Your Morning TSA Security Round-Up

And now the media meme has become: All you hysterics are so full of shit.

New York Times—A Media False Alarm Over the T.S.A.: "If a squadron of mad scientists surrounded by supercomputers gathered in a laboratory to try to conjure a single news topic that would blow up large, they could not touch the T.S.A. pat-down story. ... But then, in the real world, nothing happened."

Washington Post—TSA says Thanksgiving travel went smoothly: "TSA plans to release final details later today, but if statistics from last Wednesday are any indication, things should have gone well over the weekend."

ABC—Were concerns over TSA security procedures hype? Travelers say 'No Problem': "Despite concerns earlier in the week about the pat downs and body scans causing back ups, things seemed to go off without a hitch."

NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT! NOTHING TO SEE HERE! MOVE ALONG!

Except: "So far, more than 400 scanners have been deployed at 70 airports around the country, with plans for some 1,000 to be installed as the system is fully enforced."

And: "The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has received over 900 complaints in the month of November from travelers who have been subjected to the Transportation Security Authority's (TSA) new 'enhanced' screening procedures."

Also this little thing: "[Fred H. Cate, privacy expert in the Indiana University] said that the new search policies violate long-held social and legal norms about personal privacy. Even though searches might detect wrongdoing, we reject them on the basis that the 'solution' is worse than the 'problem'."

I suspect, with no evidence to back up my suspicion aside from a lifetime of observation about how things like this play out, that TSA employees were told to turn it down a notch during the holiday weekend, possibly through the holiday season, and that when the system starts being "fully enforced" with 1,000 scanners across the nation, whatever objections there are will be buried beneath ten metric fucktons of "Oh, we already did that story and decided anyone who complains is a hysterical traitor."

Anyway, it's certainly been interesting watching privileged white men get OUTRAGED! about being treated like women, and men of color, get treated all the time. Yeah, it's not fun having your body treated as public property, groped without your explicit consent, searched without cause, and exposed to a government-sanctioned experiment that may have negative physical ramifications, and then being dismissed as an overwrought hysteric who's just looking for something to get mad about, is it?

I'm sure it's too much to ask that these gentlemen remember that the next time they're inclined to tell a woman, or a man of color, to suck it up and stop whining about how they're treated—and how that treatment affects their quality of life, sense of self, and regard for the sincerity of promises made about equality in this alleged land of the free.