Airports to inspect ID cards with black lights

[ursi]

Source: USA Today

WASHINGTON — The newest tool at airport security checkpoints is 3 inches long and costs only a few dollars: a handheld black light.
Airport screeners are starting to use them this month to examine driver's licenses and other passenger ID cards presented at checkpoints to spot forgeries or tampering. Passengers with suspicious documents can be questioned by police or immigration agents.

Black lights will help screeners inspect the ID cards by illuminating holograms, typically of government seals, that are found in licenses and passports. Screeners also are getting magnifying glasses that highlight tiny inscriptions found in borders of passports and other IDs. About 2,100 of each are going to the nation's 800 airport checkpoints.

The closer scrutiny of passenger IDs is the latest Transportation Security Administration effort to check passengers more thoroughly than simply having them walk through metal detectors.

In the past six months, the agency has been taking over the checking of passenger IDs and boarding passes at airport checkpoints. For years, security guards hired by airlines have done that.


Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-01-20-blacklights_N.htm

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. Well, I feel a lot safer now, don't you?

[ursi]

2. yeah, one more thing for them to wave at us

[OKthatsIT]

28. NEW SURVEILLANCE ECONOMY...the only Wall Street hope left

Besides the Prison Industrial Complex~

sick sick bastards.

[Wilms]

3. I expect as much and more.

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/bushismvideos/youtube/bushharmamerica.htm

[ursi]

4. have you seen the movie "Strange Culture"?

http://www.strangeculture.net/

If you have about 75 minutes to watch this, do. You will learn what our FBI wastes its time on ...

[orleans]

5. black lights? FAR FUCKIN OUT!

i have black lights. maybe i could get a job there?

[BadgerKid]

6. Some chemicals/drugs glow when exposed to UV

so this isn't just for checking for valid IDs.

[radfringe]

7. what's next batman utility belts and secret decoder rings?

wait a minute - I have a better idea - a way to provide security and healthcare - full body catscans, bloodtests, mamograms, pap smears, prostate exams, and colonoscopies at the airport

this way they can check for everything all at once

[eppur_se_muova]

17. AND it would mean free healthcare for everyone!

Well, at least health tests.

"Oh, I'm not boarding a plane, I just wanted to have someone look at this."

[radfringe]

19. wonder what would happen if you took some

paint that would show up only under a black light... wrote "Buck Fush" on your license...

[saigon68]

26. WOW A Colonoscope at the Air Port

I can't wait.

Awesome

</sarcasm>

[formercia]

31. Already there

They have been a standard tool in training for decades.

I hope the clean them between uses. It would be a shame to catch Hepatitis, just because some nervous nellie thought I had something hidden.

[TheMadMonk]

8. Um excuse me. What exactly is everyone's problem with this?

I'll tell you what mine is. That it has taken so bloody long to do this simple thing.

My bank used this well over twenty years ago in it's passbooks. It is simple and non-intrusive.


If your ID is good, what are you worried about. If bad what are you hiding?

[MadHound]

15. Well, first of all, measures like these won't eliminate, or really make a dent in

The number of forged IDs being used. As you said yourself, your bank and many others started using this procedure a couple of decades ago. Did it stop or even slow down the crime rate at your bank? My guess is, if it's like other banks, no, it didn't. Just as banks and the TSA and Homeland Security get more adept at spotting fakes and such, criminals also get better, and manage to stay one step ahead of the game.

The thing is many, if not most, of these measures simply won't be effective because the there has been a huge shift away from forging documents(though that still goes on) and towards simply getting the necessary documents, only have them in name different from your own. Thus one can travel, do business, etc. all on a real live ID that stands up to scrutiny, but it still won't be under your name.

It used to be, up until the end of the twentieth century, ridiculously easy to get the mother lode of all documents, a birth certificate in the name of somebody else, even somebody who had died. Things haven't advanced much since then, and despite all of these security measures, a person who is clever enough, or who knows somebody in the right position, can still obtain a birth certificate in a name other than their own. After that, it is a simple matter to get a SS card, driver's license, etc.

As far as why we're complaining about it, it is simply another time waster, another way for petty bureaucrats, under the cloak of security, can exercise their petty power over the masses, making our lives miserable. In addition, this is another advance towards an all encompassing surveillance society, where we will be watched, monitored and tracked every minute of every day. Much of this surveillance society isn't even coming under the auspices of the federal government, where we would have at least some sort of nominal accountability. No, it is being done by the corporate world, where it falls under the cloak of "normal business practices," except for the fact that more and more of this information is being shared with our government.

Sure you say, if you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about. Except for false reads from biometric scanners, resulting in your arrest or interrogation. Except for the fact that your EZ pass record could be used in a legal case, perhaps a divorce, against you. Same with your cell phone records(including the record of where ever you went, since it is now regular practice to track people via cell phones), even conversations that you have in your car(if your car is Onstar, or similarly equipped, which more and more are). Hell, even the records retained by the car's computer can be retained to be used against you. Not to mention the security system you installed in your home, which not only can record when you left and returned, but new models that can tell how many people are in the house, where they are at, and some of what they're doing.

And not only can these records be used against you in divorce cases, but insurance claims, and a plethora of other ways. You may personally comfortable with such a surveillance state, but that's probably because you really don't know the scope of it. Those who do find it appalling, and this is simply another brick in the wall they're building. People look at these individual measures, and think there's no harm. But if you add them together, and there are now lots of them, what it adds up to is something that is quickly exceeding Orwell's worst nightmare. Are you really comfortable with such a surveillance society?

