Gettin' Frisky at Airports

Wanna get frisked by a $17,000 a year airport security guy/gal? Talk about a cheap thrill. The minimum wage for a TSA staffer is a tad over $17k. If you protest going through the new government approved X-ray screening devices coming to an airport near you (already in a few cities), then you have two alternatives:

1. subject yourself to up-close and very personal searches
2. drive your car, take a taxi, ride a bus, or hitch a ride

No doubt, you've followed on-line, on the tube, and in the newspapers, the reports of the one young guy who vehemently protested the X-rayed screening as well as the body search.  If not, check it out at your convenience:  http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/11/15/california.airport.security/index.html

Ok, so you say "no big deal". In the X-ray screening, this is what the unseen TSA screeners see:

The TSA bureaucrats say these images will NOT be saved, and no names will be attached to them.

I believe them, don't you?

From GIZMOTO:

 

One Hundred Naked Citizens: One Hundred Leaked Body Scans

At the heart of the controversy over "body scanners" is a promise: The images of our naked bodies will never be public. U.S. Marshals in a Florida Federal courthouse saved 35,000 images on their scanner. These are those images.
A Gizmodo investigation has revealed 100 of the photographs saved by the Gen 2 millimeter wave scanner from Brijot Imaging Systems, Inc., obtained by a FOIA request after it was recently revealed that U.S. Marshals operating the machine in the Orlando, Florida courthouse had improperly-perhaps illegally-saved images of the scans of public servants and private citizens.
We understand that it will be controversial to release these photographs. But identifying features have been eliminated. And fortunately for those who walked through the scanner in Florida last year, this mismanaged machine used the less embarrassing imaging technique.
Yet the leaking of these photographs demonstrates the security limitations of not just this particular machine, but millimeter wave and x-ray backscatter body scanners operated by federal employees in our courthouses and by TSA officers in airports across the country. That we can see these images today almost guarantees that others will be seeing similar images in the
future. If you're lucky, it might even be a picture of you or your family.

If you think that the naked images of a personality, i.e. movie star, won't be sold to a tabloid, then you really need to visit the supermarket. Check out the reading material while you wait to pay for your groceries.
Back to the normal among us. What part of your privacy are you willing to sacrifice? I doubt there's anyone who doesn't want to "fly safe", knowing that our government has taken "all reasonable means" to make sure that is the case. We also want to be safe and secure in our homes, in our cars, and on out boats. But, at what personal sacrifices of privacy does government intervention become ridiculous? We could, after all, build cars that cannot be blown up by bombs,  boats that would never sink, and houses that are burglar proof. But, the cost and inconvenience of such an undertaking would take away all of our fun. Don't even mention the expense. That's not what America is about.

Back to the grope-and-grin processes. I have my doubts that all of us will be treated equally at the screening points. I doubt, seriously, that our TSA guys will be groping on a fully "costumed" foreign national. You know what I men. After all, that would not be politically incorrect, and the State Department, the President's press secretary, and France would have a hissy-fit.. But, goodness sakes. Your mothers, grandmothers, sisters and daughters are all fair game. It's like the guy in the video said: this is nothing more than sexual assault. He's right. In North Carolina (and, I'm sure many other states), anyone groping another's private areas are indeed likely to be arrested.