I plan to opt for the pat-down every time I'm given the option as an alternative a body scan.
I'm male (and reasonably free of hang-ups). If being groped by a man, I plan to writhe and moan with evident enjoyment (unless he pings my gaydar). If examined by a female officer or a gay male, I will threaten to file accusations of sexual harrassment.
Why?
Call it a small scale civil rights protest, and note that if everyone does it (or even 1% of everyone in the queue) the whole stupid mess will grind to a halt sooner rather than later.
(And they haven't managed to ban feigning pleasure yet, nor do they have any insight into my actual state of mind -- who knows, maybe I am enjoying it?)
I'm all for opting out every time; I plan to do it myself. Moaning and threatening sexual harassment borders on childish, though. Not because the new pat downs aren't sexual harassment, but that your double standard of "moan with straight men, accuse the rest" makes it obvious that you don't actually feel harassed. It cheapens the more legitimate complaints of people like the woman in the article.
"It cheapens the more legitimate complaints of people like the woman in the article."
It would be a legitimate complaint if this woman voiced her objections seven years ago when the money was being appropriated, or perhaps five years ago when Jeffrey Rosen wrote his book about them. But if you don't start speaking up until other people's tax dollars have already been spent then your opinion doesn't deserve much weight.
I don't think there is anything at all exaggerated about this being sexual assault. It's far past anything you'd get anywhere else outside of a pre-prison/jail search.
I don't want to argue, but my point is that there surely will be specific TSA agents out there who will abuse their authority in perverted and illegal ways. It would be a shame if complaints against them were buried under complaints from people protesting the policy that the entire agency is operating under.
It's exaggerated because he's intentionally trying to provoke a reaction. It's better that you just let them act unprofessionally all on their own, and then go file an official complaint and another with the ACLU here: http://bit.ly/9KOipo
This is pretty much my exact plan if I ever fly anywhere that tried to implement this.
I've written about the unfortunate personal consequences of the DHS and TSA here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1850768 but I just don't see how I can go to a country that pays people to sexually assault men, women and (presumably if they or their parents refuse the scatter scan) children on entry or exit.
I feel they are doing that demeaning of a body search to coerce others into going though the scanners.
That's exactly what they're doing. There was a recent article (sorry, no citation) where supposedly the TSA agents said that the more complete pat down is designed to encourage people to stick to the scanners. Lesser of two evils, at it were.
At least there's a choice, of sorts. Hands-off scanner or hands-on pat down. It'd be crazy if the pat down wasn't able to reveal the same items the scanner can, so it makes sense to me, and I'd definitely choose the scanner (I went through one of the trial ones in 2009 and it was quite interesting, though I had no idea what it was at the time).
You went through a machine which took photos of your naked body without your knowledge and you don't see a problem with that?
I went through a machine in Amsterdam last year and was super pissed when I realised, after going through, what it was. I'm not planning to opt out whenever possible.
I am more worried with the radiation. The volume of the body that's exposed to the radiation is smaller and that makes the energy absorbed per volume much higher. Since I plan to have kids soon, I really don't want to be exposed to X-rays.
The volume of the body that's exposed to the radiation is smaller and that makes the energy absorbed per volume much higher.
Much higher than what?
I think the health risks are probably overplayed. I've only seen one article quoting an expert, David Brenner, and that seemed somewhat out of context. He points out that the primary risk is going to be skin cancer and problems for people with certain genetic syndromes that are hypersensitive to radiation, like ataxia-telangiectasia.
These machines don't come anywhere near producing the doses necessary to cause temporary or permanent sterility in males (0.5 Gy and 6.0 Gy) or females (2-12 Gy). 1 Gy = 1 J/kg. But more importantly, the radiation isn't energetic enough to penetrate to your gonads, that's why it's suited for backscatter imaging.
There was a recent article (sorry, no citation) where
supposedly the TSA agents said that the more complete pat
down is designed to encourage people to stick to the
scanners.
