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TSA Pats Down 3-Year-Old
3-year-old Mandy Simon started crying when her teddy bear had to go through the X-ray machine at airport security in Chattanooga, Tenn. She was so upset that she refused to go calmly through the metal detector, setting it off twice. Agents then informed her parents that she "must be hand-searched." The subsequent TSA employee pat down of the screaming child was captured by her father, who happens to be a reporter, on his cell phone. The video have left some questioning why better procedures for children aren't in place. I, for one, feel much safer knowing the TSA is protecting us from impressionable minds warped by too much Dora the Explorer.
Travel season is starting. That's why. Not to mention the pat-down is now an "enhanced" pat-down. Correct me if I'm wrong on the "enhanced" pat-down being a semi-recent change.
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People get up in arms about profiling, but this is what you get when you say it has to be completely random. 3-year olds, nuns, grandmothers being searched.
Meanwhile people who are thousands of times more likely to be an issue can't be targeted even though it makes good sense.
If Osama is alive he must be laughing his skinny ass off.
It's a non-story that US citizen's constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure are getting violated? It's a non-story that the government is now examining and groping genitalia without any suspicion of wrongdoing? It's a non-story that people are being threatened with lawsuits by the government for asserting their rights?
Tell me, exactly what does the US government have to do to its citizens for it to be newsworthy?
I am officially gone from
Your American odds of dying in an airplane bombing (either on-board or in a skyscraper), are 1 in 500,000. That is about the same as your risk of drowning in a tsunami. And of course if you move to the mountains or don't fly, the odds drop to near-zero.
I think I'd rather take that infinitesimal risk, rather than take the 1-to-1 risk that some TSA officer will be playing with my penis, touching my wife's boobies, and/or fondling my kid's pussy. (Sorry for the frank language but I believe in speaking the brutal truth.)
I also think the US Transportation Secretary can go eat a bullet.
"This is okay," he says.
No. No it is not.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
People always forget this fact.
For now, I am going Greyhound...
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
And making hordes of people stay in a densely packed formation for extended periods of time does what exactly to stop someone from detonating an explosive device while they wait in line?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
They may have hung themselves with their new backscatter stuff and intrusive pat-downs -- I think all this extra coverage is indicative of people outside of Slashdot-types finally realizing that TSA is out of control and helping no-one.
Unless we make TSA Security a 6 figure career we are not going to have good decisions and professionalism out of these people. They are mostly high-school graduates with a few weeks of training. The kind of people we can trust not to pat down every hot chick, or hold up every rude businessman, or occasionally do something moronic like this story reports, simply do not work in this sort of pay. Either we need actual doctors and nurses assigned to the pat downs, or we need to give up this little bit of safety for the sake of privacy.
Trillion dollar wars that kill tens of thousands are OK when our government tells us they are protecting us from terrorist attacks. But a screening and/or pat down is going too far!
Seems like the same people complaining the loudest today were bashing me for being against the TSA back when it was first created.
Blar.
Its happened in places like Palestine. When people get desperate enough, or when their belief system gets twisted enough, people will try it. Its just that such a attack may happen once every decade in the west, and there is a point where it simply isn't worth the loss of privacy and freedom for hundreds of millions of people to save a few lives, maybe, one time in the next 10 years.
You're right. The whole thing is security theatre at its finest. That's been true for years. Does anybody really think that an old ladies sewing needles are a threat to the airplane?
The problem now is that TSA has gone from annoyance theatre to dangerous and vile theatre. Keep it up much longer and they'll bring down the airline industry as a whole, because do you seriously think I'll ever fly to the US again while this bullshit is going on?
A lot of other countries are happy to take my tourism dollars without molesting me for the privilege.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
What would happen if we stopped making up crazy situations in our heads to justify the total loss of our freedoms?
A while back TSA prepared to introduce high-resolution, clothes-penetrating body scanners as part of their standard procedures. There was then a flood of (accurate) stories portraying it as a "virtual strip search", which produced political pushback against the scanners and TSA made them optional, with the alternative of a pat-down search. By making the scanners an option, with a moderately intrusive but reasonably innocuous alternative, the pushback was effectively neutralized.
Recently, in an effort to get people to submit to the scanners, TSA has (and they've been fairly open that this is what they are doing) changed the pat-down procedure to make it more embarrassing with the hope that this will get more people to submit to the imaging scanners instead.
