For the third straight trip, I was “randomly selected” for the full pat-down. They’ve apparently started doing the unit-touch with the back of their hand. Honestly, that part didn’t jar me as much as when he felt below my pants. Not far enough to touch a really sensitive area, but even so. It’s that part, rather than the actual unit-rub, that made me think twice about my decision not to go to a private area.
The last time I got it, there was no under-the-pants action. There wasn’t much of any action at all. The guy was really skittish (the flight was out of Mormonland) and I could have kid something up in those parts without him finding it.
Note to TSA, I would not hide anything in those parts. I am not a threat worthy of being on whatever list I am on.
“Freedom Job”
Not Freedom as in Freedom Fries, one hopes.
Pres. Obama should do a Clintonesque micro-initiative, and wind down this bullshit. [He actually ramped it up.]
I think we Amerkins are all ready to accept a bit more risk. The heroes of Flight 93 figgered out nearly immediately on that first day, 9-11, that the game had changed. Not about inconvenient hijackings to Cuba anymore where you make nice-nice, and it never will be from here on in.
My basic take on it is that the disaster that was 9/11 did not occur because a plane was hijacked. It’s bad to lose a couple hundred civilians, to be sure, but what really got it was using the plane as a weapon. And due to the reinforced politics and non-compliant passengers, that’s not going to happen again.
This is outrageous. I have a hard time imagining George Washington submitting to a testicle-carees in the name of safety. Recognizing that the TSA agent probably finds the process as unpleasant as does the searchee is little consolation.
In my recent travels, I have been spared the request to choose the full-body scan or the full-body pat-down. But if forced to choose, I’d rather have the scan than the feel-up. While undignified, it seems less intrusive to me. Is the body-scan not available at your airport?
In this case, there was no body scan. However, in one of the previous cases they did the pat-down after the body-scanner (and not, and not because I failed). It was the case that you could avoid the body-scanner by getting the feel-up, or you got the feel-up regardless because you were randomly selected. That was over last Christmas, though, when they were particularly antsy.
Burt:
Since TSA can’t profile folks to get the real bad guys we all get searched. Isn’t equality great?
I never said (in this post or the other touching on security) that we had to become the Israelis. I said we could take some lessons from them.
Nor is it the case that the only threat to safety onboard airplanes comes from a particular racial group. There’s a particular racial group that inspires heightened levels of anxiety in our society. But they’re not the only ones with bizarre and extreme agendas willing to commit violence and navigating the world with perverted ideas of morality to implement those agendas.
So yeah, equality is great.
Burt:
As far as I know, Muslims(some but not all) are the only ones trying to attack the US in such a way as to produce mass casulaties and have used airplanes to do so. Therefore it seems to me that we have a smaller subset of folks to scrutinize.
If your concern is about Muslims rather than Arabs, then you’ve got a problem because it is not clear who is Muslim and who is not. Persians look different than Arabs who look different than Turks who look different than Pashtunis, etc. etc. etc. Not all members of those racial groups are themselves Muslims, and there are people of European descent who have adopted Islam (sometimes of the particularly crazy varieties, e.g., U.S. citizens John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla).
My guess is that you wouldn’t be satisfied by a technique of simply asking someone if they were Muslim, because you’d say that a Muslim terrorist suicide bomber fancying herself to be a jihadi would, invoking taqiyya, simply lie and call herself a Christian so as to avoid scrutiny in fulfillment of her mission of death. So constitutional and legal issues aside, how do we determine who is a “real” Muslim? Bear in mind, she might look like and even actually be a person of apparently western European ancestry.
Nor are violent Muslim fundamentalists the only crazies in the world capable of inflicting violence on innocents. I wouldn’t put suicide bombing past Chechen separatists, especially on flights going to or from Russia. Those guys are, to use Murali‘s wry turn of phrase, nucking futs.