You're probably thinking of "For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance"[1]. Not exactly a reliable source of information, but entertaining, and definitely worth a read. Also, my recollection is that the TSA agent didn't say the pat down was designed for that purpose, just that he expects most people to opt for the scanner, because the new pat down procedure is so invasive.
Well, but can it? Some places are still unreachable by pat downs, and people have always hidden stuff there to get it into jails, etc. So what is the point of pat downs?
“He started at one leg and then ran his hand up to my crotch.
He? That seems.... wrong.
I am fairly certain TSA policies, and indeed various laws, require a female officer to perform the pat down (on a woman). Unless my information is out of date they broke a number of their own rules there, so I would file an official complaint (and potentially a molestation charge).
True enough. It's quite hard to find them but I found one that apparently came from a site called InfoWars - isn't that some whacko conspiracy theory website?
That's an unusual selection in general - there's comments that don't even describe something that occurred - just someone complaining in general about the TSA policy.
Yeah because not only will that actually matter to the TSA, your name also won't be stored somewhere so that the next time you're in line you get a special treatment.
And what about non-US citizens? What say do they have, really?
The TSA is not an evil intelligence seething and building a victim's list to antagonize for all time for its own pleasure.
It is instead a misguided bureaucratic attempt to address (to the public's eye) the problem of airline security. It is an organization consisting of civil servants who are accountable to process and contractors who are accountable to master contracts. What intelligence it has as an organization is clearly --- demonstrably --- top-down and ham-handed.
The TSA is both incapable of storing the names of complainants to enact future revenge fantasies, and also utterly held hostage to its own process and oversight rules. The one, single thing you can do to harm it is apply its own process against it.
Not filing complaints is exactly what the TSA wants you to do. Like every other government bureaucracy, the only stimuli it's prepared to act on are the ones it is pinned out to handle, and one of the very few control pins TSA has for inputs from people who aren't terrorists is "formal complaint".
To say that an intensive pat down is okay (or somehow better) as long as it's done by someone of the same gender seems awfully heteronormative. In this case the gender of the TSA agent seems to have made the experience especially traumatic, but in general groping is groping regardless of the gender of the person who's doing it.
I'm not sure you've noticed, but American society is intensively heteronormed. Also, you didn't respond to his comment; instead, you ran off in another weird direction altogether.
I don't know if there is a single government agency more universally reviled than the TSA. I cannot think of a single person who supports this, and yet it happens.
Former United States Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff supports it.
"Chertoff has been an advocate of full body scanners at airports. In 2010 he admitted that a client of his security firm, the Chertoff Group, is Rapiscan Systems, one of the two manufacturers of this technology."
The IRS? http://www.irs.gov/. Perhaps. But this stuff is really egregious. I am not looking forward to my next flight. These new rules are really making me question whether or not I want to fly. Obviously, I won't say I will never fly again but this will really make me think about whether or not I really have to.
Believe it or not, in all my dealings with the IRS, they have been polite and effective. And I was late with my taxes so there was a reason for them to be jerks.
Actually, I find the entire escalation of TSA to be both fascinating, in a kind of 'what will they think of next' as well as in a practical manner. Eventually the security theater will get _so_ intense, that it will result in enhanced security of flights.
Makes me think of the scanners in "Total Recall"
And yes, I get the whole "Give Up Liberty for a bit of safety, Deserve neither" argument. Though, I'm guessing some might argue that Airplane flights today are safer than they were in the 80s, and continue to get safer even _past_ the fact that people can't get into the Pilots Cabin, and passengers know they have to fight back in the event of a hijacking...
I really doubt that there is much difference at all in the number of passengers killed, injured, or even inconvenienced by hijackers on planes today compared to the 80's. There have only been a handful of significant incidents in the past 30 years, and probably half of them occured on 9/11.
In contrast, air travel has become horribly inconvenient for almost everyone due to the security theater. We have nonsense restrictions, much longer wait times to get to our gates, and invasive sexual assualt security checkpoints.
We've given up far too much for little or no benefit.
Reading these reports just makes me think the terrorists have won. People may not be blowing up, but they're getting abused by the government that swore to protect them. And living in fear. It's a sad and completely avoidable situation. Shame on the US government for allowing this travesty to pass.
