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She is guilty of disobeying authority and nothing else.

The TSA exists solely to condition the American people to a police state. This is it in action.

We have known since its inception it is but security theater, not security. So it must exist for some other purpose. Here we see that purpose revealed. Obey authority no matter that it is a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment, and you will be made a criminal if you refuse (unless you are rich, famous or powerful).

But I'm also pretty sure, reading about this self-professed behavior on Ms. Alkon's part, that she's also a drama queen just looking for some new controversy to embroil herself in, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if she was also deliberately provocative and confrontational, making the situation more tense than it needed to be, and blowing events out of proportion with histrionics.

Entirely possible, although I'd wonder under what circumstances those allegations become a proportional response to anything.

Also worth noting that the TSA agent is supposed to be a trained professional. (Meaning I wonder why they're allowing themselves to *be* provoked).

I know the white knights here who already despise the TSA will crucify me for saying it, but millions of people fly every fucking day. Yet this shit mostly seems to happen to self-important bloggers who have a history of engaging in nasty, vicious, spiteful little "campaigns," who are so broken up by the experience that they rush home and pound out 2000 words on their blog to generate some pageviews, extra bonus when they just happen to have a videocamera handy to record all the harrassment and abuse they're subjected to.

Alternate theory - we don't hear about the folks who don't have blogs or cameras handy, because they don't have a voice or evidence.

We're always willing to inflate other sexual assault statistics to account for "unreported crimes" - why not here?

Aside: If you're looking for a report from someone who literally has no need for attention, check out Penn Jillette's account. Amazing how things can be resolved when you have the time and money to stand your ground.

This has, indeed, actually been done. By a semi-celebrity, nonetheless. See?
And that even predates the new, intentionally "invasive" patdowns, by far.

'Course, nothing every happened to it, since these worthless sacks of crap are government sacks of crap.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, indeed.

In 12-18 months non distorted images of celebreties and politicians will be on the Internet.

Nope - most politicians are exempt from going through security:

From the New York Times

Only Congressional leaders or members of Congress with armed security details are allowed to go around security. The same privilege is afforded to governors and cabinet members if they are escorted by agents or law enforcement officers.

And does it surprise anyone that they'll give celebrities a pass

as well?

She said, "Well, the airport is very important to all of our incomes and we don't want bad press. It'll hurt everyone, but you have to do what you think is right. But, if you give me your itinerary every time you fly, I'll be at the airport with you and we can make sure it's very pleasant for you."

(No knock against Penn - I think he might be our best hope for getting some sanity out of this: he's passionate enough to want to do something about it, rich enough to afford it, and popular enough that people will listen.) But how amazing is it that for security that's Absolute Necessary, there are so many ways to skip the line?

And we haven't even talked about the lack of security for people and things going through cargo yet...

It seems to have been bought in at the same time as the new scanners came online. I think the biggest objection to it seems to be the way it's done more than anything else - the TSA officials aren't warning people about what they're doing, taking a presumption of guilt if you question any part of the process, haven't made it clear at any point what's changed (or the apparent $10,000 fine for decided you neither want to be x-rayed or felt up) and generally acting like power-drunk dicks.

Another interesting POV here: http://www.pennandteller.com/03/coolstuff/penniphile/roadpennfederalvip.html

anti-GPL people aren't people, they're corporations

how about Penn of Penn and Teller?

He seems like an individual to me. I don't agree with everything he says (though, on the whole, he tends to make a lot of sense), but he is indeed an individual.

Lord knows that with what Fed-Ex charges to ship a package they can certainly afford to do it.

PRINT "I WILL GUESS YOUR WEIGHT"
FOR I=0 TO 1000
PRINT "DO YOU WEIGH "; I; " POUNDS?"
IF INSKEY="Y" THEN BREAK
NEXT I

Apologies to Penn Jillette

Same here. And it looks like we both agree with Penn of Penn&Teller

This reminds me of an article Penn Jillette wrote in Jan 1992 for PC/Computing... which he has so graciously put up on his webserver here.

This reminds me of an article Penn Jillette wrote in Jan 1992 for PC/Computing... which he has so graciously put up on his webserver here.

Read Penn Jillette's great explanation for details.

is the title of an article by Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller fame).

Whether or not you want your laptop cremated depends on your personal data, but planning ahead is definitely recommended. :-P
--

The problem is in execution. There always seem to be those people out there who think that if they talk louder, their ideas gain more credibility.

I've always just viewed it as a similar to Munchausen Syndrome, in that it's a person who just wants attention, but there methods of going about it vary.

But in all, he seems right up there as the type of thing that Penn and Teller would make fun of on their show, but there's no full listing of what's going to be in season 2.

