Rape Survivor Devastated by TSA Enhanced Pat Down
pncminnesota.wordpress.com
pncminnesota.wordpress.com
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?)
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'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.
"That's my penis."
"Sorry about that."
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).
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.
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.
The privacy, etc, is a whole different issue...
To be honest: No - don't see a problem with that.
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.
[1]http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/10/for-the-...
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).
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".
All non-US citizens are assumed to be terrorists and must prove their innocence (albeit the same goes for US citizens).
Unbelievable.
"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."
Then again, I know lots of people who'd support this...
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...
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.
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.
It seems like any political resistance has been mere theater.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So the TSA needs to stop dicking us about on the ground since our safety is in our own hands anyway.
I would happily walk through the airport naked if I could keep my laptop(s) in my bag at the checkpoint, though.
Anyone who thinks these stories are exaggerated should check out this collection. The consistency is impressive:
"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."
Yup. Good 'account'. Very... consistent.
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...
...and amazingly enough, I noticed that your chosen 'highlights' include such rants! Deary me, pay attention.
what kind of person would apply for such a job, knowing this was one of the duties?
how is this not state-sponsored sexual assault?
... definitely trying to avoid the usa for the foreseeable future. too fucked up.
An unemployed kind of person, perhaps with a family to feed and bills to pay.
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.
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.
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.
Shouldn't it be females get patted down by females and the same with males?
How is no one protesting this? The signs you could make would hit emotional hot buttons pretty easily.
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?
This is absolutely ridiculous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_people_impris...
It's still ridiculous (as you say, we have to trust the pilots, the employees, etc.. - but a background check can mitigate that)
And the best response to give your TSA patdown-partner when he asks if he can feel around your crotch area:
"Who do you think I am, a U.S. Senator?"
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.
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.
1 body scan = 1 hour normally = 1 minute aboard a flight
By comparison, last time I got a real x-ray the x-ray tech told me the radiation was about equivalent to a cross country (~5 hour) flight.
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 :)
Seriously, c'mon.
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.
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.
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, I just don't want them to trample on other peoples rights.
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.
You're no better than them.
I apologise for being blunt, no offence intended.
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.
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 may take issue with the science - but you would be missing the bigger picture: this is about politics, not science.
So keep it the fuck off Hacker News, dammit!
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.
(I also don't want to be seen naked in an airport.)
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?