I believe it was Scott Adams who suggested that one woman should take one for the team and build a bomb into her bra. Once the TSA realizes that they would have to require each woman to remove her bra while passing through airport security, the whole thing would unravel pretty quickly.
Yeah, or we'll all have to arrive two hours early and get strip-searched if we want to get on a plane. Think it couldn't happen? I wouldn't bet against it.
You're already getting strip searched before you board planes; they're just using millimeter wave scans to do it. People really need to start calling these things what they are: electronic strip search machines.
"People really need to start calling these things what they are: electronic strip search machines."
That will never happen. Given the choice between two methods of searches, both of which have equal safety outcomes, people prefer the strip search over the non-invasive one.
Jeffrey Rosen wrote an entire book about this phenomenon; the book is The Naked Crowd. You can read the story, which is on page 1 of the book, via the Amazon sample:
Read it. Response: the same sample of people would support repealing the 4th Amendment, because "people who have nothing to hide have nothing to be afraid of" (logic used by the people the author talked to). Meanwhile, their mothers are being imaged naked when they fly out to see their grandkids. No, I don't think everyone is OK with this. I think people don't yet fully comprehend what the machines do.
I'm sorry. What? The fact that there's a potential digital image of my strip search defuses the embarassment aspect of it? The reason there's no righteous indignation over them is that normal people don't actually know what the devices are doing.
The fact that there's a potential digital image of my strip search defuses the embarassment aspect of it?
Uhh, yes. Embarrassment is an irrational, emotional response to a situation. When there is no "situation" - you're no longer in physical proximity to someone with authority over you, who is demanding you do something you don't want to do - there's no embarrassment. I can understand if you object based on principle, but I doubt you're actually embarrassed by it.
No, my objection based on my assumption that regardless of whether they store images today, 10 years from now when we've socialized the idea of electronic strip searches, we will end up storing them, and some douchebag minimum wage TSA dead-ender is going to circulate them on the Internet.
There's principles here too, but I don't need to evoke them.
Then I'm going to differentiate between actually being embarrassed and rationally anticipating potential future embarrassment. And I think that's indistinguishable from objecting on principle.
