Who manufactures the pornoscanners? I’m betting we’ll eventually learn of some connection between the company that makes them and high-level members of the government.
Ultimately, I wonder if this isn’t simply a consequence of creating a separate government entity (the TSA) to handle security in the first place. Give bureaucrats their own agency, and you give them the incentive to engage in all sorts of shenanigans to justify their own (budgetary) existence.
ETA: Just noticed Steve MB’s post at 115. I’m not surprised at all.
That, or “If you’re not a terrorist you shouldn’t have a problem with any and all security measures. Do you have a problem with being strip searched, citizen?”
I wouldn’t be so sure. FiveThirtyEight has a nice breakdown of some polling on the issue, and some of the problems with the poll data. Given that, it seems as many as 81% of Americans support these procedures. Link
Unfortunately, I just don’t see that there’s a reasonable way to roll many of these procedures back. I think we’re seeing it clearly in the hearings with the TSA leadership. All the agency has to do is scream “TERRORISM!!!” and the majority will bend over backwards. Well, that and citing to “secret intelligence” and unspecified threats which will never be made public for our review.
In terms of any legal challenge, I would be astonished if the Supreme Court found that these searches weren’t reasonable.
I’m glad to see that 538 zeroed in on exactly the response I had when you mentioned the poll - a poll of the general public isn’t useful if the majority of the public doesn’t fly, or if they haven’t flown since the procedures were put into place.
Also, that poll was only regarding full-body scanners, and there is very little information available yet on how effective they are, how much they show, and what the TSA does with the data.
I’m willing to get that polling would be much, much lower on the invasive pat-down procedures, which seem to be the development that is really triggering the public backlash.
And I do think the full body scanners are much less intrusive and not particularly violating of personal privacy. The images are vague, they aren’t personally identifiable, and they don’t really reveal much more than tight clothing would. If someone wants to stare at images of my clothing-constrained junk in low-resolution fuzzy black and white, I don’t really care.
I care a lot more about someone grabbing me by the nuts or feeling up Mr. Happy. And I care a lot more if my wife is forced to lift her shirt in public so another person can grope her breasts or jam her hands down her pants and feel her genitalia. It’s degrading, it forces you to be submissive, and it’s somewhat frightening. And I REALLY care if they do it to my daughter, who as a young girl is really going to be hyper-sensitive to this kind of intrusion.
I don’t know. I hope they would - especially the part about fining you $10,000 if you refuse. But I don’t really have any sense of how they would vote on this.
The only way this get rolled back is if the public really rises up against it - or if it causes such a decline in air travel that the big corporations that the government really pays attention to start squawking and threatening to withdraw campaign donations and start lobbying for candidates who oppose these measures.
I agree - I think there are some serious problems with polling the general public. I am heartened to see at least some effort to gauge national reaction to these measures, but frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if even the flying public generally had positive impressions of these measures.
I’m not sure I believe that this outcome is particularly likely. If not flying was a reasonable possibility for most people, perhaps a boycott would work, but as is, if I need to get somewhere in a hurry, flying remains the most viable means of travel.
If I had to make a prediction, I’d say the end result of all this hubbub is a few new “procedures” without any substantial change in the overall screening process. At the end of the day, “protecting us from terror” is the trump card.
I read the full body scanners can not detect plastics, liquids and chemicals. They do increase cancer risks. That would be a serious shortcoming. Eventually we will have to fly naked. Then we will be safe. The suppository, tampax checker job will have to pay well.
No, I don’t think so. My gf buys shoes at a high end shoe store. There is a salesman there who has been there a long time. He has an obvious foot fetish (lingers sliding the woman’s foot into the shoe, glassy eyed stare, etc). My gf loves the shoes, and doesn’t mind him getting off.
I doubt he is paid all that much, and I don’t think he cares.
Sorry, I don’t happen to have the option of using the scanner, I travel in a wheelchair and my only option is sexual abuse. Personally, I would really rather the only 2 people groping my labia to be my OB/GYN and my husband.
Of course, what with implants and all, this will not be enough.
I expect women will also have to supply notarized statements from their doctor that ‘the girls’ are all natural.
We took the first step down the road to madness years ago, and until someone is willing to stand up and tell Bryan Fischer and his kind that we as a nation simply do not give a rat’s ass about his ridiculous fears for the safety of his family, things will continue to deteriorate.
For the past several years, there has been a federal program in place controlling access to US seaports, called The Transportation Worker Identification Credential, or TWIC. The TWIC process involves application in person, at which time a photo and electronic fingerprints are taken of the applicant, a waiting period during which a criminal background check is carried out, then the applicant again shows up in person to pick up the card. The card includes a scanner-readable chip with the applicant’s biometric information.
The provison is that all persons who wish to access secure port areas (consisting of nearly all fenced port facilities and working areas of offshore vessels with 150 or more crew) must have a TWIC card. If not, access is only permitted with a cleared, permanent escort.
I possess a TWIC, so I can legally access secure port areas simply by having the card read by a scanner. The catch is that despite my apparently being trusted by the government to enter all sorts of sensitive areas on display of the card, I must still stand in line to be treated as a potential terrorist with all the other mooks at the airport. If the government accepts that I am safe to, for example, drive a heavy, possibly bomb-laden vehicle into a port, then it seems to me that my being checked for underwear, or shoe, or deoderant bombs at the airport is, as I have always contended, a complete waste of time.
Seems to me it’s this kind of uncoordinated and seemingly capricious application of procedures that has so many people talking dismissively of ‘security theater’.
BTW, the TWIC program is administered by the TSA, so it’s not like they don’t know about it.
Heh. If another dude touches my junk in the privacy of my own home, that’s a moral outrage against God and civilization. But if I don’t allow another dude to touch my junk at the airport, then I’m letting the terrorists win.
So, I guess it’s okay if another dude touches my junk as long as I don’t ask him to?
My wife and I were talking about these new scanners and this was the only point where we couldn’t agree.
She thinks it will be before christmas when you start seeing “angelina jolie rapiscan shots” on the net and in tabloids. I think that they’ll probably take until the new year or so. I’m picturing the viewers to hold on to a bunch and release them all as a greatest hits montage available for sale/comment. Shit, they even did it to themselves almost as soon as they got the opportunity.
You would have to be retarded to think that the non-storage feature of these machines was anything but some toggle box in some configuration menu.
