Eighteen-month-old Riyanna has been called a lot of things: cute, adorable and now ... a suspected terrorist.

Meet 18-month-old Riyanna. Although she can't speak in full sentences, the toddler somehow managed to get on a watch list, prompting authorities to remove her and her parents from a Jet Blue flight in Fort Lauderdale, the New York Daily Newsreported Thursday.

According to the girl's mother, a JetBlue employee approached them and asked them to get off the plane.

“I said, ‘for what?’” Riyanna’s mother told TV station WPBF.

"Well it’s not you or your husband," the employee reportedly said. "Your daughter was flagged as a no fly."

"It's absurd," the father said. "It made no sense. Why would an 18-month-old child be on a no-fly list?"

The parents did not wish to be identified for fear of repercussions, the Daily News reported, adding that they are both of Middle Eastern descent, and the mother wears a head scarf. According to one account, the family was born and raised in New Jersey, the flight's destination.

After speaking with the TSA and being forced to wait a half hour, the family was granted permission to board the aircraft, but refused and left the airport instead. According to the family, no one apologized for the incident.

“We were put on display like a circus act because my wife wears a hijab,” the father said.

"Riyanna’s father said he intends to retain an attorney to pursue the matter further," John Hayward wrote at Human Events.

According to a statement from JetBlue, “several customers were flagged in the system as being on TSA’s No Fly list.”
Both JetBlue and the TSA are blaming each other for the mix-up.

WPBF says that JetBlue told them "this was an issue with the Transportation Safety Administration," and said both it and the TSA were investigating the matter, but the TSA disagreed, saying it was an airline issue.

"The TSA also said that since Riyanna and her parents were issued boarding passes, that means they had been cleared by the TSA and were definitely not on the no-fly list," WPBF added. More

"Baby Has A Gun ???" Mom: TSA Treated My 4-year-old Like a Terrorist Following Hug From Grandma

Of all the many complaints about airport security and the TSA, one of the most common is that they make little distinction between plausible security threats and passengers unlikely to be doing anything wrong.

And a recent incident in Wichita, Kansas has reinforced that argument, as a four-year-old girl was apparently subjected to a humiliating ordeal after she hugged her grandmother while she was waiting in line.

The girl was accused of having a gun and declared a 'high security threat', while agents threatened to shut down the whole airport if she could not be calmed down.

When asked about the overbearing treatment the girl received, a TSA spokesman did not apologise and insisted that correct procedures had been followed.

Terror threat? Four-year-old Isabella was subjected to a full body pat-down and accused of carrying a gun in an airport

Four-year-old Isabella's horrific experience in Wichita earlier this month was recounted on Facebook by her furious mother Michelle Brademeyer.

The family was in Kansas for a wedding, and was travelling home to Montana with Ms Brademeyer's mother.

Ms Brademeyer and her two children had passed through security when the grandmother was detained after triggering an alarm on the scanners.

Isabella then, according to her mother, 'excitedly ran over to give her a hug, as children often do. They made very brief contact, no longer than a few seconds.'

The young girl was immediately detained by security agents, who apparently shouted at her that she would have to be frisked too, and refused to let her mother explain what has happening.

Ms Brademeyer wrote: 'It was implied, several times, that my mother, in their brief two-second embrace, had passed a handgun to my daughter.'



Nightmare: The TSA has been criticised for being over-zealous (file photo)

In her terror, Isabella tried to run away rather than face a full body pat-down, which unsurprisingly enraged the TSA officers further.

One officer even told the girl's mother that the airport would have to be shut down and every flight cancelled if the four-year-old did not co-operate.

They also apparently described the little girl as a 'high security threat'.

As Isabella was taken into a side room for a pat-down, accompanied by her mother, she could not stop crying and refused to let the agents touch her.

An officer repeatedly said she had 'seen a gun in a teddy bear' in the past, in an apparent attempt to justify the situation.

Ms Brademeyer continued: 'The TSO loomed over my daughter, with an angry grimace on her face, and ordered her to stop crying.

