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It looks like it is now too expensive to join the Mile High Club.

But isn’t membership free? Yes, so long as a flight attendant does not ask you to stop.

If a flight attendant asks you to stop your ‘activities’ and you don’t, you are now committing a felony.

From Section 46504 of Title 49 of the US Code:

An individual on an aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States who, by assaulting or intimidating a flight crew member or flight attendant of the aircraft, interferes with the performance of the duties of the member or attendant or lessens the ability of the member or attendant to perform those duties, or attempts or conspires to do such an act, shall be fined under title 18, imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both. However, if a dangerous weapon is used in assaulting or intimidating the member or attendant, the individual shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.

Jesus, I wonder what could be considered a ‘dangerous weapon’?

Seem far fetched? Totally, but not for two lovebirds who were arrested upon landing and have been indicted.

From the indictment:

…the defendants, CARL WARREN PERSING and DAWN ELIZABETH SEWELL, did by intimidation, knowingly interfere with the performance of the duties of an aircraft flight attendant and lessen the ability of the attendant to perform his duties….

The FBI agent’s affidavit, attached to the indictment, explains the suspect ‘activity’ witnessed by the flight attendants. Below is a key page:

Sounds like cuddling to me. I don’t think this rises to the level of a felony, but I am no lawyer. I wish I could be on the jury for this case.

Thank god there wasn’t an Air Marshall on the flight, or these two would probably be dead.

Ever wonder if the security at airports is sufficient to stop a trained terrorist? Is the ban on liquids over 3 oz. really keeping us safe? Do I really need to take off my shoes to have them xrayed?

A friend of mine accidentally attempted to go through airport security in Seattle last weekend, with a knife. I don’t know all of the details, but if you normally carry a knife, I would be sure to double check everything before going through security. The TSA seems to be quite serious about these sorts of things.

Meanwhile, in a different city, my girlfriend and I were trying to fly back to Seattle. TSA was announcing every few minutes that “All liquids and gels must be less than 3oz in volume and all must be placed in a quart size ziplock bag. If you do not have a ziplock bag, they are for sale at the gift shop in Concourse 1.” Although I was curious as to how much a single ziplock bag from a gift shop would set me back, I did not have the desire to walk a half mile to the other concourse. Fortunately, I was able to get one from the ticket counter. What if I had 6-3oz. containers?

This really doesn’t make sense. But we are a nation living in fear, so it is not surprising. If a terrorist or anyone else for that matter really wanted to do harm, the TSA is not going to stop them. There are of course many people, like myself, who believe that airline security is more about perception than security.

One such person is Christopher Soghoian , a Ph.d. student who spends alot of his time traveling and thinking about airport security. One, funny at the time, idea that he came up with was the creation of a “fake boarding pass generator”. I discovered his tale on the Wired.com blog of 27B Stroke 6.
His theory appears to capitalize upon a weakness that Senator Charles Schumer of NY first spoke about in this February 2005 press release:

Schumer today laid out the following scenario in which someone on the terrorist watch list can get through airline security undetected:

1. Joe Terror (whose name is on the terrorist watch list) buys a ticket online in the name of Joe Thompson using a stolen credit card. Joe Thompson is not listed on the terrorist watch list.

2. Joe Terror then prints his “Joe Thompson” boarding pass at home, and then electronically alters it (either by scanning or altering the original image, depending on the airline system and the technology he uses at home) to create a second almost identical boarding pass under the name Joe Terror, his name.

3. Joe Terror then goes to the airport and goes through security with his real ID and the FAKE boarding pass. The name and face match his real drivers license. The airport employee matches the name and face to the real ID.

4. The TSA guard at the magnetometer checks to make sure that the boarding pass looks legitimate as Joe Terror goes through. He/she does not scan it into the system, so there is still no hint that the name on the fake boarding pass is not the same as the name on the reservation.

5. Joe Terror then goes through the gate into his plane using the real Joe Thompson boarding pass for the gate’s computer scanner. He is not asked for ID again to match the name on the scanner, so the fact that he does not have an ID with that name does not matter. [Since Joe Thompson doesn’t actually exist it does not coincide with a name on the terrorist watch list] Joe Terror boards the plane, no questions asked.

Chris figured that the best way to change the system would be to call attention to this weakness. He did this by creating a fake boarding pass generator. This generator would create an authentic looking Northwest Airline boarding pass in any name. A sample boarding pass is below. The Washington Post has a screen shot of the generator before the site was taken down and further discussion on their blog.

While I can see the humor in this and the fact that he most certainly did not intend to actually use this for illegal purposes, I doubt he had any idea who was outside when there was a knock a couple days ago…

As reported on BoingBoing, he was visited by the FBI who “had a few questions” for him.

