"Many of the images we gawked at were of overweight people, their every fold and dimple on full awful display."

"Piercings of every kind were visible. Women who’d had mastectomies were easy to discern—their chests showed up on our screens as dull, pixelated regions. Hernias appeared as bulging, blistery growths in the crotch area. Passengers were often caught off-guard by the X-Ray scan and so materialized on-screen in ridiculous, blurred poses—mouths agape, à la Edvard Munch. One of us in the I.O. room would occasionally identify a passenger as female, only to have the officers out on the checkpoint floor radio back that it was actually a man. All the old, crass stereotypes about race and genitalia size thrived on our secure government radio channels."

From "Dear America, I Saw You Naked/And yes, we were laughing. Confessions of an ex-TSA agent."

"The jelly looked like pus, the peanut butter like God knows what and the bread was hard as a rock..."

So says Frank Hannibal, describing the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in jail, where he was sent after he joked about his expensive peanut butter. When the TSA agent at LaGuardia Airport opened the jar, Hannibal said "They’re looking to confiscate my explosives."

What idiot doesn't know not to joke about bombs in the airport security line? Now, this guy is suing for $5 million.

This lawsuit looks like pus. There. Whatever judge gets stuck with it is welcome to use my joke against this phenomenally stupid man who purports to be a connoisseur of humor and peanut butter. Hannibal should have to reimburse the taxpayers for all the public money he's consumed and will continue to consume.

"I witnessed light sexual play among officers, a lot of e-cigarette vaping, and a whole lot of officers laughing and clowning in regard to some of your nude images, dear passengers."

What goes on in those sealed rooms where TSA agents look at X-ray images of passengers in screening machines? The agents are isolated where they won't see the in-the-flesh individuals being screened, but they will see them naked. How would you expect human being to act while doing a job like that?

I love the placement of e-cigarettes in the scenario, as if they make the TSA workers more disreputable and sleazy — in a high-tech kind of way that meshes with the high-tech way they are peeping at nudity.

Quite aside from the TSA and its awful problems, vaping e-cigarettes can be amusing way to do something with your mouth and hands. Here's a kind that doesn't even deliver nicotine.

"The whole Homeland Security thing has been a bureaucratic crock."

"It’s turned out exactly as I predicted."

Speaking of Venn diagrams...

... that popular Venn diagram with circles for prostitutes, doctors, and TSA agents and the "get paid to touch your junk" punchline in the center is not a proper Venn diagram, as brilliantly and amusingly explained by Rich Skrenta (via Techdirt).

"YouTube City, man."

Says a man who's frustrated that his presumably video-capable "phone can't come out of the scanner fast enough." Someone else is there with a video device capturing him saying that about the scene at the airport as a woman....

Well, what the hell is her game? Is she the victim of horrific TSA intrusion or a fame-seeker seizing the viral video route to celebrity? She's awfully carefully coiffed and made-up for the occasion of her humiliation....

We were already "more naked, as a nation, than we've ever been" — which is why we're accepting the airport naked-body scanners.

Asserts Libby Copeland:

We are more naked, as a nation, than we've ever been. We are forever baring our souls, revealing the mundane and the sacred. We are naked in our curiosity about the semi-famous and the strange, we are naked in our aspirations (to be semi-famous, even for something strange), we are naked online - or, at least, considerably more exposed than we tend to realize.

All of which may help explain why most Americans seem unconcerned about those full-body airport scanners, the ones that see under your clothes. In an existential sense, we are used to this sort of thing. Go on, take a gander, we seem to be saying. We have nothing to hide.

So if I choose to reveal myself in various ways, I will accept someone else forcing me to reveal myself? That's like the old and much-maligned argument that if a woman is sexually active, then raping her isn't such a serious crime — and that it's impossible to rape a prostitute.

"I have an old-fashioned rubber bicycle horn that I thought I'd stuff down into my junk before the pat-down."

