US Congress Tries To Cut Body Scanner Funding 241
OverTheGeicoE writes "The Electronic Privacy Information Center reports that the US House of Representatives is trying to cut funding for new airport body scanners from next year's budget. This would prevent the TSA from installing 275 new scanners in airports in FY 2012, at a cost of $76 million."
Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Informative)
There was 1 for-profit company, who just so happened to have financial ties to then-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, who shoved the idea down the TSA's throat. These guys aren't even trying to hide the corruption anymore.
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Open bids can be skipped when there's a sole source justification. Whether the justification holds up or not is a matter of opinion, but when there's only one provider, it's usually not much of a debate.
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I thought it was "if you can't beat them with logic and reason, beat them with a stick"? But hey, this works, too.
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If you want to save lives, that $80 million can be used much more wisely than on scanners of dubious safety and effectiveness. Where the money is spent should be driven by data and there simply isn't any data that says terrorism is something to be worried about. Not when you compare it to the dangers of traffic and simple health problems.
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
Or send it with a crooked employee who doesn't have to go through those scans, or toss it over the fence into the sterile area where it can be picked up by an employee who does have to go through those scans, or pack the fun bits inside the metal tubes of a piece of luggage, inside a bunch of film containers, inside a prosthetic metal leg, inside the metal tube of a cane or a pair of crutches, or in any of the other top 100 places to smuggle explosives onto a plane.
I mean, I think it's absolutely hilarious that we spent all these billions of dollars on something that only protects one relatively tiny attack surface, does so relatively poorly, invades people's civil liberties in a truly horrific way, and in spite of that, is still provably orders of magnitude less effective than bomb sniffing dogs. If you ever needed proof of why government cannot be trusted to protect its citizens, there you go. Just follow the trail of money from the manufacturers back to the crooked politicians who support this absurdity. It can't be all that hard to prove that bribes were involved. Unless, of course, they're really that dumb, in which case we're in bigger trouble than I thought.
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I have never understood the US publics horror at body scanners. So they show your junk. Who gives a shit? My junk looks just like my neighbors, and his neighbors, and so on and so on. I could care less if someone downloads a weird photonegative of it.
If they shorten lines at the airport, and avoid some of the pointless 'pat downs' then I'm all for efficiency. The scanned images are not all that personally identifiable in a real sense, and as far as I know they haven't been proven to be less effective than e
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left-wing right-wing they both place us for fools
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You sir, make it partisan.
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Blame the tea party "republicans." The GOP is really wishing they had done their homework before courting the tea party. The libertarian agitators in the tea party really wanted those scanners to gtfo yesterday. The mainstream GOP's response to this anti-big-government push is to start grooming Trump for 2012.
I promise you one thing, this election cycle shall be incredibly entertaining.
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Except Ron Paul has gone full-bore against the Bin Laden assassination. He won't get a single tea-party vote in the primary. He'll get the last few 9/11 truther's in the GOP and the Stormfront vote, and that's it.
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Palin?
So the blind leading the blind?
I can't understand why anyone would vote for that moron. On the other hand I cringed that people voted for W because they felt they could have a drink with him. I thought we were looking for presidents not drinking buddies or frat bros.
Re:Excellent (Score:4, Informative)
People voted for her in Alaska because she was the outsider, gave a huge chunk of money to the people of Alaska, raised taxes on oil companies and fought the lobbyists.
Since she got on the national stage she's way different.
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Even though I certainly did not like him, I think you really insult W by comparing to Palin. They are worlds apart.
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Prevent the TSA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't they do the RIGHT thing and DISMANTLE the god damn TSA?
Re:Prevent the TSA? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't they do the RIGHT thing and DISMANTLE the god damn TSA?
I'm not saying that it is, but it could be the beginning. Cutting funding is a way of stopping something when you have to save face for the people who support it. Then you can say "it was a good idea, but too expensive" and they can say "it was a good idea, but they were too cheap" and everybody walks away with their precious egos mostly intact.
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I agree that there will always be a new enemy, but I think it's less inherently about control and more about perception. When there's another superpower, that superpower is the greatest threat. But when that's gone, gradually the previously lesser threat is (rightly) perceived as the greatest threat. Its absolute magnitude hasn't necessarily changed significantly, but its relative magnitude certainly has. People don't think in absolutes very well. Their perceptions, and thus their responses, are almost
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The bill in Texas is also doing its damnedest. You can kill a program (or make it toothless) with a thousand papercuts, it just takes longer.
