Debate grows over flyer security vs. privacy

• Phunkie wrote on 2010-11-22 19:51

  Quote from Chillax;224631:

  It's a few seconds (note, few seconds, not constant exposure) of radiation, and your body has mechanisms to reverse mutations. I think you're getting too hung up about X-ray radiation, which is a general term from simple body scans to MRIs. If you are really that worried, take your cell phone out of your pocket and put it in a man-purse or something.

  
  
  It's not about the X-rays or the pat-downs.
  
  It's about our rights, man.
  
  If we don't defend them, they will take them away from us, one by one. We need to defend our rights.
  
  These searches are ridiculous. Innocent before proven guilty. This treats us all like we're convicts carrying guns or whatnot. And yes, security is important, but what's the limit?
  
  Why bring a case upon a man who refused to be groped around his genitals? He left the airport, if you saw the video.
  
  There's no need for this.
  
  It's about my right to privacy. No one can tell me to take off my clothes and search me without a warrant for arrest. No one can touch me all over without a warrant for arrest.
• Chillax wrote on 2010-11-22 19:54

  Quote from Phunkie;224635:

  It's not about the X-rays or the pat-downs.
  
  It's about our rights, man.
  
  If we don't defend them, they will take them away from us, one by one. We need to defend our rights.
  
  These searches are ridiculous.

  
  
  Then what would you propose airport security do? Can you think of a more reasonable way to prevent terrorists from using bombs hidden in private areas?
• Phunkie wrote on 2010-11-22 19:56

  Quote from Chillax;224640:

  Then what would you propose airport security do? Can you think of a more reasonable way to prevent terrorists from using bombs hidden in private areas?

  
  
  What happened to the good ol' metal detectors that they're still using in many airports today?
  
  To carefully searching people's bodies, instead of aggressively lifting their breasts and even touching them in between their private parts? Thighs are fine, but groping??
  
  Come on now.
• Chillax wrote on 2010-11-22 20:01

  Quote from Phunkie;224644:

  What happened to the good ol' metal detectors that they're still using in many airports today?
  
  To carefully searching people's bodies, instead of aggressively lifting their breasts and even touching them in between their private parts? Thighs are fine, but groping??
  
  Come on now.

  
  
  Unfortunately, metal detectors only detect, well, metal. They don't register chemicals that have been hidden away, which can be assembled to make a bomb. I don't agree with pat-downs, but I don't see why there is so much fuss about X-ray scanners.
• Phunkie wrote on 2010-11-22 20:35
  There's a lot of fuss because there are sick people in this world, Chillax.
  
  The TSA says the images aren't saved, but here's a link talking about how airport employees in Lagos have been caught using full body scanner images as a type of porn.
  
  So much for privacy and claims that these machines couldn't "save" the images.
  
  

  They use the machines, installed in the wake of the Farouk AbdulMutallab affair, to watch the naked images of female passengers for fun.

  
  
  And gosh,
  
  

  This doesn't only concern genitals but body size, body shape and other things like evidence of mastectomies, colostomy appliances or catheter tubes. These are very personal things that people have every right to keep private and personal, aside from the modesty consideration of not wanting to be naked.

  
  
  Airport X-ray labelled strip search - World - smh.com.au
  
  
  Here, the TSA forced a cancer survivor to show her prosthetic breast.
  
  

  The TSA screener "put her full hand on my breast and said, 'What is this?' " Bossi told the station. "And I said, 'It's my prosthesis because I've had breast cancer.' And she said, 'Well, you'll need to show me that.' "
  
  Bossi said she removed the prosthetic from her bra. She did not take the name of the agent, she said, "because it was just so horrific of an experience, I couldn't believe someone had done that to me. I'm a flight attendant. I was just trying to get to work."

  
  
  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40278427/ns/travel-news
  
  
  Here,
  
  

  A Michigan man who survived bladder cancer in 2007 has now been forced to survive humiliation at the hands of the TSA, whose airport screeners spilled urine on him during a recent security check at Detroit's airport.
  
  I tried to warn him that he would hit the bag and break the seal on my bag, but he ignored me," Sawyer said. "Sure enough, the seal was broken and urine started dribbling down my shirt and my leg and into my pants."

  
  
  http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/tsa-pat-down-leaves-passenger-thomas-sawyer-covered-in-urine/19727469
  
  
  Here, the TSA apologizes for forcing boy heading to Disney to remove leg braces.
  
