Erroll Southers withdraws his name from consideration for head of TSA
The embattled nominee for Director of the Transportation Security Administration has withdrawn his name from consideration for that post. He has been roundly opposed because of an incident of lying to Congress about rifling through the records of his former wife’s boyfriend, and his credentials and lack experience was also cited.
Erroll Southers nominated by President Obama to head the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has withdrawn his nomination. Southers is an expert on transportation security and a former FBI agent. He is the chief of homeland security and intelligence for the Los Angeles International Airport police department. In 2009, he was tapped by President Obama to take charge of the TSA. Southers has withdrawn, saying his path has been “obstructed by political ideology.” Southers was referring to his nomination being blocked by Republican Senator Jim DeMint over background checks Southers did on his estranged wife’s boyfriend.
Christmas bomber may mean higher airport security fees
It looks like the Christmas bomber incident will probably lead to higher security fees. The fees have already been proposed by the government, but have been fought by the travel industry. Chances are, that Congress will act on the fee increase this session.
“There’s no question” the administration and Congress will enact higher fees in response to the Christmas Day attempt, Michael Boyd, president of the Boyd Group International Inc., an aviation consulting firm, said in an interview.
U.S. airlines, with collective losses of about $60 billion since 2001, say they lack pricing power to pass fees on to fliers. The government is buying more full-body scanners after it said a 23-year-old Nigerian man attempted to ignite explosives in his undergarments on a Detroit-bound flight.
Security costs should be borne by the government, said David Castelveter, spokesman for the Air Transport Association, whose members include Delta Air Lines Inc. and AMR Corp.’s American Airlines. “The airlines are not under attack; the country is under attack,” Castelveter said.
IBM planning high-tech profiling system
IBM has been filing patents that will allow the monitoring of dress, eye movements and physical factors to alert security personnel to possible suspects. Amazing research has been done to automate this profiling.
A dozen little-known IBM patent applications lay out a sophisticated computer-analysis-based approach to airport security. The technology has the potential to apply profiling of passengers, based on attributes such as age and type of clothing worn. One of the patents IBM is seeking even appears to go Israeli-style security one better, using analysis of furtive glances in the application entitled “Detecting Behavioral Deviations By Measuring Eye Movements.”
The objective of the technology in the passel of patent applications is to alert officials to potential terminal and tarmac threats using a network of video, motion, chemical, and biometric sensors arrayed throughout the airport. The sensors feed into a grid of networked computers, which provide high-powered processing to get results to officials in so-called real time, yet the systems are compact enough to be located on-site.
Charlie Leocha is the President of Travelers United. He has been working in Washington, DC, for the past 14 years with Congress, the Department of Transportation, and industry stakeholders on travel issues. He was the first consumer representative to the Advisory Committee for Aviation Consumer Protections appointed by the Secretary of Transportation from 2012 through 2018.