"Hilarity ensues! Besides, anything that increases my junk profile has to be a good thing, right?"

No video of this actually happening at a real TSA groping at the link. Just some (genitalia-free) artwork.

Irradiating food. Irradiating people.

Irradiation is a great way to improve food safety:

Bacteria, viruses, and everything else are all sterilized by the radiation. Ionizing radiation is used because it's high energy, and is extremely dangerous to living tissue.... [T]he food coming out the other end — be it bread, milk, meat, fruit, or cheese — is absolutely sterile and, if properly sealed, will last longer on your shelf than virtually anything else in the supermarket....

But Americans are too freaked out by it:

The circular green logo along with the words "Treated with irradiation" are so terrifying to much of the American public that the process has been put virtually out of business. Most Americans would prefer to accept a few E. coli deaths....

Even though there is absolutely no radiation in the food that we would buy:

Food irradiation... does not place radioactive material onto the food. The food is placed in the radiation field, and then it's removed. Run a Geiger counter over it, and it shows zero. Food that's been irradiated is not radioactive.

But we're too scared of this radiation to use it to protect ourselves from the very real bacteria in food that can kill us.

If we're overcautious to the point of irrationality about radiation, why then are we at all willing to let the government irradiate our bodies?

In April, four scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote a public letter to the White House warning that the government may have underestimated the dosage of ionizing radiation delivered to a person's skin from a backscatter machine by one or two orders of magnitude. The scientists, who have expertise in biochemistry, biophysics, oncology, and X-ray crystallography, pointed out that the government's estimate was based on radiation exposure for the entire body. During scanning, the majority of radiation will be focused on the surface of the body, meaning a more concentrated dose of radiation is delivered to the skin....

Ed Nickoloff, professor of radiology at Columbia University and chief hospital physicist at Columbia University Medical Center, says the data isn't yet clear either way. "At this point, until I knew more information, I'd tell people to take the pat-down," he says.

Is it that we are not only irrational, but we are also irrational in our choice of what to be irrational about? I don't think so. Food radiation was something that businesses were permitted to do, but they stopped because we avoided buying the product. The government isn't asking us whether we want our bodies irradiated if we want to travel by plane. It's not like going to the grocery store and picking one package of hamburger instead of another. We still get our hamburger. We don't have a choice of flying with radiation or without radiation. The only choice the government gives us is not to fly or to accept a groping.

Matt Bai identifies "the central theme of Mr. Obama’s presidency: America’s faltering confidence in the ability of government to make things work."

He begins with the example of the the new get-naked-or-groped TSA policy and goes on:

From stimulus spending and the health care law to the federal response to oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama has continually stumbled...

I add my longtime blog tag "Obama stumbles" to this post.

... blindly, it seems — into some version of the same debate, which is about whether we can trust federal bureaucracies to expand their reach without harming citizens or industry....

Bai notes that during the Reagan and Clinton years, America turned away from "the era of big government," but then:

[T]he unraveling of the second Bush administration and the 2008 election... persuaded a lot of long-dispirited liberals that their philosophy, and not simply their party, had been restored. 

What a delusion!

"It is not comfortable to come to work knowing full well that my hands will be feeling another man’s private parts, their butt, their inner thigh."

"Even worse is having to try and feel inside the flab rolls of obese passengers and we seem to get a lot of obese passengers!"

Ron Paul on the TSA: "This one is just such an affront, so much out in the open, and government being so bold as to molest in public..."

"... and say they're doing it for our interest. If we tolerate this, there's something wrong with us. I mean something wrong with it. It's almost like... It's probably not fair to say this, because so many people don't deserve it. We deserve some of this stuff. If we don't do something about it. And hopefully, the American people will do something. They'll eventually have to boycott the airlines or whatever. Or throw more of the bums out. Maybe the Congress will get off their duff and do something in January and insist we rein in the TSA."

TSA bumper stickers.