  

  The Transportation Security Administration says a developmentally delayed boy heading to Orlando for a fourth-birthday celebration at Walt Disney World should not have been forced to remove his leg braces during an airport-security screening in Philadelphia in March, a Web site is reporting.

  
  
  

  As a result, the boy wears custom-made leg braces made of metal and hardened plastic.
  
  After an alarm went off, a TSA screener said the braces had to come off and the boy had to walk on his own, the column says.
  
  The family complied, but they remain upset. The father contacted columnist Daniel Rubin last week about the incident.

  
  
  http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2010-02-16/news/os-tsa-apologizes-boy-leg-braces-disney-20100216_1_braces-tsa-boy-s-father
  
  
  
  This is unnecessary and absolutely humiliating. It is an invasion of privacy. And it needs to change.
• Zid wrote on 2010-11-23 00:25
  How do you propose we do something about airport threats then? There are as many support against this kind of pat-downs/X-ray usage as there are support of trying to protect ourselves and others in airports.
  
  I don't think people can just protest against this without a solution to fix both sides. Else, it'll get nowhere.
• Adelynn wrote on 2010-11-23 01:22
  I guess I'll pick radiation. I don't want to be groped. Especially because it will happen when someone I know is near me..x.x
• Zid wrote on 2010-11-23 02:33
  Follow-up:
  
  

  Quote from RAY HENRY, Associated Press:

  ATLANTA – The nation's airport security chief pleaded with Thanksgiving travelers for understanding and urged them not to boycott full-body scans on Wednesday, lest their protest snarl what is already one of the busiest, most stressful flying days of the year.
  
  Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole said Monday that such delaying actions would only "tie up people who want to go home and see their loved ones."
  
  "We all wish we lived in a world where security procedures at airports weren't necessary," he said, "but that just isn't the case."
  
  He noted the alleged attempt by a Nigerian with explosives in his underwear to bring down a plane over Detroit last Christmas.
  
  Despite tough talk on the Internet, there was little if any indication of a passenger revolt Monday at many major U.S. airports, with very few people declining the X-ray scan that can peer through their clothes. Those who refuse are subject to a pat-down search that includes the crotch and chest.
  
  Many travelers said that the scans and the pat-down were not much of an inconvenience, and that the stepped-up measures made them feel safer and were, in any case, unavoidable.
  
  "Whatever keeps the country safe, I just don't have a problem with," Leah Martin, 50, of Houston, said as she waited to go through security at the Atlanta airport.
  
  At Chicago's O'Hare Airport, Gehno Sanchez, a 38-year-old from San Francisco who works in marketing, said he doesn't mind the full-body scans. "I mean, they may make you feel like a criminal for a minute, but I'd rather do that than someone touching me," he said.
  
  A loosely organized Internet campaign is urging people to refuse the scans on Wednesday in what is being called National Opt-Out Day. The extra time needed to pat down people could cause a cascade of delays at dozens of major airports, including those in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Atlanta.
  
  "Just one or two recalcitrant passengers at an airport is all it takes to cause huge delays," said Paul Ruden, a spokesman for the American Society of Travel Agents, which has warned its more than 8,000 members about delays. "It doesn't take much to mess things up anyway."
  
  More than 400 imaging units are being used at about 70 airports. Since the new procedures began Nov. 1, 34 million travelers have gone through checkpoints and less than 3 percent are patted down, according to the TSA.
  
  At the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said the government is "desperately" trying to balance security and privacy and will take the public's concerns and complaints into account as it evaluates the new, more stringent boarding checks.
  
  The American Civil Liberties Union has received more than 600 complaints over three weeks from passengers who say they were subjected to humiliating pat-downs at U.S. airports, and the pace is accelerating, according to ACLU legislative counsel Christopher Calabrese.
  
  "It really drives home how invasive it is and unhappy they are," he said.
  
  Ricky D. McCoy, a TSA screener and president of a union local in Illinois and Wisconsin, said the atmosphere has changed in the past two weeks for officers in his region. Since word of the pat-downs hit the headlines, officers have been punched, pushed or shoved six times after they explained what would be happening, McCoy said.
  
  "We have major problems because basically TSA never educated the public on what was going on," he said. "Our agency pretty much just threw the new search techniques out there."
  
  Stories of alleged heavy-handed treatment by TSA agents captured people's imagination.
  
  A bladder cancer survivor from Michigan who wears a bag that collects his urine said its contents spilled on his clothing after a security agent at a Detroit airport patted him down roughly.
  
