George Hobica: TSA PreCheck Expanding, Breezes You Through Airport Security

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Since 2001, multiple schemes have been floated to get passengers through lines at security and customs more quickly. Some were marginally successful, others failed, some never got off the ground. But with Global Entry, a customs fast-track solution in the making forever and finalized this past year, are we finally getting it right? Let's take a look at this increasingly popular program, which has travelers saying nice things about airports for a change.

What is it?

Global Entry is a voluntary program, co-developed by United States Customs and Border Patrol that offers you expedited service when re-entering the country via customs and immigration. This means no more dreading the immigration or customs lines in the arrivals hall when you return home from overseas - just walk up to the automated kiosk, check-in and go on your way - no filling out paperwork, no nothing. In addition, Global Entry members are automatically eligible for the increasingly popular TSA PreCheck service, developed by the Transportation Security Administration, designed to whisk low-risk types through the security checkpoints with less hassle: no removing laptops, shoes, jackets or liquids/gels.

Where do I sign up?

Head to www.globalentry.gov, fill out an online application and pay your $100, non-refundable application fee. Note, however, that you will be required to schedule an in-person interview at one of the Enrollment Centers, located at airports around the country. (Make sure you live close to one of them, the complete list is located on the Web site.) An official will sit with you, ask you a lot of personal questions (don't get nervous) and then you'll either be approved or rejected for the program; membership lasts for five years.

Who qualifies?

The program is not only open to American citizens, permanent residents will also qualify, along with Mexican nationals and citizens of The Netherlands and South Korea. (The list of qualifying countries is expected to grow in future.) Also, Canadian citizens can sign up for the pre-existing NEXUS border crossing program available there and receive the same benefits.

Who shouldn't bother?

If you've got a criminal record, have ever been in arrears, customs-wise, in any country on the face of the earth or have previously tangled with US immigration, save yourself the trouble of signing up.

How to beat the system

There's no way around the interview process, but there are ways to avoid paying the application fee. Got an American Express Platinum card? They'll reimburse you the $100, and the $100 paid by any additional cardholders on your account. Citibank's Citi Prestige cardholders also qualify for this benefit, as do Global Services, Premier 1K and Platinum members of United's MileagePlus program. Also, if you're already a member of the existing programs that the U.S. government operates in partnership with the Canadian (NEXUS) and Mexican (SENTRI) governments, you're set. Designed to get you and your car over the border faster, membership in these programs also allows you to use Global Entry at any American airport. The NEXUS program only costs $50 for five years, so join that and you'll save a nice chunk of change. (All in, SENTRI ends up costing a little more than Global Entry, but at least if you're a member, you don't have to pay another $100.) With both programs, make sure to check that you've got the correct fingerprints and documentation on file before attempting to use Global Entry, or you'll be kicked to the next available immigration agent for the standard screening.

Oh, and a little more about PreCheck...

Again, Global Entry members are automatically enrolled in the program; all you have to do is make sure you enter your known traveler number when booking your flight - you'll get that once you're admitted to Global Entry. Once again, you're at an advantage - passengers without membership in Global Entry have to be invited to participate in PreCheck by their airline (if their airline is participating), and access is generally determined by their frequent flyer status.

Why it's worth it

It shouldn't be too difficult to see the benefits. With both Global Entry and PreCheck, you've very nearly eliminated all of our least favorite things about airports - waiting in line at security, being forced to take off shoes and remove little baggies of toothpaste from our luggage, waiting in line at immigrations, waiting in line at customs. Talk about VIP status.

More tips on skipping airport lines:

Skip The Lines With Priority Boarding

Global Entry Gives You VIP Immigration When Entering U.S. Airports

Follow George Hobica on Twitter: www.twitter.com/airfarewatchdog

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Streaker At Browns Game Gets Kicked By Security, Apparently Withstands Joique Bell Hits (VIDEO)

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A streaker stormed the field during the third quarter of a preseason game between the Detroit Lions and Browns at First Energy Stadium in Cleveland on Thursday night. His full-speed, drawers-dropped frolic concluded with a kick and a shoulder tackle.

Suggesting that he was already in midseason form, the streaker reportedly shrugged off a pair of hits from Lions running back Joique Bell.

We had a streaker on field at FirstEnergy Stadium. Knocked down twice by #Lions RB Joique Bell. Kept going before cops tackled him by tunnel

— Nate Ulrich (@NateUlrichABJ) August 16, 2013

Streaker ran onto the field and Lions Joique Bell hit him twice. He was lucky James Harrison was in Cincy.