I don't know there original source for this, but it's going around in email:

I'm searching for video of Janet Napolitano doing a decent job of explaining the new TSA procedures.

I'm working on the thesis that such video does not exist. Please disprove it if you can. I came up with this video, which is interesting for a lot of reasons. Napolitano appears at 1:22 and is laughably unconvincing:



(Most of the video is about San Mateo County's Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe threatening to prosecute for sexual assault. Love the name "Wagstaffe" in this context.)

TSA agent: "What is this?" American citizen: "It's my prosthesis because I've had breast cancer."

TSA agent: "Well, you'll need to show me that."

How about a little empathy for the people who work for the TSA?

How would you like it if your job suddenly changed to requiring you to feel people up all day long? And everyone started to hate you? And it seemed as though maybe you could be accused of committing crimes — thousands of crimes — including the molestation of children?

Well, how would you like it?
	I'd hate it, and I would sacrifice my livelihood and quit.
	I'd hate it, but I wouldn't quit because these are hard times and you don't walk away from a job.
	I'd bring my mind into alignment with the government mission and soldier on.
	I'd find a way to see the work as challenging and fun and do it with energy and good cheer.
	I'd get a sexual thrill from the power trip of feeling up people who are compelled to submit.
pollcode.com free polls

Who's getting rich selling those see-you-naked TSA body scanners?

As noted in the previous post, I want to follow the money. Let's start with this article in The Examiner. It lists these "research results":

• In 2008, former U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff authored a 38 page report warning of terrorists exploiting our security deficiencies – including air travel.
• On Christmas Day 2009, just before the “attempted bombing incident” on board flight 253, there were a total of 40 body scanners in use in 19 airports in the U.S.
• On Christmas Day 2009, numerous witnesses watched while Abdulmutallab, the supposed 'terrorist' was escorted TO the plane by several men in suits.
• After the 'bombing attempt' Chertoff made a flurry of media appearances suggesting that the “attempted bombing incident” could have been avoided if all airports were using full body scanners.
• The Washington Post printed an article on January 1, 2010, calling Chertoff out for using his government credentials to promote a product that benefits his clients. It was revealed that Rapiscan Systems, the manufacturer of the naked body scanner Chertoff was recommending, was a client of Chertoff's security consulting agency.
• Rapiscan has since received over $250 million in scanner orders.

Abdulmutallab, the supposed 'terrorist'... Oh, lord. That's too conspiracy-theory for  me. And the Washington Post story from last January is behind a pay-wall now. There's this time line at Firedoglake:

• 2005: Michael Chertoff, as head of Homeland Security, orders the first batch of porno scanners from a company called Rapiscan Systems. After his departure, Chertoff gave dozens of interviews using his government credentials to promote the device. What he didn’t tell people was that Rapiscan was one of the clients of his consulting company, The Chertoff group.
• March 2009: The Department of Homeland Security says they will apply $1 billion in stimulus money to the nation’s airports. Senator Joe Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, personally promises to oversee the distribution of stimulus funds so money goes toward the goal of creating “4 million jobs” and not on “boondoggles”
• December 2009: Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz inserted language into the Homeland Security appropriations bill barring the use of full-body image scans as “primary” screening tools at airports, and it passed the House on a bipartisan vote of 310-118. Both the ACLU and the NRA backed it. The amendment also made it illegal to store and copy these images. It died in the Senate.
• December 25, 2009: The “Christmas bomber” attempts to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear while on board a flight to Detroit.
• December 29, 2009: Joe Lieberman calls for “more widespread use of the full-body scanners after the aborted attack.”
• January 2010: Since they couldn’t get money for the porno scanners from Congress, TSA uses the “Christmas bomber” scare to appropriate $25 million they had received in stimulus money to buy the “backscatter” scanners — from Rapiscan, Chertoff’s client. Rapiscan said the contract “helped create” 25 jobs. The government gives the TSA the green light to spend a total of $173 million on the scanners. TSA spokesperson Sarah Horowitz said “the agency has enough funds that would come from the stimulus program and other federal sources” to purchase 300 more porno scanners, per CNN. Total jobs created, per the government’s own website: 1.
• April 2010: The GAO reports that “it remains unclear whether the AIT would have detected the weapon used in the December 2009 incident based on the preliminary information GAO has received.”
• November 8, 2010: US Airline Pilots Association tells its members “NOT to submit to AIT screenings.”
• November 15, 2010: Joe Lieberman says he “comes down on the side of the patdowns.”