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It would be bad for the unemployment statistics. What industry would take all those unemployables?
Re:Prevent the TSA? (Score:4, Funny)
I hear they need bodies to fight the flooding along the Mississippi. No no... not labor... just the bodies...
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But, sandbags don't keep sneaking off for a quick beer.
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This is one of the problems we have with spending in this country. Once a program is in place, it almost never gets cut, unless something even worse is put in it's place. To actually cut the TSA, you have to pass an entire bill through the House, Senate, and then get the signature of the President or an override majority from Congress.
I wish we had a provision that a simple no vote by the House of Representatives could cut bad programs. (Laws would have to be written to not only get past the current House,
Re:Prevent the TSA? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sure, as long as one law is written that way. Ideally, all laws should have to be written that way, which would effectively bound the total size of the body of law, thus forcing lawmakers to choose which laws to keep based on their actual importance.
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The Bush tax cuts (penned in a very very different financial climate) were supposed to expire in 2010. They were renewed.
Even when it takes effort to renew a law, it still happens 100% of the time.
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Right. Any attempt to reduce the size or scope of the TSA will be met with PSAs showing happy families with their children at play ... and then a scene showing empty playgrounds, empty homes with foot-high grass and a line of people outside a shelter in February in Chicago. See what happens if we put these nice people out of work?
The total staff for TSA is pretty large - I'm sure it is in the tens of thousands when you add up all of the people in Washington DC, all the airports and all of the off-airport
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I wish we had a provision that a simple no vote by the House of Representatives could cut bad programs.
We have that. It's called a government shutdown when the House fails to pass a budget.
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I don't see how that's any better. Why shouldn't a change in the law have to go through the same process as a law does?
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Because that would come awfully close to admitting they were wrong.
As geeks, we sometimes admit we were wrong, and try to learn better. Politicians cannot, it seems, get away with that. They at least seem to think it's vital for their continuing careers that they were never actually wrong, or else their hypertrophied egos (and you really can't hit high office without one of those) don't stand for it.
If Congress voted to cut the TSA back to what it should be (administering pre-2001 security), that wou
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Because then we'll go from having overbearing and often ineffective security into having absolutely zero security. There should be a middle ground in there somewhere.
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It's not clear what eliminating the TSA would solve.
People might not feel that they're in an authoritarian police state whenever they have to fly somewhere?
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It's not clear what eliminating the TSA would solve.
Ending Federally sanctioned sexual assault for starters.
Hrm... (Score:3)
I see no problem with this. Then again I always believed that behavior profiling is a better method of screening anyway. It's very hard to train yourself to not set off behavioral queues for evasion, and so on, unless you've had a head injury that screws everything up.
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It's very hard to train yourself to not set off behavioral queues for evasion, and so on...
...which is why militaries and paramilitaries offer hard training for the sort of people who need to evade behavioural queues (sic, intentional? because that's all they're going to create).
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Uh-huh. I'm guessing you know how many years it takes to do something like that right? It's not exactly a crash course. You're not going to dispose of someone who's had training for that long, on being a splody-dope, etc.
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Yeah, but the same can be true for training people to spot behavioral cues. And I'm pretty sure it's easier to find and train a few motivated terrorists than 100,000+ competent TSA agents.
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I've always thought of political correctness as just another form of racism, with a dash of sexism, and bigotry all mixed into one happy basket. And I say that as someone who's half-japanese. But otherwise you're spot on.
Re:Hrm... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually we can't do behavioral profiling because idiots like you don't understand that it's not the same thing as racial profiling.
Racial profiling: "That guy is black but he's driving an expensive car. He probably stole the car."
Behavioral profiling: "That guy is driving conspicuously slow and it's 2:00am on a Saturday night, there's a good chance he's drunk."
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Racial profiling is wrong. What I said was, in effect, if you have a 25 year old man who appears to be from the Middle East who is acting suspiciously in an airport, and you have a 25 year old Caucasian who appears to be from the Northeast (let's say he's we
Re:Hrm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Behavior profiling is not racial profiling, nor does it even require racial profiling. The simple solution to not getting labeled racist is don't be a fucking racist. Don't racially profile. Starting with race, yeah, that makes you a racist, and it's completely irrelevant to the job.