The recent flood of stories is the pushback that that change has produced.
Perhaps people should start tipping their TSA agents after the pat-down, perhaps with a "here's $10 dollars, that was nice, but slower next time - like you mean it".
I'd easily give $100 dollars to the first person who clearly, loudly, publicly asks their TSA pat-down agent, "how much for the happy ending" and gets audio/video. Or fakes a convulsion and blackout while getting scanned - that would put a spike in the "opt-outs" for the day.
Perhaps someone can organize a non-profit to reward people who embrace civil-disobedience.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
With all the TSA stuff in the press, I'd been thinking. Anyone sufficiently security minded should know that there's no such thing as perfect security. Maybe if all they ever did was transport dead people then you would know they wouldn't cause trouble. Even if you're not a pro, anyone could derive the law of diminishing returns from security theater.
But pre-9/11, shit happens on planes. Hijackings, bombs, whatever. They were pretty rare but they happened. But WHEN they happened, nobody pointed a finger at the president and said that he dropped the ball. Nobody cried about someone "not connecting the dots" and "intelligence failures" and all that stuff. It was just something tragic, pointless, but essentially a fluke of living in the modern world with the crazies.
But 9/11? People were chomping at the bits to blame Bush for SOMETHING, ANYTHING. And why not? A tight race that ended essentially via court order and Al Gore's withdrawing (read, not perusing additional legal action). Bush seemed to be setting the stage to frame his presidency as the The Vacationing President. Yeah, 9/11 was an act of terror with the goal of global effects, but even if it was just another random bomb the freshly brewed vitriol unlike anything I've seen before in my lifetime (Reagan and those after) would have had similar effects.
The upshot is that now random violent acts of terror now need to be defensible by politicians. It didn't happen because "shit happens," it happens because "Government Official Soandso screwed up." Protecting lives is secondary to protecting against SCANDAL. It's so politically important to make sure no random accidents or malicious acts of violence occur on their watch that politicians just can't afford to have anything happen on their watch.
As much as I hate to think this way, we really do need to have a random act of terror happen involving a plane and loss of life to show that these crazy TSA regulations are really just theater. That a dedicated individual, or group of individuals, can do what they feel they need to do and cannot be stopped just because we're afraid, and that, in the end, if it's your time, it's your time.
More Twoson than Cupertino
This is the classic example of a bureaucracy run amok and it's time for the politicians to do their jobs and regain control over it.
Bureaucracy run amok is the very definition of a politician. What we need is a government for the people by the people and we haven't had that in a couple of generations...or we have and the people are very dumb.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Round-up natural-born citizens and put them in concentration camps?
Nope.
That happened in WW2 and nobody balked. Instead they praised democrat FDR's initiative and labeled him "best president ever". The average American simply doesn't understand the need to fight for individual rights, especially if the rights being violated are somebody else. "I am not asian, so it does not concern me." "I am not muslim, so it does not concern me." "I don't fly, so it does not concern me."
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Sorry, but it's the whole process that's flawed. Terrorists get by TSA all the time. Weapons get by TSA all the time. Sometimes they're even there by accident (someone forgot a hunting knife in the bag). But TSA's thugs are focused on molesting people and trying to find bottles of water.
The entire system TSA uses is fatally flawed at the core, and has to be rebuilt entirely. What we have now is very expensive theatre (and sexual assault), not actual security.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Other people would make them up in their heads and foist their lunacy upon us anyway.
Of course, it's critical to ensure their identity is correct - that they are who they are suppose to be - but then screening them? Um... Even *if* they were "bad guys", they don't need weapons or explosives; they're flying the plane.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
>>>Flying isn't a right.
Yes it is. Read Amendment 9. Also 4 (which forbids congress from strip-searching or fondling Americans w/o warrant.) Plus it would be impossible for me to attend a Friday meeting in California if I had to travel by car or train (2500 miles is a frakking long distance).
Flying is the only option to get from MD to the west coast, and the government has no more right to block me from using a plane, than they do to stop me from drinking alcohol, or having sex with the same gender.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I've made this point repeatedly to my friends... I'll state it here now. The problem with America today is that we suck so badly at math.
As an example, 200 people get sick eating tomatos.... Suddenly 300 million people stop buying tomatos... All because no one can do that math in their head and figure out that they only have a 0.000000667% chance of getting sick eating tomatos.
