The Un-Friendly Skies of the Transporation Security Agency

For many years after its creation, TSA was a really expensive theatre production playing in a city near you. For what has now seemed like forever, when flying, you had to take your shoes off, and if you had a backpack you had to take that off as well and then sort your backpack’s contents in order of importance into seven or eight different containers.

Then, when you inevitably set off the metal detector, because you left your belt on to keep your pants up you have to walk through again, this time with an under-paid, bored TSA agent looking at you as if you were Osama bin Laden.

Thankfully, technology has come to the rescue and those days of cheap theatre are over—or are they? With a recent budget increase, TSA now has state-of-the-art theatre props for their production. Instead of a cranky, overly sensitive metal detector, the TSA has now installed full-body scanners that while they can search every nook and cranny of your person, could also give you cancer after multiple scans over a period of years.

In theory, this new technology seems like a fantastic way to stop the terrorists from doing what they do. Unfortunately, these new scanning machines are also a huge invasion of privacy and more importantly, they can be dangerous to your health.

Each time you fly the now un-friendly skies of TSA, you must first pass through these new fangled scanners where you will be subjected to a small dose of radiation. Admittedly, it is similar to the dosage you receive when x-raying your leg or foot after an accident—they pose no real risk by themselves. The challenge however, is that repeated use of these scanners can statistically increase your risk for cancer over your lifetime. And what is even more frightening is that this small dose of radiation is considerably more dangerous to young children.

If you happen to be someone who never takes these kinds of cancer scares seriously, you must at least see how the privacy of everyone passing through one of these scanners is unreasonably compromised.

These scanners, which are supposed to make us all safer, actually take a full body image and then displays it to a so-called “security enforcement officer.” These images show everything—never mind mom’s warning about dirty underwear—these scans expose every oddly shaped toe, every meal eaten during the past week and of course, the male genitals. This last bit of unsettling consequence of the full body scan if nothing else, probably lends credibility to the old saying that “Men can read maps better than women. Cause only the male mind could conceive of one inch equaling a hundred miles.”

This, for me, extends far beyond any definition of a reasonable policy. While I support the government’s right to sometimes pry, this is something that I think we can all agree crosses the line.

One strange and troubling aspect of all this is that despite the insistence of the TSA that all these images are immediately deleted from their system, there have been several instances of these images being obtained by groups not affiliated with the government, one of those being a privacy watchdog. A positive feature of the system is supposed to be that the stations we all pass through to be scanned are remotely monitored, which means that at the very least, they are after all transmitted over the internet somehow.

As it should be, one does have the option to refuse the health risks associated with radiation scanning and privacy invasion. The alternative to avoiding these scanners is a rather aggressive pat down by a TSA officer. So, instead of getting hit with a dose of radiation, the passenger who enjoys their right to privacy is then given the opportunity to have a perfect stranger feel them all over with gloved hands. Previously, pat downs were accomplished with the back of the hand, but with the adoption of these new security measures, TSA agents have become more aggressive fortified in their behavior by new security regulations that suggest using the palm of one’s hand and getting very personal between the legs is a new standard.

This, naturally is designed to force you into the body scan process because after all, who wants some stranger groping them between their legs, tea baggers notwithstanding.

The TSA of course insists that these pat downs are performed by a professional workforce and that there is absolutely no intent on the part of any TSA officer to take advantage of the situation. Yeah right.

So my friends, if you are flying this weekend, or for Christmas or for any reason in the coming months. I would advise you to not fly unless of course the distance is so great that other modes of transportation would take forever to get you where you want or need to go.

Apparently, from now on purchasing a plane ticket is enough to make you immediately a suspected terrorist. With all the rights we continue to relinquish in the name of national security or even our own security, soon folks will be judged solely by the ethnicity of their clothing or appearance or their skin color. But that could never happen—could it?