Wow, nothing like a hard evidence link there. Your link contains one sentence claiming "this is what CNN was rumored to use." No substantiation whatsoever. If you weren't such a liberal, you'd call yourself an idiot for believing anything.

Ahem. Did you happen to notice the author of the linked article? It was Penn Jillette. Now, since you are probably just a little boy, let me explain something to you. Pen Jillette is a famous comedian who usually performs on TV at hours that are probably way past your bedtime. He is part of the comedy duo called "Penn and Teller". Now, I'm not surprised you didn't know this, because Mommy probably doesn't let you watch their act. It's usually on HBO (do they have HBO in your trailor park?) and involves lots of cuss words and fake blood.

By the way, nothing makes a joke funnier than some complete idiot taking the joke seriously and getting mad at the person who was joking. Seriously, an idiot like you makes the joke much more complete. So, uhm...thanks! Moron.

Wow, nothing like a hard evidence link there. Your link contains one sentence claiming "this is what CNN was rumored to use." No substantiation whatsoever. If you weren't such a liberal, you'd call yourself an idiot for believing anything.

Ahem. Did you happen to notice the author of the linked article? It was Penn Jillette. Now, since you are probably just a little boy, let me explain something to you. Pen Jillette is a famous comedian who usually performs on TV at hours that are probably way past your bedtime. He is part of the comedy duo called "Penn and Teller". Now, I'm not surprised you didn't know this, because Mommy probably doesn't let you watch their act. It's usually on HBO (do they have HBO in your trailor park?) and involves lots of cuss words and fake blood.

By the way, nothing makes a joke funnier than some complete idiot taking the joke seriously and getting mad at the person who was joking. Seriously, an idiot like you makes the joke much more complete. So, uhm...thanks! Moron.

Source of the comment from here, probably cribbed from this comment.

I don't know why you'd do that, especially when you break all formatting and make it impossible to read. Paragraph breaks are your friend.

this is the same device CNN allegedly used to spruce up their Gulf War footage :)

god bless america...

-fren

This has been done before, here and here.

• Obvious references to Linux/Unix/X11 still seem pretty rare to me. Some movies have featured them prominently, but unless the computer is itself part of the plot, the interface is usually made to melt into the background. Here's some examples I can think of where the *nix interface seems obvious:
  • The movie "Hackers" is a standard one to cite here. The movie is really awful, but I'm willing to give it a pass not because of the silly computer displays, but because it has Penn Jillette in a small role, Hal (which automatically scores points for the 2001 reference). And the reason it's cool that Penn is in there is, well, because it's Penn, and he's really "in" on this silly little subculture. Witness his snarky comments on Richard Stallman, the comedic potential of the Turing Test and Markov chains ("Mark V. Shaney" -- get it?), the math behind public key encryption, and -- most of all -- is chummy with Unix co-designer Rob Pike, and has even pulled pranks on Nobel laureats with him. So, short of putting in someone like Pike, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, or Linus Torvalds, putting Penn Jillette in a geek role in a movie is pretty much close enough for me.
  • "Jurassic Park" had a famous scene where the girl sits down at a terminal, looks things over, then exclaims "This is Unix! I know Unix!". Silly, but then it was real, sort of: the screen shots were of an experimental 3D file manager from SGI. There was probably an xterm open somewhere offcamera or behind the file manager window so that a technician could enter commands in between the GUI clips that made it into the film.
  • There are other examples of Linux in movies, but unfortunately most of the movies are awful (Antitrust, Swordfish, <troll> The Matrix </troll>, etc).
• As has been noted all over, Macs show up a lot in movies & tv shows. This probably isn't a coincidence: the machines may look nicer than the typical beige box PC, but the product placement was probably paid for (also see here, at the bottom) in most cases, just as it would be for any other identifiable consumer product in a show. That said, random Mac sightings I can think of include:
  • Carrie's laptop in recent seasons of "Sex and the City" is an old black Powerbook G3 running OS9. Before that she had an older Powerbook. She was given a clamshell iBook as a gift when the G3 crashed, but returned it & fixed the Powerbook.
  • Harry Connick Jr's character had a G4 tower & cinema display on his desk in a recent "Will & Grace". The display wasn't up, so no idea what it was running.
  • In the movie "Zoolander", Apples show up all over the place. The funniest example was probably when Ben Stiller & Owen Wilson are told to break into an office & steal some files off someone's iMac: after staring blankly at it for a while, they call for help and are told that the files are "inside the computer". Like wisdom dawning on the apes in 2001, they get the idea -- and start beating on the case trying to break it open and cause the files to spill out.
  • In my favorite example, it has been observed that on the show "24", all the good guys use Macs and all the bad guys use Dells. An awareness of this pattern would have uncovered a turncoat who ended up betraying people at the end of the first season.
• A lot of shows have hard to identify OSes. Probably on purpose.
  • On "CS

