Whistleblower Disclosure, and Protecting Aviation and National Security
While the general public watched in plain sight air marshals trying to accomplish their missions under strict Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) dress-code, hotel, check-in, and boarding policies the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in January 2009 reported to have all been finally rescinded, in July 2003, Las Vegas, Nevada Federal Air Marshal (FAM) Robert MacLean tried to blow the whistle within the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) on a plan to reduce air marshal coverage of nonstop, long distance flights amidst heightened warnings based on a July 26, 2003 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Advisory and confirmed by a May 18, 2006 Department of Homeland Security's Homeland Infrastructure Threat & Risk Analysis Center (HITRAC) Report describing intelligence of an al-Qaeda suicide hijack plan that would exploit a U.S. immigration loophole enabling a suicidal terrorist, without a U.S. visa, to take a flight from a country with less-stringent security to a U.S. airport and roam that U.S. airport during a layover before taking a second connecting flight to the destination country without being screened by that U.S. airport's security. Once inside a U.S. airport, terrorists would smuggle weapons onto aircraft by hiding weapons inside camera equipment and children's toys. During flight, the terrorists with the smuggled weapons would overpower the crew, take control, and fly the hijacked aircraft into U.S. east coast targets.
Read more about this topic: Robert Mac Lean
Famous quotes containing the words national security, protecting, national and/or security:
“Mr. Speaker, at a time when the nation is again confronted with necessity for calling its young men into service in the interests of National Security, I cannot see the wisdom of denying our young women the opportunity to serve their country.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The duty of government is to leave commerce to its own capital and credit as well as all other branches of business, protecting all in their legal pursuits, granting exclusive privileges to none.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)