Note To The TSA, Your New Big Brother Is An Arsehole
by Vince?Daliessio
(PHOTO: What you could see out your airplane window soon, if you mumble too many Koran verses under your breath, or maybe your boss' name)
BAE Systems, a British-based systems vendor to the US military wants to sell an "Onboard Threat Detection System" to the airlines, consisting of video and audio recorders at every seat, to catch mumbled Koran verses and shifty eye movements. As Paul Craig Roberts points out today, I guess this means the intrusive, abusive stripping of rights that occurs now at the airport security counter is simply useless kabuki.
More to the point, BAE Systems are the suppliers of computer systems to the Lockheed F-22 Raptor, the magnificent?uselessness of which we have pointed out here before. An incident with the Raptor illustrates why the airlines should think twice before letting them have a contract combining computers and aeroplanes;
"Lockheed's shiny new F-22 Raptor stealth fighters may have owned a few war games, but crossing the International Date Line left them as helpless as a carrot in a rabbit trap, with multiple system crashes causing an emergency detour en route from Hawaii to Okinawa, Japan. Communication, fuel subsystems, and navigation systems were rendered useless and repeated "reboots" were of no help. Luckily, the fleet had clear skies and refueling tankers to guide them back to Hawaii. If they had separated from the tankers, "they would have turned around and probably could have found the Hawaiian Islands. But if the weather had been bad on approach, there could have been real trouble," states Retired Air Force Major General Don Shepperd. The voyage suffered a two-day delay on account of the system failures -- "a computer glitch in the millions of lines of code, somebody made an error in a couple lines of the code and everything goes." What should have been a showy parade of $125+ million super fighters quickly turned to disaster for Lockheed who would've had a lot of explaining to do, had this happened during combat."
(Read the comments section, where I effectively destroy the rationale for this expensive flying pig)
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