I got frisked at LAX by a TSA agent

Remember the Bill of Rights, in particular the 4th amendment,
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I've just about quit flying due totally to the TSA (Terrorist Schizophrenia in America) and airport security in general. While I laugh at the jokes you guys and gals make about it, the reality is we have voluntarily given up our 4th amendment right in the name of 'security'. A much wiser man than myself once said, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin

So as long as my junque isn't about to explode, they have no right to search or seize it, and believe me, none of those TSA agents look good enough to make my junque want to explode.

 

I agree

We know those responsible, but thanks to do-gooder non-profiling agendas, we search little boys and grandma in a wheelchair

 

If I voluntarily showed that much bodily detail in public, I'd have to register as a sex offender upon my prison release. I don't like being involuntarily forced to do that which I'm prohibited from doing voluntarily.

If I photographed someone else in public in that detail in this state, I'd have to register as a sex offender upon my prison release. (Why the fuss about if or how to charge the students who recorded and streamed the Rutger's student's dormroom tryst? Here, they'd both have to register as sex offenders upon their eventual release many years hence. Many men are already in prison for hidden cameras in bathrooms / changing rooms / showers / bedrooms.)

When the first prototype body scanner images appeared in the trade journals not long after 9/11, there were considerable promises about safegaurding privacy. Many of those promises vanished before the actual machine rollout. Even during pre-rollout training, TSA had a case if undersize 'junque' leading to workplace sexual harassment, then escalate to workplace violence. And they expect me to trust them, behind a secrecy wall that is blocking public oversight?

Not having flown recently, I don't know just how this will be handled when it becomes necessary.

A recent news article here pointed to more advanced equipment (American-made, even) installed at Schiphol airport that displays screening results as highlighted areas of suspicion overlaid on an image of a generic mannequin. TSA, in its infinite wisdom, selected cheaper equipment.

 

The key word here is "unreasonable." Police are allowed to break into your house if they have "reason" to believe a crime is in progress. It's then up to the lawyers to argue, and a jury to decide, whether the cop had sufficient reason.

The courts have decided, and most Americans seem to agree, that "security" makes routine searches "reasonable." And since the courts get to decide what the Constitution actually means, the searches are allowed.

I disagree that the present level of searching is reasonable. However, I really don't much care if the pervs at TSA want to look at or even feel my "junque," and I'm certainly not going to let it prevent me from taking trips to scuba dive, or freedive, or other fun stuff. And in fact, I've only once gone through a full-body scanner (didn't realize what it was at the time) and I've never been groped (though once a TSA agent patted my belly after telling me what he was going to do -- didn't bother me... I found it amusing). Nearly always I just go through the regular metal detector.

Sure security is a nuisance and can add half an hour to the time you have to be early at the airport. And yes, it's stupid and doesn't actually make us any safer. But I look at it this way: What if there was a nightclub where you had to be x-rayed and groped to get in? Some people would consider it worth the annoyance. A few people would like it. Everyone else just wouldn't go to the night club. How badly do you want to see the show? I hate flying, but there are places I want to go, and to be perfectly honest, the TSA and its security are far from being the worst part of flying. A missed connection or lost luggage is FAR worse than an x-ray machine or a random groping, and missed connections and lost luggage happen far more often than a groping or an x-raying.

 

The issue is that while the general public is complaining about full body scans, TSA agents are not complaining. This is inherently problematic.

 

You have a very good point there. If I had to stick my hand into men's crotches, I'd be complaining. Hell, I'd be on strike!

 

I'd like to quote that in case you come down with cancer.

 

If the machines work as advertised, any cancers will be scarce enough to be undetectable in the noise.

But I have no problem letting TSA take plenty of heat for not allowing independent checks or oversight of the machines, and for fraudulently representing numerous outside entities as having endorsed their safety.

 

As said, I'll take a good groping over X-Ray any day.

 

I worry about things that are more likely before things that are less likely. I've never been groped by TSA and only once ever gone through a scanner. My bags get misdirected all the time, and I miss connections regularly even when I allow plenty of time. The amount of radiation I may get from airport scanners is dwarfed by the amount I get from doctors, dentists, and the ambient radiation from television transmitters, cell towers, etc.

And while I agree that they are a bad thing, I'm not going to hide under my bed and cancel my travel plans out of fear of something that's a one in ten million chance. It's a thousand times more likely that I'll be killed driving to the airport, than that I'll get cancer specifically from the three or four times I may go through a scanner at an airport, given that mostly they just send me through the regular metal detector.

 

Funny, those odds sound reasonably similar to the odds I would give of any single passenger being killed by a live terrorist in a plane, ...without any TSA to bother with. OK, maybe not 1 in 10,000,000, but a 1 in 1,000,000 would be reasonable. And worst of all, while the reported 9/11 hijackers did use metal weapons to gain access to the cockpit, it certainly could have been pulled off without them. After all, they didn't blow up a single plane, they reportedly piloted the planes into their target. Does TSA give extra scrutiny to every passenger that happens to have a commercial pilots license or has recently attended a commercial pilot school?

 

Don't forget the high altitude cosmic radiation of the flight itself.

 

This whole "security" thing has nothing to do with making airplanes safer, and everything to do with convincing the public that the demagogues are "doing something."

"It's a jungle out there. There's poison in the very air you breathe..." and radiation in the air, and cosmic rays, and germs. Life is always fatal, and both nature and civilization are trying their damnedest to kill us as quickly as possible. So I'm going to have as much fun as I can until they get me. I'll avoid things I judge to be a significant risk, like travel to Afghanistan or handling rattlesnakes or really big alligators (small, tame ones are okay -- the backdrop is fake, but this 'gator is alive and real, and very tame) but I regard flying as a colossal nuisance more than a real danger.

 

+1, I couldn't agree more.

 

This has already led to workplace violence during TSA training.

 

Here I am, wanting to be frisked by somebody, even DEMANDING to be frisked, and they never do

Guess I have to keep paying back alley chicks $20 to do that

 

Based on the pictures in your link, I had the millimeter wave, not the backscatter, the one and only time I had anything other than the old-fashioned metal detector.

The link claims that the agent with the passenger never sees the image, and the agent who sees the image never sees the passenger.

People are altogether too squeamish about being seen naked.

 

Not me