The boldfacing is mine, but go to the link for the internal links in that text.

So the “groping” technique was developed as a way to punish people into using the scanners — because there are $148 million more on the way. And just so nobody gets the idea to follow Tyner’s lead, the TSA is using threats and intimidation to guarantee the market for the porno scanners. Whether Tyner is prosecuted or not, people will hear about what happened to him and think twice before refusing to become fodder for their new machines.

CORRECTION: I had the wrong link to the Examiner, which went to a website I didn't want to link to. Why is it so hard to find this information about the scanners?! I couldn't find anything recent in the NYT or the Washington Post.

"Don't touch my junk." It's the new "Don't Tread on Me."

Says Charles Krauthammer.

Don't touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm election voter. Don't touch my junk, Obamacare - get out of my doctor's examining room, I'm wearing a paper-thin gown slit down the back. Don't touch my junk, Google - Street View is cool, but get off my street. Don't touch my junk, you airport security goon - my package belongs to no one but me....

Do you remember how the government presented this newly intensified bodily search? Why did the Obama administration — which I associate with opposition to enhanced interrogation techniques used on terrorists — adopt enhanced pat-downs on ordinary citizens to protect us from terrorists? Was it done because of the introduction of the enhanced imagining scanners? I really don't know. Did the government explain this to us when I wasn't paying attention? Because I monitor the news for hours every day, and I don't know the explanation.

It seems to me that these 2 things happened together: new machines that see you naked and newly intense body searches. Am I wrong to believe that the new groping procedure was intended to get more people into the scanners they would otherwise resist? Someone, at some level of the Obama administration, decided that the only way to channel people into the see-you-naked machines was to make the alternative more offensive to nearly everyone. Personally, I'd take the grope over being seen naked, but I did a poll yesterday, and I see that the scanner is significantly more popular than the grope.  I suspect that was the calibration. And I suspect that if too many people choose the grope over nakedness, the plan is to intensify the grope until they get the scanner acceptance rate they need.

But why were the scanners introduced when they had to know people didn't want them? With healthcare reform, the Obama administration became associated with ramming things down our throats. The government knows what we should want and doesn't bother to find out what we do want or even to persuade us to want what they think we should. The scanners are the ultimate graphic example of forcing something on us without asking. We're only asked: Well, would you prefer to have us feeling all around your genitals? That's the kind of consent of the governed we're facing these days.

But why push the scanners on us? Do you remember hearing Obama or Janet Napolitano or anyone say anything persuasive about why these machines were bought? (Suddenly, I want to follow the money. For that, I will  move to a new post.)

(In my unscientific poll, 73%  of those who would keep flying, picked the scanner over the grope. I suspect the government needs a better acceptance rate than that to keep the lines flowing and justify the investment in the machines. But most of those of us who picked the grope haven't been groped yet, and if being seen naked becomes the norm, more of us may fall into that brain-dulled line that shuffles into the machine.)

Are you going to stop flying?

Megan McArdle is.

What will you do?
	I'll continue, as usual, and accept the scanners seeing me naked.
	I'll continue, as usual, and opt for the grope.
	I'll cut back, and when I fly, accept the scanners seeing me naked.
	I'll cut back, and when I fly, opt for the grope.
	I'm quitting flying.
pollcode.com free polls

"Airport staff 'exposed woman's breasts, laughed.'"

Here come the lawsuits, riding on a wave of public emotion and credulity.