Excerpts
MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): The issue was brought to the fore with last month's discovery of timed bombs headed for the U.S. On October 29, British authorities intercepted a shipment from Yemen on a UPS cargo plane bound for Chicago. They found a printer with a toner cartridge that had been rigged with a detonator and a powdered explosive.
A similar device was found aboard a Qatar Airways cargo plane in Dubai that also came from Yemen. At the same time, a furor has erupted over airport security screening for passengers. Two new security measures are at issue, first, the use of full-body scanners, which reveal images of the naked body. They're now in 60 U.S. airports, with more to come.
Some people have balked at submitting to the scan, for reasons ranging from invasion of privacy to fears of radiation. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano insists the scanners are safe and the images are viewed in private, without identifying the passengers.
Those who refuse the scans are subject to new intensive full-body pat-downs. And those, too, have raised hackles.
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MARGARET WARNER: Did you here at TSA underestimate the estimate of blowback, of anger from passengers over these more intrusive screening procedures?
JOHN PISTOLE, administrator, Transportation Security Administration: We are a risk-based, intelligence-driven organization. And knowing that, any time we make changes in the protocols that we use to screen passengers, in dealing with the latest intelligence, that we have to do a good job of informing the public as to what we're doing, without providing a road map to the terrorists.
So, that's the tension that we deal with. How much do we inform ahead of time, here's what we're going to be doing, as a counterbalance to the security that we need to ensure that everybody who gets on every flight has been properly screened?
I think there -- reasonable people can disagree as to the balance between the privacy that some people have raised as issues. And I'm sympathetic to those concerns. But the job is really security in terms of, how can we provide the best security?
MARGARET WARNER: Now, Secretary Napolitano said yesterday, well, if people don't want to fly, they have other means of travel.
But that isn't really practical, is it, for a businessperson?
JOHN PISTOLE: You know, if you have two flights, and you have the option of going on the two, and you know, the one, people have been thoroughly screened, and, the other plane, people have opted out and not had a thorough screening, and so you don't have that confidence, I think virtually everybody is going to go with the flight that has thorough screening.
MARGARET WARNER: A lot of passengers are wondering whether these procedures are proportionate to the threat. And I'm just wondering, would, for instance, these more extensive pat-downs and the full-body scans, would they have caught the Christmas Day bomber with the explosives in his underwear?
JOHN PISTOLE: So, I know the threats are real. And I believe that the techniques and the technology we're using today are the best possible that we have. And it gives us the best opportunity for detecting a Christmas Day-type bomber.
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MARGARET WARNER: What about the level of radiation? The pilots and flight attendants are objecting, saying it's going to expose them to a higher level than is safe. Have you done any kind of testing? Do you know how much radiation an individual is exposed to and how that measures up to what is allowable, what's safe?
JOHN PISTOLE: There have been a number of studies done, Margaret, that deal with this, whether by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, or the FDA, or Johns Hopkins, which have independently assessed this, because, obviously, that's something we're concerned about. What is that exposure?
They have all come back to say that they're -- the exposure is very, very minimal. It's equivalent to -- I have heard several analogies -- a couple minutes of flight, like, at 30,000 feet, the same amount of exposure you would get there. So, it's well, well within all the safety standards that have been set.
This is the world we live in today, thanks to fanatics around the world (including USA).
This issue no longer applies to me, since I don't travel long distances any more. During my Navy carrier I flew many times (including landing on Aircraft Carriers), so flying is not the problem. My problem IS having to restrict what I can carry with me on an airplane.
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