Free floating rage is focusing lately on the ever-intrusive body searches at airlines.  It began to amp up last week with new devices coming on line, and reports of assaultive groping of those who chose to “opt out.”

Screening Protests Grow as Holiday Crunch Looms

On Nov. 1, screeners began using a far more invasive form of procedure for all pat-downs — in which women’s breasts and all passengers’ genital areas are patted firmly. Since that change happened to coincide with the accelerated introduction of the body scanning machines, many fliers began expressing their dismay on blogs, fanning anti-T.S.A. reactions.

A traveler named John Tyner, for example, posted a detailed account of being detained at the San Diego airport when he tried to leave after declining a body scan. Mr. Tyner recorded the encounter, in which person who appeared to be a T.S.A. screener insisted that he undergo a “groin check.” That account, and that indelicate term, quickly went viral.

Jane Hamsher has a time line and a show of connection for the purveyors of these devices and those who pass the laws mandating them…

Gizmodo has released 100 scans of some 35,000 illegally scans held by Florida at a Federal Courthouse.  [These are not very revealing, the newer devices certainly are.  But the issue is privacy and the ease with which these promises to respect it are made, and broken.]

This particular invasion of privacy is an invasion in itself but also a marker of the much wider slide into a mostly participatory repressive state in the name of protecting us from un-nameable terrorism.  Orwell’s inspiration for 1984 — which he bollixed in the telling– was that people would agree to enter into authoritarian states for reasons they had persuaded themselves were necessary.  The defeat of the enemy demands that we are better at carrying out the threats the enemy promises us; we must be ‘worse’ than the enemy… and so it goes….

Print PDF