'When my scared child could not do so, two TSOs called for backup saying, "The suspect is not cooperating." The suspect, of course, being a frightened child. They treated my daughter no better than if she had been a terrorist.'



Airport: Isabella's family was flying out of Wichita at the time of the incident

Isabella continued to cry, and officers said the family would have to leave the airport as the TSA was unable to frisk the four-year-old.



When a manager was called, he decided that the distraught Isabella could be checked alongside her mother, and let the family pass through security at last.

But their nightmare was not yet over, as on a connecting flight in Denver, an airport employee demanded to know which of the family was Isabella - and 'looked really confused' when the girl was pointed out to her.

Ms Brademeyer concluded her Facebook post by drawing attention to TSA rules against separating children from their parents, and added: 'I feel compelled to share this story in the hope that no other child will have to share in this experience.'


When The Consumerist approached the TSA for comment on the bizarre incident, a spokesman said: 'TSA has reviewed the incident and determined that our officers followed proper current screening procedures in conducting a modified pat-down on the child.'


Last month the agency came in for criticism when a video of a three-year-old boy in wheelchair having a full pat-down and being swabbed for explosives circulated on the internet.

Read more:
The Consumerist: 4-Year-Old Gets TSA Pat-Down Following Hug From Grandma

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2134280/Weeping-year-old-girl-accused-carrying-GUN-TSA-officers-hugged-grandmother-passing-security.html#ixzz1szP9hRgZ

TSA Pats Down 3-Year-Old In Leg Cast And Wheelchair ~ VIDEO

A toddler in a wheelchair is stopped by the TSA at the Airport in Chicago and forced to into a sequestered area. On his way to a family vacation in Disney, this 3 year old boy is in a body cast for a broken leg. Despite assurances from his father that "everything is ok", he is physically trembling with fear while he watches his two siblings, mother, father, grandfather and grandmother pass through along with everyone else...only to be singled out.

He simply does not understand what is happening and why.

Blogger shows world how to sneak anything past TSA’s nude body scanners

The United States Transportation Security Administration recently invested $1 billion in body scanner technology it claimed would make air travel safer, but the scanners have come under fire since the agency first revealed its intentions.

Some people argued that the nude scanners were an invasion of privacy while others were concerned with radiation emitted by the machines. Now, however, it appears as though past arguments pale in comparison to recent information brought to light by scientist and blogger Jonathan Corbett.

According to Corbett, who was the first person to sue the TSA when it introduced the scanners in early 2010, people can bypass the devices by simply fixing items they want to hide to their sides.

The scanners bounce electromagnetic waves off of a subject to create an image that shows metallic items in black against the human body, which appears in bright white on the TSA’s equipment. The background of the scans is also black, however, so objects held in clothing on a person’s side will not appear over the dark background in the TSA’s scans.

“While America was testing these devices, Rafi Sela, who ran security for Ben Gurion airport in Israel, which is known for being one of the most secure airports in the world, was quoted saying he could ‘overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to take down a Boeing 747,’ and Ben Gurion therefore refused to buy scanners,” Corbett said in a video posted to his blog.

The blogger demonstrated his methods on video, successfully sneaking a metal object through the TSA’s screening process at both Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and Cleveland-Hopkins International Airport.

While capturing as much of his experiment as he could on camera, Corbett slipped a palm-sized metal case into a pocket he sewed on the side of a shirt. He then passed through the TSA’s body scanners at both airports without his metal case being detected.

While speaking with Digital Trends, a TSA spokeswoman called the video “a crude attempt to allegedly show how to circumvent TSA screening procedures.” She continued, “TSA conducts extensive testing of all screening technologies in the laboratory and at airports prior to rolling them out the field.

Imaging technology has caught many items large and small, and is one of the most effective tools available to detect metallic and non-metallic items, such as the greatest threat to aviation, explosives.”

This content was originally published on BGR.com

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/03/08/blogger-shows-world-how-to-sneak-anything-past-tsas-nude-body-scanners/#ixzz1oYxOkwIH