TSA will soon be "psycho-bullying" people into body scanners

[archibaldcrane]

introducing thought police

We've had hate crimes for a while now.

[Khajit]

Maybe so but there isn't a law(to my knowlege) against a person being a racist. Just one against them doing anything that actually is a crime such as assault as a result of being a racist.

[Chun Liroy]

Oh man I think I did this here thing just now. After you stand in a weird pose for 15 secs you get to stand in front of this big black guy uncomfortably for 30 seconds as he struggles to put on rubber gloves, then when he's done he says you can exit here and takes off the gloves.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

Because at some point, stifling competition (politically is one way, but there are plenty of non-political ways, which is where the government's power to regulate interstate commerce is regularly asserted) is the more effective than outperforming on a level playing field.

I get this aurik, and the most common way to do it is through the govt., but again unless I'm missing what you're saying, that isn't capitalism's fault.

[Hellfury]

Out of curiosity, do anyone know if they (and if so, any details regarding) plan to introduce similar measures to trains and buses?

[aduidarnenye]

Out of curiosity, do anyone know if they (and if so, any details regarding) plan to introduce similar measures to trains and buses?

They will as soon as a train or bus is the target of a terrorist attack. Not before.

[Stumblingdrunk]

They will as soon as a train or bus is the target of a terrorist attack. Not before.

no they won't

[Kurokikaze]

They will as soon as a train or bus is the target of a terrorist attack. Not before.

^ this so much.

I can only imagine the nightmare that it would be if I had to go through metal detectors to get on the fucking subway.

[aurik]

I get this aurik, and the most common way to do it is through the govt., but again unless I'm missing what you're saying, that isn't capitalism's fault.

But it is capitalism's fault in the purest sense. Individuals in a capitalist system are charged only with deriving as much individual benefit as they can. In most cases, this aligns very well with the system goal of market efficiency. In some not-so-boundary cases, though, market efficiency and individual benefit are diametrically opposed. And, worse, often this idiosyncrasy is self-reinforcing.

[Meresgi]

no they won't

You dont know America.

[Norellicus]

They won't because every other transportation area has risk-assessment and intelligence-based security behind it, instead of the herpderp the TSA provides to the airlines.

Edit: Maybe. And even if they don't, the private sector is impacted a lot more so they're liable to produce their own security that actually works rather than go crying to DHS and let the TSA come in and do it.

[aduidarnenye]

I rather meant that any implementation to the train or bus systems would only be reactionary, as many of the security implementations in airports have been. The moment a bomb explodes on a commuter train you'll have heightened security measures in train stations. I don't think it would be difficult to blow up a train. I've been on trains in both America and Canada, and there is absolutely no security checking at any train station.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

But it is capitalism's fault in the purest sense. Individuals in a capitalist system are charged only with deriving as much individual benefit as they can. In most cases, this aligns very well with the system goal of market efficiency. In some not-so-boundary cases, though, market efficiency and individual benefit are diametrically opposed. And, worse, often this idiosyncrasy is self-reinforcing.

I 100% agree, which is why you don't give govt. the power that well funded people can take advantage of. I'm not sure how that's different than what was just said in the previous posts though.

[aurik]

Yes, I see, it's much better that the power to distort open markets is instead directly in the hands of the people who stand to benefit from such a distortion.

[Kuya]

What part of the government are you talking about, swamp?

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

What part of the government are you talking about, swamp?

The Legislative and Executive branches.

[Cream Soda]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/sanitary...lt-victim.html

hursday, Nov 25th, 2010

Menstruating women beware. If you intend to travel, your panty-liners are now considered suspicious objects, after all you could be concealing a bomb in there.

The latest insane TSA transgression answers questions that were raised last week when it was revealed naked body scanners can also detect sanitary napkins.

New York Times reporter Joe Sharkey wrote Monday that he was getting a lot of requests for information from female frequent fliers.

“Do the imagers, for example, detect sanitary napkins?” women wanted to know. “Yes,” wrote Sharkey.

“Does that then necessitate a pat-down? The TSA couldn’t say. Screeners, the TSA has said, are expected to exercise some discretion.” the article continued.

“And what about tampons?” asked the blog Feminist Peace Network. “They look kind of like sticks of dynamite. Are they going to ask us to pull them out and show them just to be sure?”

The answer, judging from one woman’s written testimony, seems to be yes.

A customer of popular women’s health company, Gladrags, relayed her recent experience at the hands of the TSA via email.

In short, she was asked to walk through a radiation firing naked body scanner and complied. The scanner produced a naked image of her, but because her sanitary towel was obscuring her most intimate parts from prying eyes, the TSA agents pulled her aside for a full groin search. Not something to be relished by any person, let alone someone who has previously suffered sexual assault.

Here is the woman’s email in full:

“This email isn’t going to be as polished as I would normally send, but I’m upset and I don’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else (if I can stop it).