• Obvious references to Linux/Unix/X11 still seem pretty rare to me. Some movies have featured them prominently, but unless the computer is itself part of the plot, the interface is usually made to melt into the background. Here's some examples I can think of where the *nix interface seems obvious:
  • The movie "Hackers" is a standard one to cite here. The movie is really awful, but I'm willing to give it a pass not because of the silly computer displays, but because it has Penn Jillette in a small role, Hal (which automatically scores points for the 2001 reference). And the reason it's cool that Penn is in there is, well, because it's Penn, and he's really "in" on this silly little subculture. Witness his snarky comments on Richard Stallman, the comedic potential of the Turing Test and Markov chains ("Mark V. Shaney" -- get it?), the math behind public key encryption, and -- most of all -- is chummy with Unix co-designer Rob Pike, and has even pulled pranks on Nobel laureats with him. So, short of putting in someone like Pike, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, or Linus Torvalds, putting Penn Jillette in a geek role in a movie is pretty much close enough for me.
  • "Jurassic Park" had a famous scene where the girl sits down at a terminal, looks things over, then exclaims "This is Unix! I know Unix!". Silly, but then it was real, sort of: the screen shots were of an experimental 3D file manager from SGI. There was probably an xterm open somewhere offcamera or behind the file manager window so that a technician could enter commands in between the GUI clips that made it into the film.
  • There are other examples of Linux in movies, but unfortunately most of the movies are awful (Antitrust, Swordfish, <troll> The Matrix </troll>, etc).
• As has been noted all over, Macs show up a lot in movies & tv shows. This probably isn't a coincidence: the machines may look nicer than the typical beige box PC, but the product placement was probably paid for (also see here, at the bottom) in most cases, just as it would be for any other identifiable consumer product in a show. That said, random Mac sightings I can think of include:
  • Carrie's laptop in recent seasons of "Sex and the City" is an old black Powerbook G3 running OS9. Before that she had an older Powerbook. She was given a clamshell iBook as a gift when the G3 crashed, but returned it & fixed the Powerbook.
  • Harry Connick Jr's character had a G4 tower & cinema display on his desk in a recent "Will & Grace". The display wasn't up, so no idea what it was running.
  • In the movie "Zoolander", Apples show up all over the place. The funniest example was probably when Ben Stiller & Owen Wilson are told to break into an office & steal some files off someone's iMac: after staring blankly at it for a while, they call for help and are told that the files are "inside the computer". Like wisdom dawning on the apes in 2001, they get the idea -- and start beating on the case trying to break it open and cause the files to spill out.
  • In my favorite example, it has been observed that on the show "24", all the good guys use Macs and all the bad guys use Dells. An awareness of this pattern would have uncovered a turncoat who ended up betraying people at the end of the first season.
• A lot of shows have hard to identify OSes. Probably on purpose.
  • On "CS

• Obvious references to Linux/Unix/X11 still seem pretty rare to me. Some movies have featured them prominently, but unless the computer is itself part of the plot, the interface is usually made to melt into the background. Here's some examples I can think of where the *nix interface seems obvious:
  • The movie "Hackers" is a standard one to cite here. The movie is really awful, but I'm willing to give it a pass not because of the silly computer displays, but because it has Penn Jillette in a small role, Hal (which automatically scores points for the 2001 reference). And the reason it's cool that Penn is in there is, well, because it's Penn, and he's really "in" on this silly little subculture. Witness his snarky comments on Richard Stallman, the comedic potential of the Turing Test and Markov chains ("Mark V. Shaney" -- get it?), the math behind public key encryption, and -- most of all -- is chummy with Unix co-designer Rob Pike, and has even pulled pranks on Nobel laureats with him. So, short of putting in someone like Pike, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, or Linus Torvalds, putting Penn Jillette in a geek role in a movie is pretty much close enough for me.
  • "Jurassic Park" had a famous scene where the girl sits down at a terminal, looks things over, then exclaims "This is Unix! I know Unix!". Silly, but then it was real, sort of: the screen shots were of an experimental 3D file manager from SGI. There was probably an xterm open somewhere offcamera or behind the file manager window so that a technician could enter commands in between the GUI clips that made it into the film.
  • There are other examples of Linux in movies, but unfortunately most of the movies are awful (Antitrust, Swordfish, <troll> The Matrix </troll>, etc).
• As has been noted all over, Macs show up a lot in movies & tv shows. This probably isn't a coincidence: the machines may look nicer than the typical beige box PC, but the product placement was probably paid for (also see here, at the bottom) in most cases, just as it would be for any other identifiable consumer product in a show. That said, random Mac sightings I can think of include:
  • Carrie's laptop in recent seasons of "Sex and the City" is an old black Powerbook G3 running OS9. Before that she had an older Powerbook. She was given a clamshell iBook as a gift when the G3 crashed, but returned it & fixed the Powerbook.
  • Harry Connick Jr's character had a G4 tower & cinema display on his desk in a recent "Will & Grace". The display wasn't up, so no idea what it was running.
  • In the movie "Zoolander", Apples show up all over the place. The funniest example was probably when Ben Stiller & Owen Wilson are told to break into an office & steal some files off someone's iMac: after staring blankly at it for a while, they call for help and are told that the files are "inside the computer". Like wisdom dawning on the apes in 2001, they get the idea -- and start beating on the case trying to break it open and cause the files to spill out.
  • In my favorite example, it has been observed that on the show "24", all the good guys use Macs and all the bad guys use Dells. An awareness of this pattern would have uncovered a turncoat who ended up betraying people at the end of the first season.
• A lot of shows have hard to identify OSes. Probably on purpose.
  • On "CS