People want to blame this whole fiasco on the oppressive, all-powerful, "political correctness" but that's a bullshit strawman. Liberals had now power when the TSA was enacted, it was an entirely Republican invention, created at the height of Bush's popularity, and Democrats cheered it along with nary a complaint. The TSA doesn't want to hire well-trained employees and would rather have McGuards in front of expensive scanners bought through cozy no-bid contracts with companies that are paying off the TSA chiefs.
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You think it's not racist now?
I fly several times a week, and except for those times I've opted out, I can remember two distinct times when the agent said I could go through the metal detector instead of the body scanner. It's funny, I see caucasian men being let through, and they notice me, and they make a couple of the men ahead of me go through the scanner as well, and then me, and the ones after me are all back to being happy campers.
Of course, in some places, they subject everyone from a 4 year old to
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I see no problem with this. Then again I always believed that behavior profiling is a better method of screening anyway. It's very hard to train yourself to not set off behavioral queues for evasion, and so on, unless you've had a head injury that screws everything up.
What "behavior(s)" are you profiling for, and how will it detect whatever it is you want to detect?
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It's hard not to look slightly off when what's going through your head is, "I hate everything you stand for and, come revolution, your masters will be the first against the wall. But, as long as you're not being a jackass, I kinda feel sorry for you."
This is different (Score:2)
The US *cutting* the budget of fear & safety stuff? The scanner manufacturer company must have done something to seriously piss off the US government...
Either that or they're getting ready to upgrade to the new tech that can detect explosives hidden inside body cavities, the APM X-RIBS (Anal Probe Mounted X-Ray Internal Body Scanner)
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There's only so much pork you can throw to your buddies before you derail the budget completely. They are greedy, but not suicidal.
The Wallet (Score:2, Insightful)
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Hey! If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have any sex life!
(but refrain from telling them, they don't seem to enjoy hearing about it... believe me that!)
Re:The Wallet (Score:4, Interesting)
The market really should decide. Some people want to feel safe, so if people are willing to pay to board a flight that has been screened, then the service should be available. But if people want to board a plane with no screening, that should also be available to them.
Re:The Wallet (Score:4, Interesting)
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The obvious counterargument to this is that even "unsafe" planes can be made to fly into buildings, and I'm not even a big fan of a lot of these TSA measures.
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Of course it is - it's just less accurate when you crash the plane with a bomb instead of the flight controls.
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Great! How much do the people on the unscreened flight have to pay me to make my building airplane-collision proof?
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You do realize we haven't NOT been screening for the duration, so you have no clue what the rate of incidents without screening might be. The GP wants to make all screening measures optional. I have no doubt lots of customers would take that deal. I say let them as long as their ticket also pays for the hefty insurance premium needed to pay renters and investors in damaged buildings.
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Terrible idea. Where do you think all of the hijackers, terrorists, etc, will go?
There needs to be a baseline of security on every flight. It just doesn't need to involve seeing me naked, or groping my balls.
I hope this passes (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate those machines. I travel a lot, and I'm worried that (1) the radiation levels are higher than the manufacturer claims, and (2) it does nothing to protect us from terrorism.
Machines can only go so far. You have to have intelligent, well trained and highly motivated people on the scene.
A friend who was traveling in China recently told me that when he went through airport security there, it felt like he was in a modern, free country. Then when he came back to American airports, it felt like he was in a backward dictatorship.
The fact that they won't let us bring a 4 oz. or 6oz. yogurt, or a bottle of pure water, or a tube of what is obviously toothpaste, does not make us safer. It inconveniences us. I love yogurt and it's ridiculous that it can't be carried through security. Go ahead, open it, sniff it. It's milk, not nitroglycerine, or a binary explosive. Water is water. Toothpaste is toothpaste.
I also miss traveling with my little flat Swiss card which contains a one inch knife and a scissors and a tweezers. It was so convenient and I used it all the time. They confiscated the knife twice, because I forgot to remove it from my backpack before traveling. So I just stopped carrying it at all.
They blanket ban these things because they don't trust their employees to be intelligent enough to recognize the difference between a dangerous weapon and a bottle of shampoo or Coke. We're not safer, we're just angrier and hungrier as a result.