— Tom Reed (@treed1919) August 16, 2013

"They told me I should have wrapped and rolled," Bell said after the game, via Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press. "I said I probably would have been the one going to jail"

Anyone looking to see this streak from multiple angles is in luck because fans in attendance were sharing images of the moment via social media.

Streaker pic.twitter.com/xsILeUi2qb

— James Zajaczkowski (@jameszaj21) August 16, 2013

PIC: Browns streaker! pic.twitter.com/nEE4zqLPAe

— Matt Skrajner (@MattNewsHerald) August 16, 2013

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Divisions Over National Security State Scramble Old Alliances, Political Coalitions

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WASHINGTON -- The contours of the debate around security and civil liberties that began the day after the 9/11 attacks have been steadily shifting ever since, but have recently become contorted in the wake of revelations about the depth and breadth of the National Security Agency's secret surveillance. The debate coincides and overlaps with disagreement over indefinite detention, the use of force abroad and, specifically, the employment of drones in a sprawling array of countries in the so-called global war on terror.

The debate has taken on a partisan bent, with grassroots Democrats broadly lining up in surveys to defend the administration, and Republicans charging that presidential authority goes too far. But among the leaders in Washington and the media, alliances are scrambling, with the greatest dissension within conservative ranks.

The battle inside the GOP has left leading tea party figures such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh in uncomfortable alignment with independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats; Michael Moore; Glenn Greenwald; Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg. They are pitted against establishment figures from both sides, such as Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), liberal Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.), and diplomat Richard Haass.

Democrats, owing partly to the simple fact that they control the levers of executive power, are more likely to back the extensive use of that authority. Two recent surveys differed in how respondents reacted to the NSA's surveillance programs, but they found similar patterns of partisanship.

In a HuffPost/YouGov poll, Republicans and independents were most likely to say that collecting Americans' phone records is unnecessarily intrusive, by a 65 percent to 17 percent margin for Republicans and by a 62 percent to 17 percent margin for independents. But Democrats in the poll were more divided, with 39 percent saying collecting phone records is unnecessarily intrusive and 33 percent saying it is justified to combat terrorism.

In a Pew Research Center/Washington Post poll, majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents all supported the NSA monitoring, but Democrats were by far the most likely to do so. Sixty-four percent of Democrats called the surveillance acceptable, compared with 53 percent of independents and 52 percent of Republicans.

That wasn't the case when former President George W. Bush was in office. A similar ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in 2006 during the Bush administration -- after similar revelations that the government was collecting Americans' phone and email data -- found that 75 percent of Republicans and just 37 percent of Democrats said it was acceptable for the NSA to "secretly [listen] in on phone calls and [read] emails without court approval."

Republicans who were then on the receiving end of Democratic criticism, particularly that dished out by then-candidate Barack Obama, are piqued to see so many now standing up for the national security state. "This so similar to the Cheney doctrine, it's not even funny, and nobody's talking about that," a former Republican leadership aide said on background. "At least Republicans are consistent. The left should be enraged. He promised something better than this. And it's fucking the same, it's the same arrogance."

The GOP has historically been a coalition that included staunch isolationists, an outgrowth of a don't-tread-on-me philosophy. The purge began in the run up to World War I and was fully complete by the 1980s, as the GOP captured "Reagan Democrats" who wanted tough talk against the Soviet Union and rebelled against the counter-cultural opposition to the Vietnam War that had seeped into the Democratic Party. The neoconservative movement, once led by Sen. Scoop Jackson, a Cold War Democrat from Washington state who had been a favorite to win the 1972 presidential nomination, drifted fully over to the GOP, and by the time the Patriot Act was rushed through Congress, the GOP gave it a full-throated embrace. A handful of Democrats stood up to it, but few wanted to make a political fight out of it.

But the tea party wave in 2010 brought in a new batch of Republicans who had no connections to the post-9/11 legislative flurry and a deep distrust of government. The first time House leaders put an extension of the Patriot Act on the floor, they were shocked when their members blocked it.

Paul has become the base of opposition to the overreach of the national security state, solidifying his place with his 13-hour filibuster on drones. He has extended that critique to include the NSA's surveillance, and has angered plenty of top Republicans in the process. That debate is likely to continue playing out over the next several years, as Paul flirts with a presidential bid, lifting his national profile and that of the civil liberties movement he's leading.

