Quote of the day: TSA and Stalin

Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s notorious secret police chief, once said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” The T.S.A. seems to operate on the basis of an adapted maxim: “Show me the security check and I’ll find you the excuse.”

That was Roger Cohen in his NY Times column (ht).

I can't understand how such a madness called the TSA can continue despite all the protests.  I suppose if the ACLU can't stop the madness, then ... hey, join the ACLU

This just gets better, er, worse:

There are now about 400 full-body scanners, set to grow to 1,000 next year. One of the people pushing them most energetically is Michael Chertoff, the former Secretary of Homeland Security.

Oh crap!
Why stop at the airports?  We can start installing them in malls, government buildings, and in the classrooms too!

And, of course, the dark irony here that the company behind these TSA porn scanners is Rapiscan!
Cohen writes:

Rapiscan: Say the name slowly. It conjures up a sinister science fiction. When a government has a right to invade the bodies of its citizens, security has trumped freedom.

Woody Allen predicted the TSA scan porn ... kinda :)

In providing this hilarious Woody Allen video clip (from Bananas), Reason notes that all along we had the "solution to the problems posed by the underwear bomber" :)

Photo of the day: not from Playboy :)

The elections ended.  I wondered then where the next source for comedy would come from, and the TSA porn happens.

This meme is like the cops/doughnut and Bill Clinton/sex themed jokes--I will keep laughing away forever :)

The photo on the right is from the Denver Post (ht).  Think again: do you really want to fly, ever?

Have the terrorists exposed America's Achilles heel?

Ever since the incidents of 9/11, the US has been on a warpath in the domestic front--with security.  Looking back, it now seems like the disgusting coinage of "homeland security" was nothing trivial.  It has evolved into an uncontrollable police state, writes Megan McArdle:

It seems to me that the TSA ratchets up the security the way a government in a police state would.  Perhaps there are some public deliberations that I'm missing, but from the perspective of a passenger, there's no attempt to achieve balance.  There's simply a progressive ratcheting of our liberty ever downward.  Did Richard Reid try to put explosives in his shoes?  Then we must have our shoes scanned--even infant shoes too small to blow anything up.  Did someone else attempt to set his underwear on fire?  Well, if you can't strip them down to their skivvies for a check, do the next best thing:  find a machine that does it virtually.

Somehow, this seems like a questionable reaction to two attacks that failed.  Especially since they failed for the same reason that any similar attack is likely to fail:  the amount of explosives you can smuggle in your underwear or shoes is necessarily small, meaning that you need to be in the cabin to detonate them if you want to be sure that you'll bring the plane down.  And it's really hard to set your underwear, or your shoes, on fire without your fellow passengers noticing.  In Asia, I've never been required to have my shoes scanned--not even to get on a US bound flight.  And yet, we have not been confronted with a rash of exploding planes out of Taipei or Saigon.

The TSA seems to have assumed that the ratchet could keep moving downward indefinitely (notice that they never seem to find ways to make searches less invasive and annoying.)  I think that the backscatter/invasive search deployment may finally have gone too far--although I freely admit that this may be wishful thinking.

Yes, it is wishful thinking.  Because, as in police states, we the people comply without protest.

Have the TSA screenings ever resulted in would-be terrorists being apprehended?

Citing national-security concerns, the TSA will not point to any specific cases in which a screener stopped a would-be terrorist at a checkpoint. Nonaffiliated security experts, such as Bruce Schneier (who coined the term "security theater") argue that that's because this has never happened.

Anything else on the efficacy of the TSA?

What's more, the GAO noted that at least 16 individuals later accused of involvement in terrorist plots flew 23 different times through U.S. airports since 2004, but TSA behavior-detection officers didn't sniff out any of them.
What these numbers don't get at is whether the TSA airport screeners prevent terrorist attacks through their very existence—deterring plots by hanging around. This is quite probably the case, but it's not obvious that they prevent any more attacks than the private contractors who handled checkpoints before the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001 went into effect.