Duly noted. I'm not a native speaker, but it seems to me that the comment still works - "won over" as neutral form of implying that government got what it wanted in contrast to "won, over" that implies negative connotation of the same deed.
The sentence does make sense either way -- both in the "government won, and citizens lost" and "government convinced the citizens of its position" senses. I just wasn't sure if you meant it both ways. :)
How is it that the efficacy of these machines in preventing terrorism has not even entered into this discussion??
I don't have strong feelings one way or another, but to read these comments (and much internet commentary) you'd think these machines were totally useless and the TSA was a department of perverts, rather than a government agency tasked with an extremely difficult job with zero margin of error.
I up-voted you because it's a legitimate reaction. And it gives me the opportunity to point out why your question is flawed.
The whole issue is the burden of proof. Here in the USA, the whole government is supposed to be about the people: "government of the people, by the people, and for the people". We built this country, and vested the Federal Government with power, in order to guarantee our freedoms.
Thus, there is absolutely no burden on us, the people, to prove or even explain why the government's bumbling encroachments are wrong. It's the other way around.
It's entirely the job of the government to prove that any encroachment on our freedom is both necessary and effective. To date, they have only asserted that this is necessary without any supporting logic or evidence. And to the best of my knowledge, they haven't even tried to make the argument that it's effective.
And absent any material demonstration of those things from the government, freedom should win by default.
Adding to that, we know that different models for security may very well work better than what we've got. See this article about Israel's Ben Gurion International Airport: http://forward.com/articles/122781/
Mind you, one definitely shouldn't argue from this that adopting Israel's airport security system would be a good idea for the USA (with, among other things, its much larger threatened area), as the article mentions. But it's important to note it, because it shows that there are effective options for securing air travel that don't cause such a devastating invasion of privacy and/or provoke molestation accusations.
A difficult job, yes, but zero margin of error -- or rephrased, 100% security -- is not possible, and attempting to achieve can justify anything that is incrementally effective.
Lets assume they are 100% effective. And instead a terrorist detonates a bomb while waiting in the security line, killing hundreds. So was the money spent on these machines a good investment?
Fine. But you have to admit that there are two sides to this issue: there is a balance of security and privacy. I'm not crazy about the privacy violations, but I don't think demonizing the TSA is particularly useful or mature. I think they're trying to do a difficult and important job that we all benefit from. Perhaps they are over-stepping their bounds right now. However, if there had been another three plane-hijackings since 9/11 I don't think anyone would be complaining. This is the political problem with effectively preventing disaster: if you're good at it you don't get any credit (because there are no catastrophes to remind people of the danger).
if there had been another three plane-hijackings since 9/11 I don't think anyone would be complaining
FWIW, I would still be complaining about them. If we had a 9/11-scale tragedy every year, the real, practical effect of this is a trivial drop in the bucket compared to other issues. Even if we were just to focus on air travel, it wouldn't be that big a deal.
There is absolutely no way that it's worth the degree of attention that it's getting, not by several orders of magnitude.
Because the shoebomber and the pantsbomber waltzed aboard without a care in the world despite the enhanced security, and were stopped by passenger action. Post 9/11, passengers know what the deal is. If frisking people stopped even one bomber they'd be shouting it from the rooftops. But they ain't.
So the TSA needs to stop dicking us about on the ground since our safety is in our own hands anyway.
I personally don't find being scanned (or patted down) particularly traumatic, but I can certainly see why some people would. I suppose I should go for the invasive pat-down just in solidarity.
I would happily walk through the airport naked if I could keep my laptop(s) in my bag at the checkpoint, though.
"And you still have to take off your shoes... correct? Eight years to built the A-bomb. Nine years to put a man on the moon. Yet... after 9 years, we are still walking barefoot through airports. Something that would not be permitted in a health care setting... or a restaurant."