I routinely perform this kind of math in my head, if there are more than 3 zeros after the decimal point, I generally don't have to worry about it. The sensationalist media doesn't help, but if people could do a little fact checking on their own, then we could avoid 99% of the problems caused by overreaction.
Terrorism falls into a very similar place. Everyone is OK with this insane security system because its protecting us from a "threat" unfortunately, no one is good enough at math to realize your likelihood of dying in a car accident is way way higher than being killed by a terrorist. You can probably be killed 10 times over in car accidents on the way to the airport before you will be killed by a bomb on a plane... Where are the enhanced pat downs and mandatory breathalizer tests for everyone before they operate a motor vehicle? Not to mention why don't we turn cars into faraday cages to keep people off cell phones? And we really should look at automatic governors on cars to limit their top speed to 55mph, and limit the weight/hp ratio in all cars to something that will barely allow acceleration... Well... no lets just ban cars all together, they're way too dangerous.
WTF is up with this "flying is not a right" "driving is not a right" "the internet is not a right" stuff?
The Constitution doesn't tell us what our rights ARE, it tells us what the government CAN'T do. Just because it doesn't mention airplanes, cars, or the internet doesn't mean we shouldn't have the freedom to make up our own damn mind about what we want to do. The right to fly on a plane (if the plane is yours or agrees to carry you) is a part of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The right to drive on taxpayer-funded roads is part of the right to life, liberty, and happiness.
The government doesn't tell us what our rights are or aren't. The founding fathers espoused the belief that our rights are inherent to our humanity, that they transcend governmental decisions, and that they cannot be taken away without due process of law. The Constitution is also very clear about limits on what "due process of law" means - you can't be searched, and you can't have your papers (including computers, documents, or files) searched either, not without a warrant. They aren't allowed to mass-print warrants without evidence that a crime has occurred or is about to occur - *evidence*, not suspicion.
The TSA's actions are completely, utterly, and without recourse illegal under the laws described in the US Constitution. Unfortunately, the Constitution doesn't provide average citizens with any way to punish the people in power who perform these illegal acts or who mandate that these illegal acts be performed. Treason doesn't apply here, as much as I wish it did. We can't bring criminal charges against them, because a) courts won't hear cases brought by private citizens. Only a prosecutor can bring charges, and none of them will. b) any court cases involving these acts will be refused on the basis of national security, which is also illegal to do.
The problem is with our legal system, and with corrupt politicians in office, and with the mass apathy shown by the majority of the populace. I don't see any way out of this, but maybe smarter minds than mine will find something.
We should not start frisking children, we should accept that once in a while a terrorist would get a bomb aboard and kill a lot of people. We should state up front, "we know it is easy to kill unarmed civilians. There is no fight, no glory in killing innocent people. But if you do kill a few of us, we can take the loss, and we will take our revenge. Living well is the best revenge, that is what we will do mostly. Also we will show how much we value our lives by the strong support and sympathy we show to every last one of us killed by you. Then we will spend as much money and effort it takes to hunt you down and bring you to justice."
Instead if we go down the path of, "we will not let you kill even one of us", their definition of success has been changed. All they have to do is to kill one American and claim victory. We should not allow them to define victory and success that way. Surest way to lose the war on terror is define success as, "not a single American could be killed by Terrorists".
It is a fact Islamic terrorists kill more muslims than non-muslims. We should repeatedly draw the contrast showing how we never say, "if we kill one terrorist it is worth 100 or 1000 American lives". But the terrorists repeatedly say, "killing one American is worth sacrificing XX or YY number of muslims".
The surest way to win the war on terror is, simply refuse to be terrorized.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Travel season is starting. That's why. Not to mention the pat-down is now an "enhanced" pat-down. Correct me if I'm wrong on the "enhanced" pat-down being a semi-recent change.
It's new and it's great! This TSA agent is a hero for following the rules. Sometimes playing badly for the other team is MORE effective than playing well for your own team.
This is the best news yet. Now the "Think of the Children" bastards that condone this garbage in the first place have to start re-thinking their cause.
Protest all you want but ONE guy taking a job for the TSA and following their own rules to the letter would do more for the cause of freedom than 100 vocal citizens.
In 1995, their was a terrorist attack on the Tokyo Metro. The technique used by them would work wonders on an airplane and the TSA has taken ZERO steps to prevent anyone from using it at US airports.