Cartoon of the day: TSA strip searches

A gift that keeps on giving ... in the cartoon world :)

Colbert analyzes the TSA porn

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
TSA Full-Body Scanners - Jeffrey Goldberg
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

TSA all over on Twitter: very funny :)

I suppose "Don't touch my junk" will be way more viral than "Don't tase me, bro" ... Twitter has been a godsend in how we are able to get our frustrations out, and sometimes in a funny way.  Here are some I came across:

Janet Napolitano's memoirs: The Audacity of Grope
We're having a debate over placing tip buckets next to the groping station
It's not a grope.  It is a freedom pat.
TSA fortune cookie: You will be touched in a special way
Why is TSA like AT&T? They both want to reach out and touch someone
Another false positive: it wasn't a bomb but a bad case of hemorrhoids

Ok. Will stop here.

ACLU has a site up and running, to collect particulars on TSA abuse.  Click here if you want to report your experience.

Scrotal terrorism versus automobile fatalities

Our preoccupation with screening passengers in the airports of the world, and the costs associated with it, has public policy implications that are not being debated enough. 

(BTW, the problem with the recent terrorist from Nigeria was more a failure to act on the intel reports than of the TSA itself.  After all, this was a guy who should not have been allowed to have a US visa in the first place!)

Heather Mac Donald writes:

In 2000, commercial jets carried 1.09 billion people on 18 million flights, according to a no-longer-linkable Boeing document.   Assuming that the number of flyers has not increased since then, that makes for one would-be underwear bomber out of about 10 billion travelers over the last decade.  Does that record represent success or failure?  Are we jacking up physical security measures on planes and in airports because we think that the risk of another underwear bomber has risen since Dec. 25, or because we think that our record of prevention over the last decade was inadequate?   The notion that we should be able to protect against every terrorist incident is understandable, and announcing that we are not going to try to stop every such incident is unthinkable, though former DHS Secretary Chertoff did make tentative noises in that direction regarding cargo screening.  But it’s still intriguing to me why dying in a terrorist-induced airplane crash has a greater hold on the public imagination than driving on the highway, where there are about 40,000 fatalities in the U.S. a year, much higher on a per-mile basis than the number of deaths from non-terror-induced airline crashes, of which there are many more than terror incidents.

And here is Bill Maher (ht):

Why we loathe flying, sometimes .....

The NY Times:

The department has sent Continental Airlines a letter asking for details on Continental Express Flight 2816, which left Houston at 9:23 p.m. Friday but didn't arrive at its destination in Minneapolis until after 11 a.m. Saturday.

In between, the small airliner spent nearly seven hours sitting on the tarmac in Rochester, where it had been diverted because of thunderstorms, before passengers were allowed to go inside an airport terminal. Two and a half hours after disembarking, passengers reboarded the same plane and were flown to Minneapolis.

''Reasonable people are outraged at the idea of being stuck on a small plane for seven hours,'' LaHood wrote in a column posted online. ''Flyers and those who are considering flying want to know that should a delay occur, they will be treated respectfully.''

Well, this is not the first time something like this has happened. A few months ago, in January, a planeload of passengers from Mexico, on their way to Seattle, suffered equally--or more:

Dozens of angry passengers were cooped up for 16 hours in an AeroMexico plane, after their flight was diverted from Seattle to Portland International Airport.

Flight 670 arrived at PDX about 7:40 p.m. on Tuesday and then sat at a gate for more than four hours after being turned away from Sea-Tac Airport because of heavy fog, said Kama Simonds, spokeswoman for the Port of Portland, which runs PDX.

Yes, fog at SeaTac is understandable. But, after the plane and passengers staying put for hours in the plane, guess what happened?

paramedics who boarded to assist two ailing passengers — one with a heart problem — found a cabinful of hungry people.

"There was no food left," she said.

The paramedics went to a local McDonald's and bought enough Big Mac meals for everyone onboard.

So, whatever happened to the passengers?

passengers weren't allowed off the plane in Portland, officials said, because no customs agents were available to process the passengers.

Eventually, the plane went back to Mexico, and then it returned to the United States to complete the flight to Seattle.

I might have taken the option of getting arrested, because of the little bit of claustrophobia that I have!