The GOP's division on national security and civil liberties was summed up nicely Monday by Rush Limbaugh, who told listeners he was "conflicted" on whether the source of the NSA revelations, leaker Edward Snowden, should be punished.

"I must tell you, I am conflicted about this in a number of ways," he said. "The regime is saying this guy's gotta be silenced, this guy's gotta be prosecuted. And the media, they're going back and forth on how to deal with this, 'cause this has got a lot of people shaken up, because [President] Obama represented a panacea, if you will. Some of these people really drank that Kool-Aid and believed it.

"We had an idealistic utopia coming that this was stuff exclusive to Bush, all this torture and all this spying and all this warrantless wiretap searching and the Supreme Court deciding who's the president," he continued. "These people were consumed with this rage. It was literally eating them alive. So Obama comes along -- leave the racial aspect out of it -- Obama comes along and promises none of this is gonna go on and he's gonna get to the bottom of it. He's gonna stop it. He's gonna expose it, and the country's gonna get its respect."

Limbaugh, after a digression about Obama's race protecting him from impeachment, made the argument that the NSA overreach is not a conservative or tough-on-terror reaction to 9/11, but is the consequence of liberalism's basic philosophy.

"I think that the opportunity still exists and the focus of attention ought to be: this is what you get with liberals," he suggested. "This is what you get with liberalism -- or Democrats if you want -- but this kind of big government, this kind of overreach, this kind of insecurity, this kind of violation of privacy, this is exactly what you get. This is who liberals are. That, to me, needs to be the message."

Meanwhile David Brooks, the man in charge of explaining conservatism to liberals in the pages of The New York Times, lectured Snowden about trusting the government.

"Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good," Brooks wrote. "This is not a danger Snowden is addressing. In fact, he is making everything worse."

Liberal writers Jeffrey Toobin and Joe Klein, meanwhile, are lined up with Brooks. Toobin slammed Snowden as a criminal narcissist. The liberal shift represents a realignment that has been underway since 9/11, but was hastened by the presidential candidacy of former Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). Facing charges of a lack of patriotism, Democrats nominated a war hero, pinned flags to their breasts and began talking in bellicose terms. Democrats who opposed the war in Iraq made sure to be clear that they supported the one in Afghanistan.

When Obama ran on that platform he stunned his base by following through on his promise to ramp up the war in Afghanistan while winding down the one in Iraq. Meanwhile, he broadened the drone war, launched strikes across the globe and instead of closing Guantanamo, closed the State Department office in charge of closing Guantanamo. He recently vowed to reopen it, in a speech aimed to spell out what limits he saw to his power to wage war.

Klein put the centrist position most succinctly, slamming the "civil liberties freakout."

"Unaccustomed as I am to agreeing with Marc Thiessen, hell has frozen over and he’s on the right track about the National Security Agency–leaks nonscandal," Klein wrote at Time.com. "Those who see the federal government as a vast corporate conspiracy or a criminal enterprise -- in other words, paranoids of the left and right -- are concerned about this. More moderate sorts should also have cause for concern -- especially if a rogue government, like Nixon’s, were in power."

Obama National Security Policies Resemble Bush's

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WASHINGTON — Five years into his presidency, Barack Obama presides over a national security apparatus that in many ways still resembles the one left behind by President George W. Bush. Drones are killing terrorism suspects, the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, holds "enemy combatants" and the government secretly collects telephone records of millions of Americans.

This from a president who in 2008 ran as the anti-Bush candidate who would get the U.S. out of Iraq, put an end to torture and redefine U.S. policies abroad.

But even as he has ended the war in Iraq, changed interrogation standards and sought to build foreign alliances, the former constitutional law professor also has disappointed some allies by embracing, and in some cases expanding, the counterterrorism policies that caused Bush to run afoul of civil libertarians.

Over the past two days, news accounts have revealed that the government has collected millions of Americans' phone records in the name of national security and has also conducted an Internet surveillance program that tracks people's movements and contacts that the Obama administration says is aimed exclusively at non-citizens outside the U.S. Both programs rely on the Bush-era Patriot Act, which Congress has since twice reauthorized with Obama's support.