In 2001 there was a mail terrorist attack using antrhax. In a controlled envrionment with recylced air, such an attack could infest literally every person on the airplane, killing them about 4 days later. If a faster acting disease was used, the plane would crash, for that extra dramatic boom. Again, the TSA has taken ZERO steps to prevent anyone from doing this.
As of 2006 (don't know about now), the TSA had taken ZERO steps to preven Surface to Air missiles used against a commercial airlines.
So NO, I don't think a terrorist would be stupid enough to do anything that the TSA would catch. The reason the 9/11 attacks worked so well was mainly because no one had ever tried it before. As soon as the U93 became aware of what was going on, they prevented the terrorists from using the 4th plane.
The TSA has not caught a SINGLE real terrorist at the gate, ever. Instead they are engaging in illegal, unwarranted (in both senses of the word), unreasonable searches of US citizens. These searches would have stopped terrorist attacks that in the past failed. They quite clearly would NOT have stopped any of the most logical, fairly cheap potential terrorist attacks.
Their searchs are simple sexual harrasments of legal citizens, they do nothing to make us safer.
But the extensive and invasive nature of the searchs do reassure fools that trust the government with their safety, instead of questioning authority.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Not being searched without specific articulable cause presented to a judge and confirmed with a signed warrant IS.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I'm European, my last flights were last week, so after those Yemen bomb attempts. I'm glad it hasn't, at least yet, caused any extra procedures to appear here in the EU. Anyway, somehow I always set metal detectors off. Must be my shoes. Last week, same as usual - walk through the metal detector, with my shoes on, the metal detector beeps, a security guard does a quick and professional pat-down. That's pretty quick, efficient and secure enough without resorting to outright humiliating treatment.
As much as I hate to say this, in a way this story is good news. I really am sorry for the family that had to go through this. But my perception of the American public is like that of a strong, sleepy bear. Might allow someone to poke him but once poked hard enough, it awakens and becomes very dangerous. It might be true that Americans have allowed too much civil liberty erosion in the past decade (at least judging from online news) but I have confidence that what America needs is a story or two that would make national headlines. A search of a panicking 3-year-old might well be it. Or let some TSA employee be caught on camera jerking off to images from the body-scan machines. Or let someone record TSA employees discussing the dick sizes of people sent through the process. A story that can make headlines in mainstream news, not just Slashdot, and is outrageous enough might just cause the society to raise a big enough stink about it so the government is forced to back down.
Had the Founding Fathers conceived of the day when vehicular travel was considered not a right, they would have included it in the Bill Of Rights. Indeed, one of the strong arguments against a "bill of rights" was that absence of a right from enumeration could/would be construed as non-existence thereof - hence the catch-all 9th Amendment.
The Constitution enumerates what powers the government is granted. None of those powers precludes his right to fly cross-country to a meeting, nor permit gross violations of other enumerated rights as a condition of that right, just because it is not enumerated.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
You remember that one only needs to cut through a single major artery to kill a person?
True, but how many arteries to crash a plane?
It is what it is.
Great post, gurps_npc; yes, terrorism is a threat. So are drunk and distracted (cellphone using) drivers, but we put our lives at risk every day for the sake of convenience and saving time. I think people have lost all perspective.
When they fortified the doors the cockpits, IMO, the problem was adequately solved.
Stupid, sexy Flanders.
A terrorists in Saudi Arabia already stuffed explosives up his butt. None of our current security measures can catch that, and obviously it is what someone willing to kill themselves to blow up a plane will do if all others ways of concealing weapons are eliminated.
If we don't do something to cover that scenario, all our other security is a waste of time. So, what are you willing to be subjected to by the TSA to prevent the next colon bomber?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
There's nothing wrong with searching people getting on flights.
Funny how we did just fine for 40+ years of commercial air travel without it. The risk of dying in a plane crash is tiny to start with -- about 1 in 11 million -- and the risk of being the victim of a terrorist attack is smaller still. This is a) a waste of taxpayer dollars in simple terms of ROI, b) a violation of the 4th Amendment by all but the most extreme of standards, c) a clear and present example of the "slippery slope" principle in action. First metal detectors, then x-rays, then luggage searches, then shoe removal, then body scanners, then pat downs, then "enhanced" pat downs (are those anything like enhanced interrogation techniques?), and what's next? It's obscene. It's allowing ourselves to behave in a terrorized fashion. And I have no qualms about someone seeing me naked, or irrational fear of what amounts to little more than background radiation. It's not about that. It's the principle of subjecting ourselves (and our loved ones) to degrading, unnecessary, ineffective, overreaching, and (IMO) unconstitutional practices just because someone yells "Boo!" It's outrageous that people allow themselves to be cowed like this.