• Obvious references to Linux/Unix/X11 still seem pretty rare to me. Some movies have featured them prominently, but unless the computer is itself part of the plot, the interface is usually made to melt into the background. Here's some examples I can think of where the *nix interface seems obvious:
  • The movie "Hackers" is a standard one to cite here. The movie is really awful, but I'm willing to give it a pass not because of the silly computer displays, but because it has Penn Jillette in a small role, Hal (which automatically scores points for the 2001 reference). And the reason it's cool that Penn is in there is, well, because it's Penn, and he's really "in" on this silly little subculture. Witness his snarky comments on Richard Stallman, the comedic potential of the Turing Test and Markov chains ("Mark V. Shaney" -- get it?), the math behind public key encryption, and -- most of all -- is chummy with Unix co-designer Rob Pike, and has even pulled pranks on Nobel laureats with him. So, short of putting in someone like Pike, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, or Linus Torvalds, putting Penn Jillette in a geek role in a movie is pretty much close enough for me.
  • "Jurassic Park" had a famous scene where the girl sits down at a terminal, looks things over, then exclaims "This is Unix! I know Unix!". Silly, but then it was real, sort of: the screen shots were of an experimental 3D file manager from SGI. There was probably an xterm open somewhere offcamera or behind the file manager window so that a technician could enter commands in between the GUI clips that made it into the film.
  • There are other examples of Linux in movies, but unfortunately most of the movies are awful (Antitrust, Swordfish, <troll> The Matrix </troll>, etc).
• As has been noted all over, Macs show up a lot in movies & tv shows. This probably isn't a coincidence: the machines may look nicer than the typical beige box PC, but the product placement was probably paid for (also see here, at the bottom) in most cases, just as it would be for any other identifiable consumer product in a show. That said, random Mac sightings I can think of include:
  • Carrie's laptop in recent seasons of "Sex and the City" is an old black Powerbook G3 running OS9. Before that she had an older Powerbook. She was given a clamshell iBook as a gift when the G3 crashed, but returned it & fixed the Powerbook.
  • Harry Connick Jr's character had a G4 tower & cinema display on his desk in a recent "Will & Grace". The display wasn't up, so no idea what it was running.
  • In the movie "Zoolander", Apples show up all over the place. The funniest example was probably when Ben Stiller & Owen Wilson are told to break into an office & steal some files off someone's iMac: after staring blankly at it for a while, they call for help and are told that the files are "inside the computer". Like wisdom dawning on the apes in 2001, they get the idea -- and start beating on the case trying to break it open and cause the files to spill out.
  • In my favorite example, it has been observed that on the show "24", all the good guys use Macs and all the bad guys use Dells. An awareness of this pattern would have uncovered a turncoat who ended up betraying people at the end of the first season.
• A lot of shows have hard to identify OSes. Probably on purpose.
  • On "CS

No, not for the casinos and stuff. For one or both of these two shows:

Penn & Teller live at the Rio.

The Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton

Oh, and U.S. readers should remember that Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of speech.

True, but instead you're labled unpatriotic if you protest against the Government.

But it's much more useful than that - if they're able to collect all that information, they can correlate it with people who give money to the Green Party or peace groups or environmental groups (some of whom are already on the TSA's not-allowed-to-fly lists because of their political incorrectness.) Also, the increased "information sharing" between the US civilian police agencies, spook agencies, and military, plus the redefinitions of lots of forms of vice as "national security" issues means that they can use those hotel bills from Humboldt County, California to decide to give your luggage a lot of extra attention when you're flying back from Amsterdam, or ask the Internal Revenue Service to check out your tax returns after that trip to Las Vegas just in case you might have been "money laundering" or passing some cash to that suspicious Penn fellow.