I'm not sure I'm catching your point, but I was thinking of comments such as these:
walnuttrees in Boston Globe comments (Sept. 3, 2010 ): Still kneeling, his face less than a foot from my crotch he advised me he would pass the back of his hands over my crotch, under my testicles, and in the fold between my legs. I felt him cup my testicles and run his fingers from my rear orifice down the back of my balls.
ryan182 in FlyerTalk (Sept. 3, 2010 ): Flying out of SFO yesterday I saw someone getting the pat down, it was shocking the guy was all up in the dudes junk. so despite what they said its happening in other airports.
Anonymous1989 in Boston Globe comments (Sept. 4, 2010 ): He stood behind me and placed his arms around my neck, surprising me with how strong and firm his grip was -- it felt like someone choking me from behind.
...
Kneeling, his face less than a foot from my crotch he advised me he would pass the back of his hands over my crotch, under my testicles, and in the fold between my legs. I felt him cup my testicles and run his fingers from my an-s down the back of my balls. By now I was turning red. I wondered what government official in what dark alley dreamed up this groping to protect the public?
MarkVII in TSA Blog: Enhanced Pat-downs (Sept. 15, 2010 ): This keeps getting worse. I had hoped that "grab and squeeze" was a case of checkpoint workers going too far. Since you can't give details on the process for security reasons, this tells me that "grab and squeeze" is actually part of the protocol. Add the seeming lack of accountability to the mix, and I don't like what I foresee at all.... If these same folks can now grab me by the b at the checkpoint, I've got even less reason to fly that I had before. There's got to be a better way...
My point was that "The consistency is impressive" is questionable, given that the list is polluted with random rants that don't even describe an occurrence. It's a poorly curated list that I find untrustworthy as a result.
...and amazingly enough, I noticed that your chosen 'highlights' include such rants! Deary me, pay attention.
Previously the TSA was just security theater. It was useless, but it wasn't too annoying so people went along with it. Prohibiting printer cartridges on flights are just the latest useless version of this.
But I think they're crossing a line with the scanners. They're really getting a groundswell of opposition, and I'm not sure how they'll be able to deal with it as such a dysfunctional, myopic agency.
I do not believe this story. At all. In it, a male TSA worker conducts the pat-down on the woman. The TSA is many, many bad things, and one of them is 'bureaucracy', and the TSA's bureaucracy has bureaucracized that female attendants do the patdowns on female passengers. The TSA gates are all staffed with women partly for that reason.
It appears to be silly season on TSA security checkpoint stories. Recently, a woman claimed to have been detained by the TSA, handcuffed to a chair, and verbally abused by the attendants for asking to opt out. TSA posted the video. Suffice it to say: no.
A breach of TSA rules like "man pats down woman" is extraordinarily clear and nightmarishly bad PR. I don't buy that it could have happened without an official TSA response.
I say this, lest someone think to compose a 19 paragraph response about how little I understand about the implications of the TSA, as someone who loathes the TSA and is intellectually offended by airport security in general.
Last time I flew, for some unexplained reason I had to do not just the scanner, but then the groping too (by a male who seemed embarrassed by it). I wasn't thrilled by either experience -- I did my ROTC scholarship payback as a Navy nuclear engineering officer, so I know that Mr. Ionizing Radiation is not our friend -- but they weren't the worst things I've ever had to endure.
The real question, ISTM, is whether we citizens / taxpayers are getting enough bang for the buck out of (i) the invasion of privacy and its long-term implications, and (ii) the billions TSA must be spending.
So my choices for my children in the airport are 1-allow a non-medical professional to view them naked and since the images can be retrieved and no one is accountable, possibly unwittingly create child porn, or 2-allow someone to molest them?
How is no one protesting this? The signs you could make would hit emotional hot buttons pretty easily.
Has there even been one incident where a US citizen has ever assisted a foreign terrorist to commit a crime on a US airline?
And if absolutely no one can be trusted, how can we trust our pilots not to fly the plane into the ground or the folks loading the cargo not to place a bomb on board?