The disclosures come two weeks after Obama declared in a major speech that when it comes to the nation's security "America is at a crossroads" and proposed a more targeted counterterrorism strategy. But even while calling for a national debate over the appropriate balance between security and freedom, that speech, and the reports of phone and Internet surveillance by the National Security Agency, underscored that Obama, like Bush before him, has an overriding preoccupation about a terror attack on U.S. soil.

"It's important to recognize that you can't have a hundred percent security and also then have a hundred percent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said in response to a question Friday during a health care event in San Jose.

"You know," he added, "we're going to have to make some choices as a society."

Obama supporters might be forgiven for thinking he would have had something else in mind.

Before becoming president, Obama unsuccessfully sought changes in the USA Patriot Act that would have placed restrictions on the very provision that his administration now uses to collect phone records.

The changes, proposed in a 2005 bill that Obama as a senator co-sponsored, would have required that "the records sought pertained to a terrorist or a spy or another agent of a foreign power," Gregory T. Nojeim, a senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said Thursday. "The surveillance that was revealed yesterday is of records that pertain to everyone else."

"It's disappointing , it's troubling and it's hard to justify given that alternatives that would protect both national security and civil liberties are available," added Nojeim, a former legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Seeking to quell the outcry, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued an unusual late-night statement Thursday saying that the records obtained are subject to strict court-imposed restrictions and that only a small fraction are actually ever reviewed. Hours later, Obama himself weighed in.

"You know, I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs," he said. "My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards.

"But my assessment and my team's assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. And the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name attached and not looking at content -- that on, you know, net, it was worth us doing."

No doubt, Obama has been aggressive in the measures he has employed to fight terrorist threats. And while he has fruitlessly sought to close the detention facility for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, he has broadened Bush's drone warfare program, even approving a drone strike abroad to kill an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was accused of having links to planned terror attacks. The Justice Department last month acknowledged that three other Americans also have been killed by drones, all unintended targets.

At the same time, the president has encouraged vigorous investigation of national security leaks. The Justice Department so far has prosecuted six government officials for sharing classified information and, in pursuing two other cases, has obtained the records of phones used by Associated Press journalists and the emails of a Fox News reporter.

"When you wake up every morning and get a PDB that outlines all the threats to the United States, it's a daily reminder of the things we need to do to protect the United States," Tommy Vietor, Obama's former National Security Council spokesman, said referring to the President's Daily Brief of intelligence data.

Politically, Obama has benefited from his counterterrorism policies, particularly the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden. During his re-election campaign last year, Obama got high approval ratings in public opinion polls for his record on national security.

And despite the stir caused by the NSA's acquisition of phone records, members of Congress, particularly those who serve on the House and Senate Intelligence committees, have been regularly apprised of the program in secret briefings. Many Democrats and Republicans defended the practice.

"This is a program that's been in effect for seven years, as I recall," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said. "It's a program that has worked to prevent not all terrorism but certainly the vast, vast majority. Now is the program perfect? Of course not."

The Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, said the program within the last few years stopped a terrorist attack in the U.S. He did not elaborate, but added: "It is a very valuable thing. It's legal. It's been authorized by Congress, judicial oversight and review."

Indeed, only a handful of lawmakers have raised public objections, but until now they had been couched because briefings on the matter are classified.

One of those critics, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said the public should know whether the Patriot Act is being interpreted narrowly or broadly by the administration and by the secret courts authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

"The document publicized yesterday certainly suggests that the secret interpretation of the law is much more like a barn door," Merkley said in an interview.

Merkley said he asked the Justice Department in December to declassify the opinions of the FISA court so Congress could debate whether to narrow the standards used to gather information. He said he has not received a reply.

"The response is totally inadequate," he said.

___

Follow Jim Kuhnhenn on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jkuhnhenn

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Osama Bin Laden Raid Film: Draft Pentagon Report Finds Leon Panetta Violated Security Rules

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WASHINGTON — A draft report by Pentagon investigators says that several weeks after Leon Panetta oversaw the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the then-CIA director revealed the name of the raid commander in a speech attended by the writer of the film "Zero Dark Thirty."

Panetta later served as defense secretary and is now retired.

The report did not say whether Panetta knew the writer was in his audience; if his disclosure was inadvertent then it's not clear that he violated security rules.

The unpublished report was first disclosed by the Project on Government Oversight and was confirmed Wednesday by Rep. Peter King.

The New York Republican said he was briefed on the draft report. He said it confirmed his suspicion that the Obama administration cut corners on security in its dealings with Hollywood executives.

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