Ok I'm getting off my soap box now :(
Re:I hope this passes (Score:5, Funny)
The fact that they won't let us bring a 4 oz. or 6oz. yogurt, or a bottle of pure water, or a tube of what is obviously toothpaste, does not make us safer. It inconveniences us. I love yogurt and it's ridiculous that it can't be carried through security. Go ahead, open it, sniff it. It's milk, not nitroglycerine, or a binary explosive.
I can't help but make a connection between this odd rant and your username.
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They blanket ban these things because they don't trust their employees to be intelligent enough to recognize the difference between a dangerous weapon and a bottle of shampoo or Coke.
Actually, either could make a handy weapon ...
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Anything can really. I can (and have) disassembled parts of my seat (or the one in front of me) and they are much more dangerous (size of a club) as a weapon. Much of the cheaper airlines have been cutting cost on maintenance to the absolute bare minimum and as a result the interiors are literally falling apart. Most of them have loose components on or around the chairs which can easily be bent off or loosened by hand, one of them I traveled in had duct-taped one of those plastic divider walls because it ha
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I hate those machines. I travel a lot, and I'm worried that (1) the radiation levels are higher than the manufacturer claims, and (2) it does nothing to protect us from terrorism.
If I were you, I'd stop worrying. I'd bet pretty heavily those are both facts.
In the case of 1, I am of the oipinion that the dose is probably still safe, at least compared to in flight radiation, but I am reasonably sure their BS handwaving arguments understate the effective dose at skin level, and that at risk people should be exempted from it (as should everyone else for your second point).
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LIKE he was in a backward dictatorship? (Score:3)
I went to Canada a few years ago. The Canadian customs officer I spoke to on the way in was friendly, polite, and asked me a few intelligent questions about my business there, and then waved me through. Coming back I was greeted by a squad of armed surly guards tha
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They blanket ban these things because they don't trust their employees to be intelligent enough to recognize the difference between a dangerous weapon and a bottle of shampoo or Coke.
Yes, and we see the same thing with the incremental proof of age at bars. First, it was left up to the judgement of the bartender. Then, policies were enacted that anyone who looked under 30 were blanket carded. Then 40. Now, at the airport bar at IAD owned by a large chain brewery, I happened to visit last week, they proudly announce that they require proof from everyone.
I am at present old enough that a hypothetical offspring of mine, born when I first became eligible to legally consume alcohol in the
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Actually, I think you fail to grasp the reason for the "incremental proof of age." If you selectively decide whom you are going to card, you run the risk of a discrimination lawsuit. You didn't card me because you thought I was underage, you carded me because I was black. You carded me because I was a woman and you wanted to find out my address to stalk me. You turned me away because I didn't have an ID even though I was obviously over 21, and that's age discrimination. Eventually the only option is to just
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Interesting idea that by providing a cutoff of any kind that involves subjective judgement, you're enabling unwarranted discrimination. We actually do want a certain kind of discimination here, so that those under the legal age are not served alcohol, but, if I understand the argument, you're suggesting that because the person behind the bar must decide on subjective grounds whom to ask for identification, there's potential for abuse. Perhaps valid, but I don't think it explains the incrementalism that's
Regarding the knife (Score:2)
Scissors are not banned [tsa.gov], so instead of bringing one knife, you just need to bring two of knives that combine into a pair of scissors.
One knife: banned. Two knives joined by a pivot: not banned.
Just for show (Score:4, Interesting)
A few Congressmen will make get a lot of press for this--defending our rights, standing up against the TSA for the common man, etc. Then at the end of the day, they'll back down and nothing will ever come of it. It's just to get themselves some positive press. They have no intention of really accomplishing anything.
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The decide against it by proposing it without the votes to pass it. It dies, they get the good press, and nothing comes of it. It's just for show.
Doing it for the wrong reasons (Score:2)
House Republicans are doing this to save money. They don't give a damn about privacy or the Fourth Amendment, the porn scanners are bad because they cost money.
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...the porn scanners are bad because they waste money.
Now I agree.
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Re:Doing it for the wrong reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes? Do you have a point that everyone doesn't know already? We also know that the scanners are useless. Being expensive and useless, is it wrong to try to save money?
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ouse Republicans are doing this to save money. They don't give a damn about privacy or the Fourth Amendment, the porn scanners are bad because they cost money.
You've got half the answer: they're bad because they cost money and they do not contribute to safety. If there were any evidence at all, or even particularly reasonable assumptions, that these things are an important improvement in safety, these Republicans would certainly not be spending their time, effort & political capital trying to shut them down.