I recently traveled via air, and was subjected to that new scanning device. “No problem,” I thought. I was wearing jeans and a linen tanktop, bra, panties, and one camouflage pantyliner.

I’m a rule follower, so I never have any problems at the airport. Not this time. I was stopped, and then held for 15 minutes while they tried to find a female supervisor. I couldn’t get to my bag, my shawl or my shoes; just standing there while the TSA agents kept me in one place.

Now, I don’t want this to be about bad TSA agents; they were doing their job, they were as delicate as they could be, etc., etc. But what ultimately happened is that I was subjected to search so invasive that I was left crying and dealing with memories that I thought had been dealt with years ago of prior sexual assaults.

Why?

Because of my flannel panty-liner. These new scans are so horrible that if you are wearing something unusual (like a piece of cloth on your panties) then you will be subjected to a search where a woman repeatedly has to check your “groin” while another woman watches on (two in my case – they were training in a new girl – awesome).

So please, please, tell the ladies not to wear their liners at the airport (I didn’t even have an insert in). I’m a strong, confident woman; I’m an Army vet (which is why those camo liners crack me up), I work full-time and go to graduate school full-time, I have a wonderful husband, and I don’t take any nonsense from anyone. I don’t dramatize, and I don’t exaggerate. I’m trying to give you a sense of who I am so you won’t think that this is a plea for attention, or a jumping on the bandwagon about the recent TSA proposed boycott.

I just don’t want another woman to have to go through the “patting down” because she didn’t know that her glad-rag would be a matter of national security.”

Chalk up another ritual humiliation at the hands of the TSA, protecting us from terrorists by forcing women to remove their underwear napkins and groping their vaginas in public.

When will this insanity end?

[Rowe]

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/27...Boing+Boing%29

Molecular biologist on the dangers of pornoscanners
Cory Doctorow at 10:25 PM Saturday, Nov 27, 2010

Jason Bell, "a molecular biologist and biophysicist... a Ph.D. candidate in Steve Kowalczykowski's lab at UC Davis," has posted a detailed critique of the research on the safety of airport backscatter radiation scanners. His specialty is the "molecular mechanism of how mutations in the breast cancer susceptibility gene, BRCA2, result in cancer," and he's posted a detailed, lay-friendly explanation of the scientific concerns expressed by the UCSF team that believes that they are unsafe for use.

Which brings me to how the scanner works. Essentially, it appears that an X-ray beam is rastered across the body, which highlights the importance of one of the specific concerns raised by the UCSF scientists... what happens if the machine fails, or gets stuck, during a raster. How much radiation would a person's eye, hand, testicle, stomach, etc be exposed to during such a failure. What is the failure rate of these machines? What is the failure rate in an operational environment? Who services the machine? What is the decay rate of the filter? What is the decay rate of the shielding material? What is the variability in the power of the X-ray source during the manufacturing process? This last question may seem trivial; however, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory noted significant differences in their test models, which were supposed to be precisely up to spec. Its also interesting to note that the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory criticized other reports from NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and a group called Medical and Health Physics Consulting for testing the machine while one of the two X-ray sources was disabled (citations at the bottom of the page).
These questions have not been answered to any satisfaction and the UCSF scientists, all esteemed in their fields and members of the National Academy of Sciences have been dismissed based on a couple of reports seemingly hastily put together by mid-level government lab technicians. The documents that I have reviewed thus far either have NO AUTHOR CREDITS or are NOT authored by anyone with either a Ph.D. or a M.D., raising serious concerns of the extent of the expertise of the individuals and organizations evaluating these machines. Yet, the FDA and TSA continue to dismiss some of the most talented scientists in the country...

Furthermore, when making this comparison, the TSA and FDA are calculating that the dose is absorbed throughout the body. According the simulations performed by NIST, the relative absorption of the radiation is ~20-35-fold higher in the skin, breast, testes and thymus than the brain, or 7-12-fold higher than bone marrow. So a total body dose is misleading, because there is differential absorption in some tissues. Of particular concern is radiation exposure to the testes, which could result in infertility or birth defects, and breasts for women who might carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation. Even more alarming is that because the radiation energy is the same for all adults, children or infants, the relative absorbed dose is twice as high for small children and infants because they have a smaller body mass (both total and tissue specific) to distribute the dose. Alarmingly, the radiation dose to an infant's testes and skeleton is 60-fold higher than the absorbed dose to an adult brain!

[BerenTebogo]

I really hope the backlash from all of this is enough to make them cave-in and get rid of this shit. /dreaming

[SilverBreeze]

I honestly don't want to step anywhere near an airport with these horror stories that have been popping up. I really can't see how people can continue to defend what they are doing to women in some of these searches, especially considering that it's not exactly uncommon for a woman to have some sort of sexual assault in her past, which just makes matters even worse.