This past Friday, the 1st of November, Paul Ciancia walked into Los Angeles International Airport’s Terminal 3 with a singular mission, his mission was to shoot and kill Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees. Upon arriving at the TSA Travel Document Checker (TCD) station at the entrance to the security checkpoint, Mr. Ciancia opened his bag…
Well today seems like as good a time as any for a reader mail, one of more than 2,200 I woke up to this morning, after posting Did The TSA & JetBlue Deny Travel For Looking Muslim During Ramadan? Nope yesterday evening. I only read a little more than 100 of these emails, as the…
Today’s reader mail comes from Vincent R., from Springfield, Massachusetts. Vincent writes “I have noticed the TSA in my local Amtrak station during the past few months. Amtrak Police refer to these uniformed TSA officers as TSA VIPR Teams. What exactly are they doing?” Well Vincent, over the past few years there has been…
Yesterday the United States Senate Judiciary Committee voted 13-to-5 in favour of an amendment, as part of immigration reform, to require the finger printing of all foreign travelers departing the United States. The bill, proposed by Senator Orin Hatch (R-UT), implements biometric tracking of foreign travelers under the Department of Transportation in three phases. …
It recently happened to me again, just as it has before … and just as it has happened to many other photographers before. I was stopped while shooting photos with my “pro gear” while people stood around me snapping photos with point and shoot cameras and their mobile phones without anyone giving them a second…
The headline of “Lone Gunman Opens Fire & Commits Suicide” is becoming all to frequent. Major headlines have most notably occurred in the past few months in movie theaters and schools. Today another headline appears in the same manner, but inside an airport terminal and the only victim was the gunman. While details are…
This morning ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize winning non-profit news organization, wrote about the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) quietly swapping certain Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) scanners from airports around the country, replacing them with other AIT scanners, implying that this is being done for health reasons. ProPublica journalist Michael Grabell writes, “The TSA is not…
A common question from traveling photographers is can they bring their tripod or monopod on-board flight as a carry on item. As Flying With Fish has not covered this topic in a few years, I figured it was a good time to bring it up again, as the uncertainty photographers face seems to surface with…
Anyone who has been selected for secondary screening, or bag screening, by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is familiar with the agency’s procedures for swabbing of a Transportation Security Officer’s (TSO) gloves for traces of explosives following a pat-down or search of a bag. But what does a passenger do when the gloves TSA…
On the 20th of September 2012 the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Transportation Committee on Homeland Security released a report entitled “Rebuilding TSA into a Smarter, Leaner Organization.” Within the 59 page report on the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Subcommittee covers a wide range of topics, some logically, some that sound good and…