If so, their wrong reasons are wrong (Score:2)
If they're trying to save money, they're looking in the wrong place. $76 million is a pittance. It's 1% of TSA's budget and .002% of the overall budget.
So maybe they're managing to do the right thing for the wrong reason for the wrong reason. I think that sentences parses and is meaningful, but it makes my head hurt.
The way I see it, they're not doing it either for the money or the privacy but because they heard a lot of people were disgruntled and they figured they could score some points. The actual r
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If they're trying to save money, they're looking in the wrong place. $76 million is a pittance. It's 1% of TSA's budget and .002% of the overall budget..
And, when you consider the number of terrorists they've caught with them, you can calculate the reasonable cost per terrorist caught to determine how economical these are for each terrorist captured: OK, $75,000,000 divided by 0 terrorists cost = *%^# stupid calculator must not be working right, keeps coming up with some weird error message.
Filter bubbles (Score:2)
Economizing (Score:2)
Latex gloves are cheaper.
Trying? (Score:2)
How can Congress be "trying?" Either only some of Congress is trying, and some is resisting, or they are doing it. Congress as a whole does as Yoda says.
More groping, less radiation (Score:2)
I guess this means more groping and less radiation.
If they were smart, they could turn it into an income source. Just hire really attractive guards, play some Barry White music, etc.
The House GOP is trying, not "Congress" (Score:3)
Thank God! (Score:2)
And the TSA responds... (Score:2)
No doubt the TSA will respond with the threat of more gate-rape.
had to happen sooner or later (Score:2)
They actually do something that makes sense.
Even a stopped (analog) clock is right twice a day. And boy is the GOP ever _analog_.
Reason - Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about time that Congress started overseeing this program. After standing in line for 50 minutes today at DFW going through security I can attest
at what a failure this whole program has been. Huge lines, angry passengers, inappropriate touching and civil rights violations all in the vain attempt to make people feel safe.
After I finally got past the ID/Boarding Pass Check what did they do? They deferred me through the Metal Detector instead of the Backscatter device. There were already three people in line for the Backscatter screening.
I'm sorry, this is one program that
a) It hasn't been proven safe. Scientists have called for an independent study and one hasn't been done. We're taking huge risks with people's health here by not doing the proper checks and analysis.
b) It hasn't been proven to stop anything. The TSA is always looking for "the last attack." Like taking off your shoes. Humm, after Richard Reid, has anybody tried attacking us with shoes except that incident with George W. Bush in Iraq a few years ago?
c) It delays people traveling through airports. You may as well stop everybody in line and ask them 20 questions ala the "Bridge Keeper" "What is your name? What is your Quest..."
d) Give up already, if all you want to do is give me a weekly proctology and rectal exam, fine just make sure you check the oil at the same time and I have these corns on my feet from standing in TSA lines I'd like you to look at as well. Just do the pat downs on everybody. That way everybody gets the sensation of the back of a hand in a rubber glove.
e) Stop with the gizmo widget fantasies. I'm sorry Secy. Napolitano was out of line for ordering these things to begin with and shame on congress for giving them the money, or were they funded out the the ARRA $787Billion?
I travel through airports every week and the lamest thing of all? Your Congressmen and Senators don't go through any of that. They have private entrances, they get VIP treatment. They need to go through the same hassles, stand in the same lines and deal with the same rubber gloves all without their special VIP identification. I'm sure if Al Franken or Kay Bailey Hutchinson had to go through this shit there would be some changes!
I saw people freak out today because they missed their flights, I saw airline counter agents have to work and rebook people and re-route them all in the name of making them safe when they fly. Bullshit! There's probably a higher probability that a Canadian Goose will down my plane than a terrorist.
Congress needs to step up and do the right thing here and step in where these retards at DHS have clearly overstepped their bounds.
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I flew recently, the first time in a while.
At Logan airport in Boston, MA I saw the full body scanner. They didn't make me go through it, no anyone else I was with.
We went through the metal detector right next to it.
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I guess they wouldnt like it if you explained that you preferred for a woman to hold your penis . I would opt out of the xray for a handjob too!
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Dogs ARE better, but they don't have lobbyists. More money to be made selling a tech solution. Therefore we ended up with the most expensive solution, not the best.