Wil Wheaton on the TSA's grab n grope
wilwheaton.typepad.com
wilwheaton.typepad.com
But wait 'til you experience it at the train or bus station, because that's already happening - the mainstream news just isn't covering it. Fondling is also now being done when you enter some courthouses now, the TSA set the standard and they immediately took advantage of that.
There were congressional hearings on this too, all aired for the public to see how concerned they were - absolutely nothing changed, in fact they only ordered more equipment despite being told not to by Congress.
What happened to their promised new review of the radiation from the scanners since they admitted they got it wrong? Or is that going to take a year to produce a "report".
On the one hand, this is probably security theater and the TSA is pretty incompetent and possibly vile.
On the other hand, people should really get over themselves. It's a fucking patdown. Deal with it. Or don't fly. This actually seems like one of the few security measures that has a chance of working (better than throwing out water bottles, anyway).
Thing is: there's probably no way to actually be secure without violating your privacy or making you feel bad.
I think the real problem is people whining. We have to deal with all of these "security" measures because of people whining about their (totally disproportionate) fear of terrorism. Now the same people are whining about the security measures.
I think the correct answer is empowerment. True airplane security is in the hands of the passengers and crew.
What is expected when you go through airport security is that you will be "secure", ie. absolutely secure. The problem is that this is impossible. There are a myriad of ways that a person can cause untold mayhem in what is arguably one of the safest modern forms of long distance travel. Due to this impossibility, you see the authorities forever imposing tighter and tighter safeguards without any real improvement to safety.
What is done, however, is "secure enough", ie. it achieves the required security objectives (chance of serious injury/death is negligible, chance of being able to hijack a plane is negligible, etc.).
This then leads to a problem when "secure enough" is not "completely secure" in a way that didn't lead to a failure in a security objective. Then you have political pressure to "tighten up security", with no actual need, thus you have what can only be termed "make work" programs that look reasonable but do basically nothing for security.