If this is real....

[mrattis]

If this is real, we truly don't have Freedoms anymore.

http://johnnyedge.blogspot.com/2010/11/these-events-took-place-roughly-between.html

Comments

[cinnamonbite]

There are stories like this popping up all over. My 2 main concerns are:
1) if you wear a burka--full muslim gear, you know, the assholes who started all this--you are not groped or put thru the cancer/porn machine.

2) a poll on CNN yesterday showed overwhelmingly that most of the readers would not opt out for either the grope nor the cancer/porn machine.

And on top of all of that, NEITHER do even one thing to keep anyone safe!

[sibn]

i think i may have hit on a winning solution: hide your tsa contraband on your children. then explain to me why the tsa needs to either see my 9 year old daughter naked, or grope her up to the gonads. make both things the crimes that they obviously are, by getting the tsa to treat children this way, too.

disclaimer here, i am not advocating that the tsa should do either of these things to children, but would not most of the country suddenly care if their kids were getting this treatment?

and try not to forget that seemingly innocuous items such as neckties, pocket knives with blades shorter than N inches, and ball-point pens are weapons, if you choose to use them that way. when do we get to fly naked on a chaingang? i think that would qualify the as the second time people were moved around in this country like that.

just a couple of thoughts.

[mrattis]

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/11/tsas-new-book-for-ki.html

More jokes and internet outrage.

As for searching kids...

While the guidelines say that kids are not part of it, unless they are suspected of something, there are reports of kids being sexually assaulted by the TSA. Also reports of kids in strollers being put into the x-ray machines.

[sibn]

that is odd. the only outrage i have heard from people about these practices are the ones who are total privacy nuts (which i do not mean as an insult at all -- they provide a valuable service to the public at large by caring enough to say something).

i would have thought by now they would have been all over that, and while i do not watch mainstream news, this is the second recent story i have seen where somebody refused the porn machine. i suppose i would just expect that if there were cases of children being molested or seen naked, that i would have heard about it through my usual news channels (slashdot, boingboing, etc) by now. you could well be right. does not sound like the sort of story msnbc or fox would ever pick up and run, for example. but boingboing? they would be all over that, i would think.

although i did recently spend about a month with no net connection, so i have a black hole from about september 9 to october 9...

[mrattis]

I would think Boing-Boing would be all over it too, but out of the 2 escorted from the airport "stories" I've seen this week. Only one made it to boing-boing.

[cinnamonbite]

Feel better? LOL
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/15/new-scanners-mark-vi.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+boingboing/iBag+(Boing+Boing)

For Thanksgiving, when more people will be exposed to the grope, I'll bet more people will speak up. I hope.

[sibn]

wow. i can only imagine how bad this must be for your guts. and no, for some reason, i do not feel any better.

[cinnamonbite]

The children are treated the same even though they are saying that children should NOT go through the cancer machine because they are more prone to damage AND in England, they are not to go thru because it breaks the child porn laws.

But here, they go through or they get felt up. This IS happening and almost no one is complaining.

"We spend my child's whole life telling him that only mom, dad and a doctor can touch you in your private area, and now we have to add TSA agent and that's just wrong," he told Reuters. "At some point the terrorists have won."

[mrattis]

I haven't heard about the Burka issue. I think it might be time to go do some shopping. I have no problem being dressed in drag to prove a point.

Personally, I think people should insist on being groped in public, and make moans when touched. Embarrass the fuck out of the ones "following orders".

People are sheep. They'd rather watch tv, play video games, and let someone else tell them what is safe other than do the thinking for themselves.

[turk_diddler]

You haven't heard it because it's not true. Airports have private rooms in which Muslim women who wear the niqab/burka can be checked and if required physically searched by a female member of security. Sometimes other passengers who don't realise this post on the internet experiences of never seeing Muslim women being searched, and in the telling and the outraged comments from anonymous users the whole thing ends up becoming a fact - that Muslim women never get searched.

I don't see the security checks being relaxed in America. More and more of airports are contracting out the whole business, it'd take a strong administration to cut the checks and deny the vested interests all that free money. For today's shrewder political donor there's a profit to be made in fondling your testicles.

[mrattis]

Actually, in America airport security isn't contracted out any more. It was before 9/11/2001. But since then, it has become an Government ran operation.

[turk_diddler]

Didn't last for long though, there is a clause and the TSA seems to invite using it with the Screening Parntership Program. It has one of those horrible taglines that inverts its actual weaknesses, "Merging Private-sector Expertise and Public-sector Know How".

[cinnamonbite]

"The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has issued a travel
notice to Muslim airline passengers, warning them that new regulations
from the Transportation Security Administration violate certain
religious rules.
According to CAIR, the TSA’s new “enhanced pat down” policy should be
limited to searching only around Muslim women’s head and neck if they
are wearing a hijab."

[turk_diddler]

You know it's fascinating when you read up on this stuff. The CAIR advice you point to is real, however it relates to a scenario in which a woman is searched because she's wearing a head scarf - if that's confirmed the woman can remind the officer to restrict the search to that area.
Regardless of that if the officer wishes to conduct a full patdown anyway then there are no rules or guidelines to stop them.

So it doesn't really matter who you are, you're at the mercy of security staff with all the flawlessly rigorous personnel checks the TSA must require before hiring to the team.
We have the same security procedures at Heathrow, bizarrely last month's failure to detect printer-bombs on a cargo flight makes it unlikely they'll stop these useless invasive searches anytime soon.