Look, if the "turrists" want to get us, they can. There are ample opportunities where huge amounts of people congregate that dwarf the contents of any plane (or any 4 planes for that matter), many with little or no security. Even putting aside the idea that there's no such thing as foolproof security, even if we secure those locations, they'll just pick others. Playing whack-a-mole is not the way to win -- the way to win is not to play that game.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
We can eliminate 100% of the threat by eliminating flying.
Sounds stupid, but there's a point beyond which additional security measures are plainly stupid. We reached that point shortly after they fortified the cockpit doors on planes.
Stupid, sexy Flanders.
Now the "Think of the Children" bastards that condone this garbage in the first place have to start re-thinking their cause.
No they won't. I don't think that kind of person is affected by cognitive dissonance.
While I strongly disagree with the current security theater here in the USA, I'd like to interject that the TSA *workers* are simply doing their job, legally. Granted some (many) seem to be power-enthralled dicks, but I digress. Perhaps it's a work-environment, pay-scale, education-level or HR issue. :-)
In any case... The people we all should be and remain angry at are our elected representatives and, by deduction, us for electing them. They made the rules, we keep them in office.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Then the GOP would not have a way to scare people into voting against their own interests.
Remember, patriotism is abandoning our liberties and principles to fight terrorism in order to preserve our... uh... profit margins?
Do you live in some alternate universe where John McCain was voted president? In my time line, we have a Democrat named Barack Obama who has been president for nearly 2 years now. We also have massive Democrat majorities in Congress. Not only are things as bad in this area, they have actually gotten significantly worse.
"The problem now is that TSA has gone from annoyance theatre to dangerous and vile theatre."
I don't see why there's a problem here. This is a good thing. They've gone and done something that the everyone is actually complaining about. The airline industry is complaining about it, the general public is complaining about it, everyone except the TSA is complaining about it. The government will do something about it because now there's actually a significant opposition to it.
Previously it was 90% of people that were willing to give up their rights and submit to bullshit searches because they stupidly thought that this would protect them from terrorists, and 10% of people that complained. Obviously, this didn't help stop the TSA. Now, the numbers are reversed. The 90% of people who think that this is an invasion of privacy will hopefully be enough to stop this bullshit.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
I am seeing a lot of posts here from the kinds of people that are the root cause of all this nonsense.
"It's okay that kids get groped because terrorists use kids to meet their ends all the time." I disagree. If children being used as weapons was a common security problem in our airports, I could understand that point of view. But it isn't. This isn't Vietnam, and this isn't Afghanistan. Either way, this kind of reaction is not okay.
Want my opinion on the matter? Drop all of this airport check-in security garbage. All of it. No scans, no molestation, no profiling, no cavity searches. Let anyone with a knife or a properly licensed handgun take it with them on board. Want to know what will happen when that one in twenty thousand flights has a hijack attempt? The guy is going to get shot, and the plane will make it safely to its destination. And the time when an extremist decides to blow himself up and take down the plane? It isn't like we can actually catch that anyways, so we can take the tax money we saved from this false security to seek justice upon those responsible instead of pulling the covers over our head like a scared child.
It should be "If you're too paranoid to fly, don't fly." not "If you don't want to be sexually assaulted, don't fly." Until this is changed, I'd rather risk driving.
Being asked to do something illegal in your job, like molest a child, doesn't grant you immunity from prosecution. Being asked to do something thoroughly immoral in your job, like intimidate people until they're more terrified of the security line than the flight, doesn't grant you immunity from social persecution. Needing to feed your family doesn't mean society will forgive you any action - consider whores, muggers, fraudsters, extortionists, and drug dealers.
The people we all should be and remain angry at are every single person involved in the entire farce, including the lowlife scum who didn't hand in their notice the second they were trained in the "right" way to molest a child.
Or better yet, refuse to do it, and see how a jury feels about wrongful dismissal for refusing to rub a child's genitals.