So what sort of opportunities does this new "pat down" policy offer? Buy put options on airline stocks. The public is not like lawmakers. They are conservative in a way I believe is hard for lawmakers to identify with, and this will be too far for them. Not to mention the pilots, who feel it is ridiculous to be required to be frisked for a bomb when in a few minutes they will be in the cockpit with total control of the destiny of the plane.
And the best response to give your TSA patdown-partner when he asks if he can feel around your crotch area:
And yet people seems to have a problem when I suggest that we freeze these little nazis out, or that we remind people that these are cancer machines.
You are dealing with the same kind of bullies you were dealing with in grade school, cept they have grow up now and now don't even have to feel sorry for what they do.
Edit: to prove my point the first two replies to this tells me that I am wrong and cite sources - this isn't a science debate, this is politics.
A lot of things are cancer machines. Including our earth and solar system. I certainly hope they continue to test these devices and analyze the risks, but I'm not feeling too scared by things like this:
The UK Health Protection Agency has completed an analysis of the X-ray dose from Backscatter scanners and has written that the dose is extremely low and "about the same as people receive from background radiation in an hour".
Flying itself exposes you to significant levels of radiation in any case (compared to being on the ground). They even have to reroute flights due to it sometimes.
Dr Robert J. Barish, an expert in aviation related radiation, even claims the average minute spent in flight exposes you to the same level of radiation as a single full body scan. Given the different types of scan available, though, this strikes me as only a vague estimation at best.
Now, I am against these machines and such actions myself.
But "little Nazi's" is just Godwins law (i.e. a silly thing to say) and "cancer machines" is the typical climate of fear nonsense we are trying to resist from the TSA.
So yeh, people probably have a problem not with the sentiment but with the language you use :)
Sure, little nazis is hyperbole and not useful for the discussion, but there is something that bugs me. Godwin's law is usually used to imply that a reference to Nazi's means a conversation has jumped the shark.
This marginalizes legitimate parallels. The loss of rights and slippery slope toward a totalitarian state in Germany started gradually, like putting a frog in cold water and gradually turning up the heat until it boils.
When my choices in order to travel are to be 1-seen naked, or 2-groped, at the government's behest this is a serious loss of rights, and comparing it to serious losses of freedoms in totalitarian states is perfectly fair.
Oh, absolutely. There are important similarities (in fact, scary ones) to what happened in Germany in the 1930's and what is happening in the US (and, to a lesser extent, other countries).
But "little nazis" trivializes that discussion; and uses the same pressure points as the TSA use. In fact the commenter above is basically advocating (in his other posts more than the first one) a form of short-term benevolent almost-totalitarianism "for the greater good" (better us telling you what to do than them). There are a number of historical examples of this, and its failings as well.
Point is; this is a classic example of Godwins law. If the GP had made a serious comparison then fine, but the aim was different.
Is this a loss of fundamental rights? I think... partly it is, partly it isn't. Try as I might I can't find myself completely outraged by the actual process here, it makes me uncomfortable and some of the bad examples make me mad (from a personal perspective I don't care either if someone wants to rub their hands on me so I can get on a plane). But what does concern me is the precedent in forcing us to submit to invasive checks; and that is where our fundamental rights (to my mind) come into play.
Do we have a fundamental right to get on a plane without invasive checks? Not entirely. But we do have the fundamental right not to be suspected, molested and mistreated at the hands of the government, and if this is a minor example if that happening, we should stamp on it now.
I'm not defending the op, just pointing out something about Godwin's law that is pertinent. I think we're in agreement, only difference being that I am actually outraged.
My theory is this: because technology intermediates the process, our natural revulsion is subverted. Consider, if instead you had to strip naked and be ogled by security personnel and have a photo taken, would that affect your feelings?
In terms of fundamental rights, I think freedom to travel is pretty fundamental to pursuit of happiness and unreasonable search and seizure. I have trouble with the argument from "existence of alternatives" and find that this is often just as absurd an argument as silly nazi references. Like arguments that end with "move to another country then" "just take a boat" is not a practical solution. Flying isn't a luxury if your family is overseas, or necessary for your work.
