That was a very misleading picture. Clearly the guy was wearing an X-ray opaque jockstrap. You could tell several ways - first of all, you can see very small details on the rest of the man’s body, including his nipples and belly button. Yet his entire genital area is basically a shadow. I suspect that you’ll get a pretty graphic image of the guys Johnson if he weren’t wearing that garment.
Second, if this were a regular man in pants, his unit wouldn’t be hanging straight down like that. It would be tucked to one side or the other. In the picture it looks like he must be wearing a robe or something.
My prediction: Within a few months of this thing being put into place, you’ll be able to find images of celebrities going through this thing. And most of those will be fake because you won’t be able to tell. But still…
Another troubling device is a chemical sniffer that is extremely sensitive. You step into a booth, and it blows air past you into a sensor array, which can pick up faint traces of explosives. That’s all fine, but it can also pick up faint traces of drugs. THAT is troubling. You could be at a party the night before where people are smoking pot, and then get flagged as a drug user in a government database. This is a serious abuse of power.
This stuff is just insane. Why are we tolerating this? It does NO good. For example, there was a news story today about another airport shutdown, because a woman’s underwire bra set off the detector.
But the reporters missed the big story within the story here - which is that the woman was allowed to get on the plane once they discovered that it was her underwire that was the problem. Why didn’t they confiscate the bra? After all, give me ten minutes with a grinding wheel and I’ll turn those underwires into rapiers. Even unmodified, the underwires in a bra are more dangerous than about a dozen items on the ‘banned’ list, like nail clippers, files, pocket knives, you name it. In fact, they can easily be made as dangerous as the box-cutter knives that were used in the first attack.
You just CAN’T secure yourself against that level of threat. And we’re spending billions and destroying the airline industry to try just that. It’s ridiculous. Give me a laptop and an hour, and I’ll build enough weapons into it to equip an entire attack team. Hell, all you have to do is scribe the shape of a dagger into the case, and then when you get on the plane flex it back and forth. The plastic will break on the scribe lines, and you have an instant dagger.
This whole ‘heightened security’ thing is totally ridiculous. You want security? Educate the population in how to resist, and let them defend themselves. Give pilots handguns, and reinforcing bars on the door. That’s enough. The rest of this all is just a bunch of hand-waving aimed at making us feel better, but it’s immensely wasteful and destructive to liberty.