  Tom Sawyer, a 61-year-old retired special education teacher, said the Nov. 7 experience left him in tears. "I was absolutely humiliated. I couldn't even speak," he told MSNBC.com.
  
  During an appearance on CBS, the TSA's Pistole expressed "great concern over anybody who feels like they have not been treated properly or had something embarrassing" happen.
  
  A video showing a shirtless young boy resisting a pat-down at Salt Lake City's airport has become a YouTube sensation and led to demands for an investigation from Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, an outspoken critic of TSA screening methods. The video of the unidentified boy was shot Friday by a bystander with a cell phone.
  
  The TSA said in a blog posting that nobody has to disrobe at an airport checkpoint apart from removing shoes and jackets. According to the TSA, the boy was being searched because he triggered an alarm inside a metal detector, and his father removed the youngster's shirt to speed up the screening.
  
  "That's it. No complaints were filed and the father was standing by his son for the entire procedure," said the posting by "Blogger Bob" of the TSA Blog Team.
  
  The boycott campaign was launched Nov. 8 by Brian Sodergren, who lives in Ashburn, Va., and works in the health care industry.
  
  "I just don't think the government has the right to look under people's clothes with no reasonable cause, no suspicion other than purchasing a plane ticket," he said in an interview with The Associated Press.
  
  He said he has no idea how many passengers plan to opt out, but added: "I am absolutely amazed at the response and how people have taken to it. I never would have predicted it. I think it hit a nerve."
  
  In the meantime, security lines appeared to move briskly at many airports.
  
  Frank Bell, 71, of Norfolk, Conn., said he took off his shoes and passed through a scanner at New York's Kennedy Airport — and wasn't even sure whether it was one of the full-body machines.
  
  "It was absolutely nothing," he said. "If there was something that was supposed to tell what sex I was, I wasn't aware of it."
  
  ___
  
  Associated Press writers Julie Pace, Sarah Brumfield and Joan Lowy in Washington; Russell Contreras in Boston; Dan Elliott in Denver; Karen Matthews in New York; and Sophia Tareen in Chicago also contributed to this report.

• Chillax wrote on 2010-11-23 02:44

  Quote from Phunkie;224709:

  There's a lot of fuss because there are sick people in this world, Chillax.

  
  
  Well, then the TSA needs to do more investigation into the kind of people they hire and the kind of methods that will allow the machine to automatically delete photos of scanned passengers. However, if they do make amendments to the scanner and change it so private parts are really blurred and the scan photos are deleted like the TSA said they would be, then I see no reason why people should be against the scanner.
• Time wrote on 2010-11-23 02:47
  If they get rid of this, and someone brings something bad on a plane, and causes something horrible to happen, then everyone will start complaining about how its not safe, and the government isn't doing enough.
  
  I dont support it, and Im not against it, I dont fly, but this is the way I see it.
• starpaw7 wrote on 2010-11-26 21:46
  I wonder how it'll go here, with me going to the airport in a month :what:
  
  

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  This seems interesting; I feel like buying both to see how it will go
• Chillax wrote on 2010-11-27 04:44

  Quote from starpaw7;229717:

  I wonder how it'll go here, with me going to the airport in a month :what:
  
  

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  This seems interesting; I feel like buying both to see how it will go

  
  
  inb4 you fail the metal detector test and have that taken off before you get into the scanner.
• TA wrote on 2010-11-28 08:44
  I definitely think it's too much.
• Phunkie wrote on 2010-11-28 09:25
  Also, these scanners do not detect certain liquids and certain plastics, so it's pretty easy to bring bomb materials aboard an airplane even with these measures.
  
  + nothing inside of your body is scanned. Who's to say that terrorists don't stick materials up their rectum?
  
  What's next? Cavity searches?
• Cucurbita wrote on 2010-11-28 17:16

  Quote from Phunkie;231124:

  Also, these scanners do not detect certain liquids and certain plastics, so it's pretty easy to bring bomb materials aboard an airplane even with these measures.
  
  + nothing inside of your body is scanned. Who's to say that terrorists don't stick materials up their rectum?
  
  What's next? Cavity searches?

  
  
  There are about 50 different ways to create your own tiny explosives or weapons with the materials you can get in the stores once you pass security. Thats all I will say.
  
  [video=youtube;q3yaqq9Jjb4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3yaqq9Jjb4
  [/video]