Word: swatting
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...into a microphone to deal with each security infraction-such as a pilot's setting off an alarm at a secure door when his ID badge is misread. For major incidents-big weather problems as well as security breaches-the action shifts to the room next door, where a swat team of airport personnel are summoned around a circular conference table whose centerpiece pops up at the push of a button to give each participant a phone and computer. Denver's layout makes dealing with a security breach easier than at many airports: the train system is instantly shut down...
...government. "There have been ominous signs," he writes, "that our fragile liberties have been dramatically at risk since the 1970s when the white-shirt-blue-suit-discreet-tie FBI reinvented itself from a corps of 'generalists,' trained in law and accounting, into a confrontational 'Special Weapons and Tactics' (aka SWAT) Green Beret-style army of warriors who like to dress up in camouflage or black ninja clothing and, depending on the caper, ski masks." Note the penultimate noun in that sentence: in Vidal's account, it's those who job it is to fight crime who are the criminals...
...September evening in 1999, Dr. Richard Carmona was driving to a University of Arizona football game in Tucson when he came across a traffic accident. A pickup truck had rear-ended a car. Carmona, a trauma surgeon and deputy sheriff on the local SWAT team, started to approach the truck when bystanders shouted that the driver had a gun. Carmona, who was off duty but carrying a pistol, called for backup and moved in, asking the driver to put down his weapon. The man was a mentally ill ex-convict who had murdered his father that day. He looked...
...college and medical school at the University of California, San Francisco. In 1985 he moved to Tucson and started the area's first trauma-care program. Since one stressful job apparently wasn't enough for Carmona, he joined the Pima County sheriff's office as a doctor and SWAT team member in 1986. "I doubt he's ever slept," says Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. "He doesn't have that in his nature...
...repaired with duct tape and a sputtering power system caused a blackout during the height of anthrax testing last fall--is only the most conspicuous part of the problem. Funding throughout the agency is so meager that members of the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service--a sort of disease SWAT team--cannot afford even such basic field equipment as two-way pagers...