Travel Security Concerns

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Desert_Diver

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Scuba Instructor
Divemaster
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Location
Salt Lake City
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For those of you traveling through LAX while checking expensive dive gear or photography equipment:

December 20, 2008: Airport baggage handlers stealing stuff from luggage, and cargo, is an old, and persistent, problem. Terrorism is much less of a problem, partly because of all the additional screening passengers get. But now some thieving baggage handlers in Los Angeles were caught working with luggage screeners (who used an X-ray device to look inside bags for bombs or weapons). The screeners were on the lookout for bags containing particularly valuable stuff. If one showed up, the screener used his cell phone to alert the baggage handlers, so they could hit the right bag. Without this kind of intel, robbing luggage is a hit or miss affair, and if you do it too often, you get caught. These guys got caught anyway, but now airport management and security officials are concerned that this sort of thing is happening at other air ports.​

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htmurph/articles/20081220.aspx

Your friends at TSA and Homeland Security making you safer. :confused:

Art
 
Hi, Art,

Thanks for posting this although I'm not surprised to hear about it.
 
Carry your most precious items on board. My regs always stay with me and the laptop :)
 
Hi, Art,

Thanks for posting this although I'm not surprised to hear about it.

Hey Sweet Sam-

I had read some newspaper stories (probably more than a year ago) about hold luggage being pilfered in Miami. But this was the first time I had seen Los Angeles cited. It makes me nervous since most of my Pacific diving takes me through LAX.

Art
 
Carry your most precious items on board. My regs always stay with me and the laptop :)

Yes, I do the same. My dive computer and camera are also in my carry-on.
 
Carry your most precious items on board. My regs always stay with me and the laptop :)

Roger that.

My regs, my dive computer, my log book, my camera and my prescription mask are always in my carry on. (I'm willing, in a pinch, to sacrifice my tacky dive T shirts :rofl3:).

Art
 
Wow that was about a month or so ago....CBS2 undercover busted them. Then the LAX police got involved....after they had numerious reports over the last year of many things missing in checked bags....even in carry on's...they had a video of a TSA agent ripping off an I pod when he was going thru a carry on.
 
Wow that was about a month or so ago....CBS2 undercover busted them. Then the LAX police got involved....after they had numerious reports over the last year of many things missing in checked bags....even in carry on's...they had a video of a TSA agent ripping off an I pod when he was going thru a carry on.

How about that?

The artical I saw was datelined Dec 20th. I assumed that it had just happened.

So what was the consequence? Did anyone go to jail? Pay restitution? Or did we just do the touchee/feely counseling?

Art
 
Scott-

Thanks for the links. It just confirms something that I have suspected for a long time. But I have to admit, the statement from TSA that it wasn't JUST THEIR screeners doing the stealing. Unbelievable. The government justifying wrongdoing because everybody else is doing it too. :shakehead:

Maybe the situation would improve if the management wonks got charged also.
(Fat chance.)

Art
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/swift/

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