And I don't give any amount of fecal matter that people are scared
And that is why I hate and despise such a sentiment. It highlights what is wrong with society that it is ok to push a position through fear. People are controlled through fear, and persisting that method of making a point is only prolonging the problem.
The method may be the same, the intend is different and no real harm is done, unlike the tsa.
Look I would love to have a rational discussion with people about this, but that will have to wait until they come down, people who are already scared shitless can't think straight, so either we step in and direct them -- though means one of us like -- or we let the politicians do so for us -- and end up in a place we have even more.
That doesn't mean that you can use bad means for good ends, though. It just means that you can't say that "the intend [sic] is different," and act as if that makes it okay. Bad means are always bad; if something is harmful when used for one purpose it's harmful when used for another.
I take issue with the bad science involved in saying that terahertz radiation causes cancer. Terahertz radiation is very low energy, far too low to ionize DNA the way that UV rays do.
If they're using actual X-rays, that's another thing entirely.
Well, it does use x-rays, they are called "x-ray backscatter scanners".
Serious scientists have expressed concern. The concern is with the fact that inadequate testing has been performed, and comparisons made with other radiation sources are flawed because they take the absorbed dose and average over the entire volume of a person. Anyone in radiation safety understands the important number is the dose absorbed in specific portions of the body. In this case, the x-ray radiation is absorbed in the skin (minus the very small scattered fraction), not your entire body volume, resulting in a much higher local dose than you would expect if you modeled the exposure as uniform through the volume.
Since the x-ray source strength is quite low (assuming the machine isn't multifunctioning), the health risks to occasional travelers are assumed to be low. Maybe frequent travelers or airline employees should have greater concern, or those at risk of cataracts.
You people can downvote me all day long, but I don't give a shit. I'd give away all this stupid "karma" to keep HN from being filled with TSA/taser/injustice of the month stories ala Reddit.
The thing that bothers me the most about this is that children are subject to the same pat downs. I can't imagine the difficulty of trying to explain to a child why it's OK for a TSA officer to touch you in this way, but it's not OK for anybody else to.
My idea: A shirt with a witty "security theater" slogan on the front, but also has a metallic thread woven into it so it spells "LIKE WHAT YOU SEE?" or "F YOU TSA" when viewed through the backscatter xray.
One of the core freedoms in the US is the freedom to travel. You don't have to request "travel papers" from the Central Office to freely move about the country and beyond. Likewise, "liberty" is synonymous with travel. Vote well & write your representatives. This is not good for the country's ideals.
"devastated" is an extreme, hyperbolic, maudlin way of describing it. Devastating would be a good description of the effect of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Not on being patted down by airport security. That's called "being patted down by airport security", coupled with being emotional about it.
Somebody might be emotionally devastated by that sort of behaviour. Especially someone who had suffered a very emotional experience, such as sexual assault/rape. It's an apt description.
I'm scratching my head. That's the only thing you want to comment upon? Semantics? I'm devastated by the amount of people willing to give up their rights for a group (TSA) that has shown no competence whatsoever regarding what they're supposed to be doing.
(I also don't want to be seen naked in an airport.)
"What they did to me, in full view of everyone else in line, was like being sexually assaulted all over again. I was in shock. I hate myself that I allowed them to do this to me. I haven’t been able to stop crying since"
Am I the only one who thinks this is just a slightly exaggerated reaction? Why did she let them do it if it's such a sensitive issue for her?
Well, she's a rape survivor, she doesn't want people to see her naked and she failed to get on that return flight she'd be stranded hundreds of miles from home. Can't say I'd be entirely rational in her shoes either.
I'm male (and reasonably free of hang-ups). If being groped by a man, I plan to writhe and moan with evident enjoyment (unless he pings my gaydar). If examined by a female officer or a gay male, I will threaten to file accusations of sexual harrassment.
Why?
Call it a small scale civil rights protest, and note that if everyone does it (or even 1% of everyone in the queue) the whole stupid mess will grind to a halt sooner rather than later.
(And they haven't managed to ban feigning pleasure yet, nor do they have any insight into my actual state of mind -- who knows, maybe I am enjoying it?)