After the interview he was quite shaken and decided to spend the night at an undisclosed location. This morning, upon returning home, he found his apartment totally ransacked with a search warrant on the table.

On Chris’ blog at slightparanoia.blogspot.com recounts the tale:

I came back today, to find the glass on the front door smashed.

Inside, is a rather ransacked home, a search warrant taped to my kitchen table, a total absence of computers – and various other important things. I have no idea what time they actually performed the search, but the warrant was approved at 2AM. I’m sincerely glad I wasn’t in bed when they raided the house. That would have been even more scary.

And he posted a copy of the warrant.

I wonder how this will all turn out. Will the government make an ‘example’ out of him? And even if they do attempt to make an example out of him, chances are his case would crumble like so many other cases before him.

A Chicago man was briefly detained on Saturday after he spoke on his cell phone in a foreign language.
According to the Seattle P-I:

The man was speaking Tamil, a language largely used in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore, on his cell phone at the departure gate and on the aircraft. An off-duty airline employee heard the conversation and informed the flight crew.

The man also apparently said something in English about a sporting rivalry at his alma mater.

It’s refreshing to see that racism is alive and well here in the Northwest.  I hope they follow up with the airline employee who started this whole thing.

Is life in America really so scary that a man speaking in a foreign language on a cell phone would prompt such a reaction?

Every time I fly, I find myself annoyed by the preflight announcements. As they rattle on over the PA “…In the event of a water landing…” I want to interject “We will all die!”, but I never say it, don’t wanna jinx the flight. Instead I look at the illustrated safety card and think that about how ridiculous the illustrations are. The guy over at airtoons.com has come up with his own illustrations for the cards.

Today I came across this post on Boing Boing and it made me chuckle. The post is a summary of the original piece in the Economist speculating on what a truthful announcement would be like.

Highlights include:

The flight attendants are now pointing out the emergency exits. This is the part of the announcement that you might want to pay attention to. So stop your sudoku for a minute and listen: knowing in advance where the exits are makes a dramatic difference to your chances of survival if we have to evacuate the aircraft.

Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero.

Please switch off all mobile phones, since they can interfere with the aircraft’s navigation systems. At least, that’s what you’ve always been told. The real reason to switch them off is because they interfere with mobile networks on the ground, but somehow that doesn’t sound quite so good. On most flights a few mobile phones are left on by mistake, so if they were really dangerous we would not allow them on board at all, if you think about it.

Please consume alcohol in moderate quantities so that you become mildly sedated but not rowdy. That said, we can always turn the cabin air-quality down a notch or two to help ensure that you are sufficiently drowsy.

But unfortunately, the airlines know better than to scare the flying public like that. Instead we all sit there half-listening, looking at SkyMall magazine wondering who in the world buys that stuff.

Last Sunday night (August 27, 2006) at approximately 11pm I experienced my first UFO sighting.

My girlfriend and I were driving back to Seattle from Portland and somewhere outside of Federal Way (around mile marker 149) we saw something falling from the sky leaving a long brilliant green trail behind it that light up the sky to the north/northwest.

At first we thought it was a meteor / shooting star. But it appeared to be dropping straight out of the sky and not shooting across the sky as the meteors and shooting stars I have seen. (I don’t know what they look like or how they appear to travel right before impact…)

I got out my digital crayons today and made a quick sketch to illustrate what we saw.

The green trail on the left shows how the object fell off in the distance. We did not see any impact, etc. Perhaps it fell into Puget Sound.

As we were near the airport, there is the possibility that we saw something related to an aircraft, but it sure didn’t look like it, or appear to be that close.

If you saw this or any other unidentified flying object, I would love to hear about it. So would the National UFO Reporting Center based out of a former ICBM missile base in eastern Washington.

Since September 11, 2001, I have been very suspicious of the explanations given for what happened on 9/11. Unfortunately I am not an expert in anything that would be relevant in proving my suspicions.

Fortunately, there are other who are also suspicious and have those skills. One such person is Richard Curtis, Ph.D. He is an adjunct professor at Seattle University and a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. (This website provides links to many additional resources on the topic.)

He wrote an article for the Seattle PI on May 16, 2006, which destroys the basic premise that the entire 9/11 Commission Report is built upon.

From the article:

First, who were the hijackers? We do not know. None of those named appear on any of the passenger lists released by the airlines. Most important, six of the men named by the government are still alive and have never even been to the United States. We know that because European media (as reported by The Associated Press, the London Telegraph and the BBC) have interviewed them. It is not a matter of mistaken identity not being noticed or someone using a false passport. The commission insists that the people they named were the hijackers but that claim is demonstrably false.

So, without going into the territory of Conspiracy Theorists, there are obviously some basic problems with the explanation that the U.S. Government has provided.

My basic question is why do we accept these lies as truth? Where is the outrage?