – mgkimsal@gmail.com, though skyping me at mgkimsal should ring thru to my phone as well while I’m over there.
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In Vermont for a couple days
I’m in Vermont (near Thetford) for a couple days. Beautiful foilage here. (spelled like Marge Simpson pronounces it).
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Proof I was down under…
Here’s a bit of proof that I was in Australia recently. I’m not very good with pictures (by “with” I mean being in them or ever doing anything with the pics I do take), but I was able to do a couple here for posterity.
“Burger King” by any other name tastes just as scrumptious…
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TSA blog contributors influence policy
The TSA recently (a week or so ago) put up a blog soliciting input on its operations. Within hours, there were hundreds of posts, mostly accusing the agency of either being incompetent or malicious, or of using the blog as a PR smokescreen. While all may be true accusations, the TSA responded today that they’ve made a change to policy based on feedback from blog contributors. Apparently the recent policy requirement to remove *all* electronics (mp3 players, cables, etc.) from carry-on baggage during screening is not official policy. The TSA has stated this procedure is being eliminated, and that it was just some field offices which created the procedure more or less on their own.
Expectedly this caused a number of replies along the lines of “don’t you know what’s going on in the field?” I had this reaction myself, and I just experienced this requirement to remove all electronics from carry-on luggage. This was in San Francisco just last week. Having flown through there in December, and not having to remove gear then, I figured this was a new procedure. I don’t necessarily *mind* the request – well, yes I do, but I’d rather not have the procedures at all – but *not* having any sort of written and posted guidelines about these changes was what really bugged me. Now I find out it wasn’t official policy. However, what *is* official policy is that you have to comply with all TSA officials’ demands, so in some sense it doesn’t really matter what the head office says – if random TSA employee #49152 in Dallas demands that everyone empty their bags, there better be empty bags or else.
I’d like to see a couple of changes to how the TSA handles its interactions with passengers:
- Uniform posted signs indicating what’s expected of passengers. The signs should be clearly visible and standard at all TSA posts. The signs should also have the TSA’s blog address to remind the TSA workers that passengers can report violations immediately.
- A web-based customer feedback system, like a software bug tracker. Let all issues be visible and searchable by the public, filterable by location. The TSA should use this as another measure of the efficiency of the TSA employees in the field. While I applaud the blog effort, it’s not a standard uniform way of collecting and tracking information about complaints/experiences.
What do you think?
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Chinese books
I went to a bookstore in China and saw some interesting computer books.
I’m doing some Grails work these days, so was surprised to see this:
Bill Wagner is one of the organizers of the CodeMash conference, and the only name I could find in the Chinese bookshop that I knew personally.
Also, I chuckled a bit seeing all the familiar tech books but with Chinese writing:
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Back from China
What a trip! I took my wife’s camera, and will be posting a lot of pictures in the next week or so. I came back through Chicago , which was having a bad enough snow that many flights were delayed or cancelled, which seemed to impact my flight. We sat on the runway for two hours, so I didn’t get to SFO until midnight, no luggage till 1, and hotel @ 1:45. My body has no idea where it is or what day it is! I’ll be back in Raleigh hopefully Wednesday morning, and will probably need the rest of the week to readjust to ‘normalcy’. Anyway, stay tuned for pics as I get them off the camera later this week (forgot the cable!)
I will be meeting from friends I met @ OSCON this year tonight (Sunday, Dec 16th) in downtown San Francisco. If you happen to be in the area and are reading this and would care to join us to talk web geek stuff, give me a call at 919-455-8488.
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Taken for a ride in China
Yes, I was taken for a ride, literally and figuratively, my first hour in China. A taxi ride from Pudong airport to downtown Shanghai, about 50 kilometers, ended up costing me 1280 yuan – about $200 give or take. It was my own fault for not checking before I got in the cab, but I was really steamed halfway through the ride. However, there were two people – a driver and another person in the front seat. He was pleasant, charged me 900 then another 380 yuan, and let me practice my Chinese on him. At the end of the ride I said the price was very high and that I wanted a refund of 250 yuan, but a) the original driver had driven off and b) he seemed to not understand what I was saying. Imagine that!
I did get receipts indicating that I’d paid 1280 yuan, so perhaps I can expense it? Seems an excessive price to expense, but I may end up having to write it off my own taxes as an unreimbursed business expense. This is what Dave Ramsey would call ‘stupid tax’. Yes, I was a bit tired after 24 hours of travel, and wasn’t thinking 100% straight, but it was still my fault.
I took a few pictures from the cab. When I get the off the camera I’ll post them on flickr.
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