[Landos Mustache]

"You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they're reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it."

Quotas in these situations are never a good idea.

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news...07/detail.html

[subego]

The "unspoken quota" is practically supposed to be an amount rather significantly less than the likely number of incidents the officer will witness. For example, a Chicago traffic cop is expected to write at least one ticket an hour. Obviously, on average, a big city cop will probably see twenty times that number of infractions over the course of that time.

So someone, somewhere thinks there is a high probability each Vegas air marshall will see significantly more than one incident of suspicious activity per month!

This seems just ridiculously out of whack. The whole point of air marshals in the first place is deterrence. People aren't going to behave suspiciously because the person across the aisle might put a cap in yo' ass.

Let's face it. It's going to be more than ten years before we've gotten lax enough for someone to even think about hijacking an American plane.

[greenG4]

Quota = Bad. I agree. What is this, retail sales? I do always question "unknown sources" but if this is really happpening... tsk tsk.

[ghporter]

The Air Marshal service needs adult supervision. Their Administrator has taken disciplinary action against marshals who don't wear the agency's "standard dress," which makes them stick out like a sore thumb. And the agency has been lauded as "best business customer" by a variety of hotels for their booking of multiple marshals for their overnight stays. It's stupid, bureaucratic BS that makes the service ineffectual. Dumb stuff like this makes it very plausable that they have a quota of "observations" for the marshals to make.