http://www.wfaa.com/news/local/Fort...pat-down-at-Dallas-Love-Field--162983586.html Now can we abolish the TSA?
As TSA harassment goes, that's actually fairly mild. No genital groping, no detention, and they even gave back her stuff they initially threw away.
$100 million intrusion detection grid at JFK defeated by some drunk dude with a broke down jetski. I like how they arrested him because, you know.. Our super important detection grid!!
Senate report on DHS's counter-terrorism information fusion centers: "It's a bunch of crap!" $60 billion well spent.
"The Homeland Security Department could not say for sure how much federal money had been spent on the centers, the subcommittee found, providing a range of between $289 million to $1.4 billion." While the above is darkly hilarious in its own way I went looking for a figure because $60 billion sounded weird. EDIT: Text from report:
To be pedantic, only 22% of the 60 billion goes to FEMA, and 13% to the TSA. Pages 23 and 25 shows the breakdown.
Hey um. This is gonna sound a little tinfoil hatty, but can anyone recall major opposition to the TSA on the right before about mid-2010? It seems like the noise about it got much louder then, right about the time that the TSA declared its intent to unionize, and every TSA protest site I see seems to be shouting that we should privatize security, not make it less intrusive. Am I out in left field, here?
Naked scanners are gone! http://gizmodo.com/5976989/tsa-to-remove-naked image-scanners-from-us-airports Because the company couldn't write software to make them not-naked scanners.
So more groping, then, I guess. Still, getting rid of those backscatter scanners is good news. I've been through them a few times and it's embarrassing as hell.
The TSA is a fucking embarrassment. They can't pick a security contractor to give their pork to that has even one competent software engineer on staff? Well, a predictable embarrassment, at least.
I thought the pat downs were just punishment for not acquiescing to authority and going through the naked scanners. No naked scanners, no need for punishment, so no pat downs. Am I wrong?
I care about the security circus, I care about the loss of freedom for no reason, I care about the fucking time wated trying to get on a plane and I care about the possible health risks... Strangers looking at my black and white junk is low on the list of stuff I care about.
I can't answer that, because I don't know. Maybe the groping will go away, or maybe it will increase due to the lack of scanners. More random pat-downs, instead of more random scanning, would be my guess. The TSA has been a barrel of shit forever, why stop now?
The airport we lived near in Cali didn't have scanners for the longest time, so they did random pat-downs instead. So yes, assume there will still be pat-downs.
I could do a better job than the TSA with one quarter of the money and all college sophomores currently sentenced to community service. Not to mention a sexier, more respectful, faster job.
If there was even a case where it should have turned out to be a massively successful false flag operation, that would be it. I mean, come on; it's called Rapiscan, it might give you cancer, and it lets the TSA agents look at your wife's naked body and save pics to a thumb drive. (And for what it's worth, it would be really easy to engineer a system that didn't permit that, ever at all.) But nope. :(
Seriously. I think I posted about the name when I was still at Qt3 (or maybe here, I don't remember), and just went BUUHHHH?! Because, in my head, I'm pronouncing it as Rapeyscan, even though I'm guessing it's supposed to be a clever take on Rapid Scan. Whoever came up with that clearly didn't think it through enough.
I look forward to reading the news about the TSA handing the government a nice, fat check back for the budgetary surplus they have when they return the Rapiscan machines to Rapiscan for a full refund! Oh, wait, I'm being informed that that will never happen and the TSA is a huge waste of taxpayer money and Jesus fucking Christ people get the fuck over your paranoia already and cut these assholes loose. It kills me that congress throws back and forth things like getting rid of the EPA and the department of education, but no one will touch the TSA because there's a possibility that a brown person might carve a knife out of a potato and use it to run an airplane into an American flag factory.
I agree, but thanks to the way our culture handles gender it's a bigger deal for the ladyfolk. [Edit: By which I mean that it's easier for us because it's almost celebrated for a guy to be all "whatevs, you want to ogle my wrinkly danglebits, go nuts" but a woman is expected to be shamed and protect her vulnerable bidness from prying eyes that devalue the asset her father/husband has invested in. God damnit, gender is dumb :( ] Also, coming back into the country recently my co-worker got tabbed for Super Bonus Customs thanks to the mouthbreathing troglodyte at the border. Imagine my shock when he told me he was the only white guy in the room they send you to.
It certainly doesn't help that the "full pat-down" includes lifting the underwire of the bra to make sure there isn't anything hidden there. As far as I know, there aren't TSA agents sticking their hands into the waistband of man underpants. Seriously wtf is wrong with our country ugh.
Oh, they stick their hands in the waistband of man undies. I remember watching a pat down or two that did just that! Honestly, my biggest problem with RAPISCAN (srsly that name) was actually that it takes for-fucking-ever for people to go through as compared to a normal goddamn metal detector. Metal detectors are simple. Stride through. Done! Oh, you still get the dipshits who forget to take off their belt or something even more rage inducing (like forgetting to put their phone in the X-ray bin), but with the stupid naked scanners you have those dipshits AND people being all DERP HOW U STAND IN THIS and you have to pose and pause and SERIOUSLY PEOPLE MOVE MOVE MOVE
I fly stand-by so getting rid of the TSA would allow all those buffoons who come late and get stuck in security lines to actually make it the plane on time. If that happened I'd never be able to fly anywhere for pocket change! Oh the humanity!
The L3 ProVision scanners are staying. Those are the ones that you get in like a transporter and have the rotating scanner. It's only the Rapiscan machines, the much less fancy looking ones where you stand between 2 roadie cases, that are being axed. L-3, when asked by the TSA to implement a "foreign item automatic recognition" system were able to code that up. Rapiscan couldn't. So now, the L-3 machines will just display little red box on a generic cartoon silhouette for things that don't look right. It also uses millimeter-wave radar, not X-Ray, so they're safer. I imagine the raw image is still there somewhere, but I suspect not available to general users. I do find it funny that I haven't seen the L-3 logo on the scanners recently though, just the ProVision logo. (Full disclosure: I used to work for a completely different division of L-3 that had nothing to do with the scanners).
Those are the ones that finally went into the airport we used to live near. Everyone went through it (there was only one security line; it's a small airport) but the scan is really quick. And really, the displays are much better than the Rapiscan. Still not thrilled about them, but at least I'm not basically reduced to naked to whoever is watching the screen.
One of these days you assholes will learn not to hotlink images while I'm supposed to be pounding the Kraken with Nute:
