Passenger Screening Quotes

There were precisely two groups of people who desperately wanted airport security to be browbeaten into giving suspicious passengers a pass: terrorists and Democrats.

Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.

When I travel overseas on many occasions, I get pulled out because I may be buying a one-way ticket, I may be traveling with my sister and we have different last names. That's smart profiling. Just pulling people out one at a time when we have millions of passengers in random screenings I'm not sure is the best way to do it.

Now, a lot of what we are doing right now, quite frankly, is because of what happened on Christmas. Many of the things were kind of in the works. We were already planning, for example, the purchase and deployment of advanced imaging technology. You call them body scanners. We call them AITs (Advanced Imaging Technologies).

The reason we are doing these types of pat downs and using the advanced imagery technology is trying to take the latest intelligence and how we know al Qaeda and affiliates want to hurt us, they want to bring down whether it is passenger air craft or cargo aircraft.

Why we cannot build a system like El Al to be proactive. Why do we have only to react? The shoe bomber - reaction? Take off your shoes. The Nigerian - the body scanner is a result of the Nigerian guy.

I know every time I fly, I get checked twice: they stop me at security, and then, they get me again at the gate. And last time, it was so bad, they actually made me go through the machine with the luggage.

We want to be sensitive to people's concerns about privacy about their personal being and things, while ensuring that everybody on every flight has been properly screened.

After 9/11, new security measures not only added longer lines and earlier check-ins, but took away our privilege of carrying knitting needles or our favorite moisturizer on board with us. Although we want to be safe when we fly, in some ways it all just adds to the misery of our experience.

I did learn something interesting [while at the Atlanta airport]. You have to be a member of the TSA in order to legally perform a cavity search. My apologies to the staff of Cinnabon, but you guys should really keep that extra frosting where the customers can find it.

The United States Government has placed me on no-fly lists.

I'm confident that the terrorists are aware that from the curb to the cockpit we've got additional security measures that didn't exist a couple of years ago.

All images generated by imaging technology are viewed in a walled-off location not visible to the public. The officer assisting the passenger never sees the image, and the officer viewing the image never interacts with the passenger. The imaging technology that we use cannot store, export, print or transmit images.

I am really high maintenance and won't walk through the microwave that fries your body. I always request a pat down [in airport].

What we're going to do is try to get TSA out of the human resources and personnel business and into the security business to connect the dots.

I believe the public's confidence would be increased if the federal government took over the functions of airport security screening for all passengers.

The TSA's airport body scanners have been shown to be so ineffective, the Homeland Security chairman suggested using traditional metal detectors. While LaGuardia will continue to just have a scarecrow dressed as a cop.

There is only so much negotiating and maneuvering that can be done while the aircraft is under siege in mid-air. Therefore, the best way to put a stop to hijacking is by having high levels of security implemented by qualified and trained personnel both on the ground and in the air.

As part of our layered approach, we have expedited the deployment of new Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) units to help detect concealed metallic and non-metallic threats on passengers. These machines are now in use at airports nationwide, and the vast majority of travelers say they prefer this technology to alternative screening measures.

I feel gigantic affection for all of Homeland Security at airports.

Other countries, such as Israel, successfully employ behavior detection techniques at their airports, but the bloated, ineffective bureaucracy of TSA has produced another security failure for U.S. transportation systems.

TSA is such low-hanging fruit. I mean, anybody can bash the TSA.

It may be annoying, but the rash of hijackings by Connecticut WASP girls surely explains the time-consuming - but still somehow completely useless - examination of my personal effects. We all have to make sacrifices for airline safety.

I think we have to look very strongly at no-fly lists and watch lists. And when people are on there, even if they shouldn't be on there, we'll help them, we'll help them legally, we'll help them get off.

We put people of concern on the watch list or the no-fly list, so we have a number of layers of security beyond the airport checkpoint. We gather as much information about a passenger as the law allows without profiling.