[pitohui]

23. see posty #23, it's a scam

by the way, just so you'll understand, there is no SECURITY reason to check IDs

the purpose of the security TSA screen should be to keep weapons off the plane, an ID real or fake is not a weapon of mass or even of individual destruction, and a person who has a real driver's license or ID can still be a crazy, a terrorist, or a criminal, imagine that, most violent criminals DO possess valid ID at least at some point in their lives

what keeps planes safe is proper and thorough searches/screens that keep WEAPONS off planes

not IDs

plus this program is fraudulent in any case, since it can't do what it says in the article -- holograms are not "revealed" by black light for example

airlines check IDs for revenue protection -- if i get ill and can't fly, i can't hand my ticket over to my aunt sally as a gift or sell it on ebay to recover some of my lost money, i'm just fucked

airline revenue protection should be paid for by the airlines, it shouldn't involve federal funds and federal employees, every TSA worker spent checking IDs is a worker YOU are paying for who is not searching for weappons and is instead using public funds to protect airline bottom lines

that's the objection, pure and simple

i'm guessing you don't fly very often, these are fairly basic facts

[underpants]

33. I wonder who is getting the "Black light" contract?

wink wink nudge nudge

[RC]

9. Wow!

"More than 40 passengers have been arrested since June in cases when TSA screeners spotted altered passports, fraudulent visas and resident ID cards, and forged driver's licenses."

"More than 40..." out of how many hundreds of millians? Wow, that sure is an impressive number. That's something like .00000006%. And they have spent how much money doing this?

How many shoe bombs have they caught? "Liquid" bombs? Breast milk?

I feel safer. Yeah, sure, yabetcha.

[ixion]

10. I used to enjoy flying... now I loathe it.

I really can't stand being treated like a concentration camp prisoner every time I walk into an airport. It is so freakin' un-American on so many levels. It is fascist crap and I don't see why people are willing to tolerate it.

[minnesota_liberal]

11. The only thing disturbing about this...

is the TSA chief's claim that it represents a huge improvement in security.

"This is a significant security upgrade," TSA chief Kip Hawley says.

Um, Kip... Holograms are visible without black lights.

[Deja Q]

12. Damn. Now they'll see all the bodily fluids people put on their cards.

x(

:sarcasm:

[high density]

13. Magnifying glasses and blacklights?

That's as useful as patting down the feet of old people with pacemakers. The screeners are being paid $8/hr and now they're going to become forgery experts? Yeah, right.

[LeftyMom]

14. That's only going to catch really bad fake documents.

Might keep a few day laborers off of planes, and maybe some twenty year olds from getting in flight drunks, but that's not going to slow the real criminals down for a minute. Especially now that the TSA publicized it and they know to eyeball any fake papers in advance to make sure they look real under black light.

[benld74]

16. It'll make my Hendrix poster will look really rad dude!!!!

[LizW]

18. They used this on my ID during the holidays.

The security guy lit up my ID, then he peered at the photo, then at me, then back at the photo. It was long enough to make me uncomfortable. Then he handed it to me and said, "Have a nice flight."

Then he let 200 teenagers go through security right behind me without showing any ID at all. I must have looked sketchy. :eyes:

[indio55555]

20. Did you look like this?

[Barney]

21. Yep. They are using it in Phoenix now

I was coming back east from Phoenix a couple of weeks ago and the TSA guy at the head of the line held a little blacklight over my license.

I asked what that little thing was. He didn't respond directly, but said he was "verifying" my driver's license.

I started to ask how a TSA agent in Phoenix could use a little light to verify my Virginia driver's license, but I thought better of it. I assumed that if I kept questioning him, he would flag me for extra screening to retaliate.

[pitohui]

22. it's quite useless, phoenix is a hand-out for security industry welfare

you don't "verify" a driver's license with a black light, you "verify" it by scanning the magnetic stripe and seeing if it's actually in the data base of, say, the virginia dept. of motor vehicles

i have seen fake IDs now that are "scannable" and will come up as "good" if just scanned by a reader, the only way to "verify" the ID is to connect with the appropriate dept. of motor vehicles and make sure it's on record, which is what police officers do, they phone it in, a little black light wouldn't prove fuck-all

black lights do not spot holograms, holograms are visible to the eye and are seen by turning the license under normal light if the person expecting the license has normal vision

if the person doing the inspection does not have normal vision, a black light won't help, they need to find a different job

there are a number of programs at phoenix sky harbor that do nothing for security but which allow private firms to bill the taxpayers for many millions of dollars, it is a scam, and i assume that local or state politicos there are taking a LOT of handouts to promote these scams

[jmowreader]

24. Does pot resin show up under blacklight?

Like, y'know, what if they were able to tell, using blacklight, if someone was using his driver's license to clean weed?

Which would prove one of two things: either you're dealing, or you're buying really shitty weed.

[slampoet]

25. I had a security person last time who didn't know Rhode Island was a state in the USA

I had to explain the history of the country SHE LIVES IN to here when she asked for my passport.


What in the world makes anyone thank these untrained personnel are going to be able to see anything more with a blacklight when they don't even know which states use that technology and which don't.

[ThoughtCriminal]

27. Pops into my head - the standard TV "investigative report"

Where they send a camera into a hotel room with a black light to point out the semen and urine stains - one bed, the walls, the ceiling...

Uh, your papers are not in order... uh... Ewwwww! what is that!?

[Cronus Protagonist]

29. They did that to my ID last weekend

FYI - the future tense is incorrect.

[complain jane]

30. Wow. That'll get 'em. n/t

[NashVegas]

32. LOL.... They've Learned a Trick From Bar Doormen

It's kind of funny to think that that we have, in the past at least, been less diligent about protecting air passengers from potential terr'ists than keeping 20 year olds out of bars.

[dropkickpa]

34. HAHAHAHA

There are nightclubs and bars that have been doing this for years, it's not like it's so new-fangled form of security, but the TSA is going to tout it as such.