Only One Man and Germany goes Crazy

In Munich the whole Terminal 2 of the airport was closed down because one man went into the safety zone even though his notebook was tested positively on possible bomb ingredients. Yet, these ingredients are also used in perfumes and similar articles, which means that it is totally uncertain if he was dangerous.

The security stuff did not retain the hurrying man who (according to a Bavarian radio station) “looked like a business man”. He just passed by and could not be found again. Therefore, Terminal 2 was closed than and the search was continued, but it was in vain.

“Body Scanners are the solution”

As you might know reading my blog there’s a discussion about body scanners in Germany since one guy tried to bomb an American plane.  In connection to this new incident in Munich the German Minister of the Interior proclaimed the introduction of these body scanners once again. According to the Bavarian broadcast he called them “promising”.

Yet, if the staff is incapable of retaining a man, how should body scanners help? There was a positive, either a false positive or a true positive—whichever, it was positive. What else should a body scanner do if not show a positive value? Moreover, how should a body scanner find explosive in the notebook? Body scanners are used for bodies, not for notebooks. At least other institutions like the Labour Union of the police are arguing that it was the security staff’s fault.

Why so much security for planes?

Why do we even need so much security for planes? There would be much better targets for terrorists if they wanted to attack us severely: e.g. dams. Yet, it seems to be more humurous for them to show that they can circumvent our security measures. They are always considered inferior by Western civilisation, therefore kidding these countries must be a pleasure for them.

Of course, you could say that transatlantic flights cannot land on another airport if something goes wrong, but then European-Asian flights would not have to be under the same security measures. Moreover, you could say that ship travellers would have to face the same security checks, because ships cannot head for a harbour on the Atlantic Ocean, either. Though, searching on the internet leads to no results about ships and security controls, moreover it’s even the case that instead you find the sentence “airline passengers to the US have to deal with stricter security controls”.

Even police are claiming that it was probably only a false positive alarm, but still people will be worried now. Media is reporting about bomb alarm at an airport, so the plausible conclusion for most people in this terror frightened world is that it was a terrorist.

Passenger Name Records also in EU

If the European Council was in charge the EU would also introduce Passenger Name Records for flights within the Union. The system of Passenger Name Records is mainly used by the United States forcing airlines to store data about passengers travelling there and pass them to the US government.

These records include a lot of data and are a huge threat for our privacy. Of course, it is not sure which data should be collected within the European Union, but it seems as if credit card number was very important to them. Ministers of the Interior are always argumenting with terrorism, but why should terrorists not be able to change their credit card number (in case one was already suspicios) or use another payment method? Some people even talk about information like food preferences which would be totally useless with regard to terrorists.

The European Council again seems to be willing to introduce more and more surveillance based on the ever same argument of terrorism. You could even say they just waited for the past terroristic attempt, because while nothing happened German politicians tried to introduce surveillance and censorship “against childpornography” using faked statistics and defaming other countries. We can just hope that for the sake of all passenger the Parliament will refuse this law and sustain our privacy.

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Saturday, January 23, 2010