Nor would I put use of terror techniques past drug cartels; although I hesitate to think that they would use suicide bombers that doesn’t mean they couldn’t try something else clever and destructive for any number of purposes. We’re already concerned (unreasonably, IMO) about beheadings in south Texas and south Arizona; do you think these guys would hesitate to smuggle a bomb on board a plane that they thought was carrying a rival?
Who the hell knows what North Koreans might get up to? As little as possible, we can hope, since their game seems to be brinksmanship rather than overt activity — but they did torpedo a ship not too long ago and they don’t give a damn about what anyone else in the world thinks of them or the way they go about bullying their way to getting the foreign aid they need to survive.
And who knows what kind of home-grown nonsense might spring up here? Maybe someone who really believes the President is a secret Muslim bent on subverting the nation to a collectivist dictatorship, who is willing to step up to the plate and strike a blow against creeping tyrrany? That’s not how most opponents of the President think, of course, but it only takes one nutball worked up into an ideological lather before some new Timothy McVeigh decides that maybe those 9/11 guys had a pretty good idea using planes as weapons and thinks of some dementedly clever way to emulate Brutus.
If you’re going to go down the road of “the world is a scary place filled with people who want to kill us” then you’ll find there are potential threats everywhere, in every guise imaginable. I think that security people are right to take a clear-eyed look around the world and not focus exclusively on Arabs.
Burt:
Nice job muddying the water by talking all the potential bad guys out there. How about we stick to bad guys that really are hyjacking airplanes to commit terrorism?
So what’s your point, then? Since apparently no white person from America could possibly be a threat to anyone, who should we be looking for, how should we identify them, what techniques do we use to sort out the innocent ones from the hijackers?
(“Bombers” would be more appropriate than “hijackers”, I think, as the actual threats I can recall after 9/11 seem to involve attempts to blow planes up rather than to take command of them while in the air, one with a bomb in the guy’s shoe and the other with the bomb in the guy’s underpants, both of which failed due to a combination of passenger vigilance and terrorist incompetence.)
“Bombers” would be more appropriate than “hijackers”, I think, as the actual threats I can recall after 9/11 seem to involve attempts to blow planes up rather than to take command of them while in the air, one with a bomb in the guy’s shoe and the other with the bomb in the guy’s underpants, both of which failed due to a combination of passenger vigilance and terrorist incompetence
And neither of which involved Arab culprits.
Burt:
I’d like to see us use profiling based on age, race, sex, religion and a host of other factors so we can hopefully avoid embarrassing grandmothers when they are forced to take off their diapers. But since we can’t hurt folks’ feeling by profiling, I don’t have much sympathy for some folks that complain about getting searched.
How about we just stop groping people without a good reason to do so? (being young, male, and Muslim not being considered “a good reason.”)
Will:
So why isn’t being young, male and Muslim a good reason to be profiled? If you really believe this, then why are you complaing about being searched for the third straight trip? I would think it would make you happy to know that all folks are being treated equally.
My primary objection is to the random searching regime. Why would I want some specific group targeted? Especially when I don’t like being targeted myself? I’m having difficulty figuring out what motives you are ascribing here…
On a sidenote, from about 2005-07, I was definitely on some sort of list. I got the special screening every time I flew during that period. It didn’t bother me as much then, for a few reasons:
(1) We were closer to 9/11. The fear was still there. It felt like I was “doing my part.”
(2) I knew (or suspected I knew) why I was on the list. I had taken three one-way flights and the screenings started immediately after that.
(3) I was younger. The older I get, the less gracefully I take intrusions. Not just at airports, but also random quizzings by cops when I smoke in public areas. And traffic enforcement (though I speed less now than ever).
(4) The intrusions were less… personal. I had to pull down my pants once, when my boxers had a button with just enough metallic substance to alert the wand. But other than that, it was just a close wanding. The main problem I had with it was the delay.
So my attitude back then was more along the lines of shrugging it off. It’s different now. And since I object to the treatment myself, I have a harder time saying that it’s “no big deal” when it comes to someone else.