Israelis to receive special clearance in US airports

Now if only Israelis could get special security clearance on the way out of US airports...without having to go through the naked scanners, life would really be grand.

Israel's Foreign Ministry and US Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for the Private Sector Douglas Andrew Smith agreed on Sunday that Israel should take part in an American pilot program that would facilitate shared use of the biometric database in order to ease the customs and security checks for travelers arriving at American airports.

The program, entitled Global Entry, will allow expedited clearance to some Israeli citizens upon arriving in the US. The Netherlands already takes part in the program, and a few other nations are waiting to join it as well.

Global Entry provides expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travelers (is that profiling?!) upon arrival in the United States. Though intended for frequent international travelers, there is no minimum number of trips necessary to qualify for the program. Participants may enter the United States by using automated kiosks located at select airports.

According to estimations, hundreds of Israelis will be able to join the test group in the coming months, and utilized the automated biometrics checks similar to those available at Ben Gurion Airport. The US will determine the criteria by which it will decide who is qualified to enroll in the program.

According to Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon, this is the first step towards the cancellation of the US visa requirements for Israelis. Ayalon promoted the subject in a conversation with Smith.

"This meeting was very important for the cooperation in the field of homelands security," Ayalon told Ynet. "We have here an expression of trust in the citizens of Israel and its systems, and that is big news." (YNET)

Actually, any airplane landing from Israel should have automatic security clearance, as everyone's been screened by Israel's airport security.


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Another Muqata Prediction Comes True

Only a few weeks ago, Muqata columnist JoeSettler wrote about what air-travel (and security) is going to be like in 2011.

2010 began with the afterglow of the underwear bomber. The government through the TSA implemented far more intrusive and tedious countermeasures in their ever failing effort to block terrorists from smuggling weapons and bombs onto the planes.

Far more passengers were randomly selected for questionings before boarding, extending the boarding time for all by an additional hour on average.

While new legislation required that the Full Body Scanner be deployed at all airports, implementation took time, and subsequently, full body pat downs and random selection strip searches ultimately reached a level of 10% of all passengers – adding an 2 hours for boarding at airports not up to legislative spec, and a certain amount of expected (but acceptable) annoyance from passengers.

But clearly the most intrusive and failed measure was the introduction of the Full Body Scanner at all airports.

The public was initially accepting of the scanner, understanding the need to trade a certain amount of privacy for security.

But even as the first “Celebrity Scans” were leaked onto the internet (understandably Angelina Jolie and ironically Arnold Schwarzenegger) the public took it in stride, meanwhile searches for “Celebrity Scans” became the number one search term on Bing and Google.

Little did Joe know that his prediction would come true in the second month of 2010 -- a whole year early!

Yesterday, the news emerged that despite promises by Heathrow airport security authorities in London, that naked body scanner images are immediately destroyed after passengers pass through new x-ray devices... naked images of Indian film star Shahrukh Khan were printed out and circulated by airport staff at Heathrow in London.

UK Transport Secretary Lord Adonis said last week that the images produced by the scanners were deleted “immediately” and airport staff carrying out the procedure are fully trained and supervised.

“It is very important to stress that the images which are captured by body scanners are immediately deleted after the passenger has gone through the body scanner,” Adonis told the London Evening Standard.

However, the Transport Secretary’s assurances were demolished after it was revealed on the BBC’s Jonathan Ross show Friday that Indian actor Shahrukh Khan had passed through a body scan and later had the image of his naked body printed out and circulated by Heathrow security staff. Read the rest of it here (there are no photos in the link!)

This is rather disturbing and raises a whole plethora of questions (no, we never believed the British authorities for a second).

Its painfully obvious how unprofessional the "security" analysts are at London's airports, and this is only a tiny step away from child pornography (and distribution).

Instead of perverts at London airports or dimwits in the TSA -- we need professional security analysts who focus on the psyche of the person and his profile.

Israel's profiling works.

We can take bottles of water on planes...and even board airplanes without being virtually strip searched (and our photos printed out) by perverts...and still have the best airplane security in the world.

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Ivory Tower Justices Target Israel's Security

While the USA abhors the very notion of "profiling", Israel has been using it to successfully keep terrorists off its airplanes for years. The USA's "TSA" randomly decides who to check, resulting in excessive security checks for all sorts of people -- including infants and elderly -- who have never hijacked an airplane.

What a waste of time, energy and resources.



In 2006, the Boston Globe praised Israel's security, and what the USA could learn from Israel, yet that was 4 years ago, and not much has changed. There have been more terror attempts -- all of them from Muslim Extremists.

No sensible person imagines that ethnic or religious profiling alone can stop every terrorist plot. But it is illogical and potentially suicidal not to take account of the fact that so far every suicide-terrorist plotting to take down an American plane has been a radical Muslim man. It is not racism or bigotry to argue that the prevention of Islamist terrorism necessitates a special focus on Muslim travelers, just as it is not racism or bigotry when police trying to prevent a Mafia killing pay closer attention to Italians.

Of course most Muslims are not violent jihadis, but all violent jihadis are Muslim. ``This nation," President Bush has said, ``is at war with Islamic fascists." How much longer will we tolerate an aviation security system that pretends, for reasons of political correctness, not to know that?

Unfortunately, Israel has been dumbing-down when it comes to "ordinary" security -- such as terror on the roads. Israel's Ivory-Tower-based Supreme Court ruled against the IDF, that the Modiin-Jerusalem highway 443 must be opened to Palestinian vehicular traffic.

At the start of the most recent Intifiada in late 2000, the 443 highway became a shooting gallery -- as Palestinian terrorists shot up Jewish cars indiscriminately, killing men, women and children. 443 became a ghost road -- and I vividly recall driving the road wearing a bullet proof vest on my way home from work in Jerusalem.

Only after the IDF created alternate routes for the Palestinians, prohibited Palestinian traffic on 443, put up sentry points everywhere and beefed up patrols, did the road become safer again and the average Israeli motorist returned.

"Tuesday's decision came despite the court indicating last year that the road had become a key highway serving tens of thousands of Israelis whose safety would be endangered if Palestinians were allowed to use it unrestrictedly. " (JPost)

Safety of tens of thousands of Israelis...that's not an issue that should bother Israel's Supreme Court.

Their Ivory Tower isn't located anywhere near road 443.

The IDF knows what needs to be done for security, just as we know what needs to be done for airport security. The way things are going now, its only a matter of time before our Supreme Court changes our airline security screenings process as well.

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