More TSA Insanity

Sorry, I just can't help but follow up with some more information on this.

Some Germans had a very novel idea for a protest of this madness - stripping down to their skivvies and wandering through the airport en masse. Now that's
making a point!

Anyway, the guy from San Diego that I mentioned in the previous post is John Tyner. His forethought allowed him to capture the audio of his entire ordeal on his cellphone. He posted it, it went viral on the Internet, and guess what happened? They Joe-the-Plumbered him. That's right, he's now under investigation. For liberals, transparency and truth are really damned annoying, and anyone who insists upon those things needs to be destroyed.

Regardless of the increasing heat, the Obama administration isn't budging:

Janet Napolitano — US Secretary of Homeland Security — has a word of advice for all of you who want to take an airplane but who don't want to have your genitals groped by a TSA agent: It's my way or the highway.

Talking at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Napolitano said that TSA's body scanners don't violate passengers' privacy rights. She also said that "if people want to travel by some other means," they have that right.

True. But should we have to? Is it really unreasonable to expect some measure of privacy and common sense when flying?

Proponents continue to maintain that these images are viewed by someone in a separate room (so they can't see the hot chicks/studs and specifically direct them into the strip search scanner) and that the images are deleted immediately after being viewed. That is simply not true. Gizmodo posted 100 images this morning from one of these scanners in Florida (of the 35,000 that were saved). Sure, they're low resolution pics, but if it's this easy to save and post these pictures, then it will be just as easy to do so with the high resolution strip search pics. Is one of these pictures of you or your family on vacation?

It appears that the GOP is moving on this, at least a little bit:

Did you know that the nation's airports are not required to have Transportation Security Administration screeners checking passengers at security checkpoints? The 2001 law creating the TSA gave airports the right to opt out of the TSA program in favor of private screeners after a two-year period. Now, with the TSA engulfed in controversy and hated by millions of weary and sometimes humiliated travelers, Rep. John Mica, the Republican who will soon be chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, is reminding airports that they have a choice.

Mica, one of the authors of the original TSA bill, has recently written to the heads of more than 150 airports nationwide suggesting they opt out of TSA screening. "When the TSA was established, it was never envisioned that it would become a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy which was soon to grow to 67,000 employees," Mica writes. "As TSA has grown larger, more impersonal, and administratively top-heavy, I believe it is important that airports across the country consider utilizing the opt-out provision provided by law."

Hm...very interesting...! More:

[The TSA has] gotten completely out of hand. And like lots of fliers -- I [Byron York] spoke to him as he waited for a flight at the Orlando airport -- Mica sees TSA's new "naked scanner" machines and groping, grossly invasive passenger pat-downs as just part of a larger problem. TSA, he says, is relying more on passenger humiliation than on practices that are proven staples of airport security.

For example, many security experts have urged TSA to adopt techniques, used with great success by the Israeli airline El Al, in which passengers are observed, profiled, and most importantly, questioned before boarding planes. So TSA created a program known as SPOT -- Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques. It began hiring what it called behavior detection officers, who would be trained to notice passengers who acted suspiciously. TSA now employs about 3,000 behavior detection officers, stationed at about 160 airports across the country.

The problem is, they're doing it all wrong. A recent Government Accountability Office study found that TSA "deployed SPOT nationwide without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment." They haven't settled on the standards needed to stop bad actors.

"It's not an Israeli model, it's a TSA, screwed-up model," says Mica. "It should actually be the person who's looking at the ticket and talking to the individual. Instead, they've hired people to stand around and observe, which is a bastardization of what should be done."

In a May 2010 letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Mica noted that the GAO "discovered that since the program's inception, at least 17 known terrorists ... have flown on 24 different occasions, passing through security at eight SPOT airports." One of those known terrorists was Faisal Shahzad, who made it past SPOT monitors onto a Dubai-bound plane at New York's JFK International Airport not long after trying to set off a car bomb in Times Square. Federal agents nabbed him just before departure.

Mica and other critics in Congress want to see quick and meaningful changes in the way TSA works. They go back to the days just after Sept. 11, when there was a hot debate about whether the new passenger-screening force would be federal employees, as most Democrats wanted, or private contractors, as most Republicans wanted. Democrats won and TSA has been growing ever since.

Yet another thing the GOP needs to address immediately. Also, maybe it's time to call your local airports, too.

The last time I flew out of KCI, the strip search scanner was optional, and I chose not to utilize it. I didn't even get the previous pat-down at the time. We're taking a flight over the Christmas season, and I'm pondering deeply how to handle this if it's now required. I'd be happy to entertain suggestions, though I'm not going to do anything that would get us booted from the plane/airport. At this point, I think I would obviously and in full view of the TSA agents make a show of taking out my cellphone and video recording everything they do to me and my family, including (if necessary) explaining why it is that they think my kids need to be strip searched or sexually assaulted. Let's get it on the record, shall we? I dunno if that's worth anything, but it's the best I've come up with so far.

Your thoughts?

But wait, but wait...it gets worse. Much worse, in fact. Today we see that the policy apparently includes authorization to allow TSA agents to put their hands down the pants of passengers!

I sure hope that's a mistaken rumor that gets debunked in the coming days! Either way, this insanity is an unacceptable invasion of privacy and decency and absolutely MUST stop. NOW. I called my Congressman yesterday to suggest that Congress needs to stop this insanity; I would urge you to do the same.