(ABC News) Earlier this month in light of the mail bomb incident, I made the statement that I believe that airport security needs to be tightened. However, I'm not supportive of the tactics that the TSA chief supports in screening passengers that board airplanes. John Pistole, the head of the Transportation Security Administration, yesterday defended his agency's new controversial patdown procedure, one that has been described by some critics as sexual assault. The new procedure involves screeners running their hands up the inside of passengers' thighs and touching around women's breasts. "There is an ever-evolving nature of the terrorist threat," Pistole told a Senate committee holding a hearing on the safety of cargo. Pistole said the government is not always ahead of the terrorists and that his agency seeks "the proper mix" between passengers' rights and protecting airplanes. "We want to be sensitive to people's sensitivity to privacy and their being while ensuring that everybody is secure on every flight," he said.
The only people who undergo the more-intense patdowns are those who refuse to go through full-body scanners or those who somehow trip other detectors. According to Pistole, it's only a very small percentage of all passengers. He says the U.S.'s patdown procedure is similar to what's being used in Europe. The testimony comes during a hectic week for the TSA, with critics ripping apart not just the patdown process but also the full-body scanners. The government has reassured the flying public time and time again that any naked images of them at airport checkpoints would be destroyed immediately. Now there's new attention being focused on another agency of the federal government--the U.S. Marshals Service--that in at least one case has been keeping thousands of similar naked images recorded by its body scanners.
U.S. Marshals Save Images from Body Scanners
John DiScala, a blogger known as JohnnyJet, said the TSA should take note of this release and be careful. (Here's what he had to say.)
"They need to realize if this was them, heads would roll. They need to do everything in their power--and I mean everything--to prevent this from happening." DiScala said. "There's already a grassroots effort to ban these machines when just a year ago almost everybody wanted them. It just shows how many people are comfortable with their bodies or being touched. It's a real fine line and they've only got one shot at this."
The full body scanners, formally known as Advanced Imaging Technology, provide security screeners with what are essentially nude images of travelers. To ensure privacy, the TSA says, faces are blurred and the images are deleted once the TSA officer determines that the passenger is not a threat. The person viewing the images is in a remote location and communicates with the on-site officer via radio. Passengers worried that their nude photos may end up on the internet (or concerned about the radiation from the scanners) can opt to bypass the machines. But those travelers then must undergo a more-intrusive search, including the new patdown procedure in which a same-gender TSA agent touches the inside of passengers' inner-thights and women's breasts.
The new patdown alone has generated controversy as passengers, and even some pilots, have equated it with sexual assault. Pilot unions started to advise their members to have the patdown done in private. Then, over the weekend, a 31-year old software programmer was thrown out of San Diego International Airport after he got into an argument with a TSA screener about the new, more aggressive patdown. "If you touch my junk, I'm going to have you arrested," John Tyner told the male screener. Tyner recorded audio of the whole 30-minute incident with the TSA on his cell phone's video camera, a video that has now had hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube and been replayed on major television stations. "The patdown is unavoidably intrusive, embarrassing, uncomfortable, but it's an unfortunate price of security these days to keep the components of bombs off planes," Flynn said. "It's a dangerous world, and the probability of an attack on flights on any given day are extremely low, but the results of one such attack by the terrorists can be of course catastrophic."
The Solution is Racial Profiling of Terrorists
This patdown procedure taking place in airports is in violation of the 4th and 5th amendments. There's no excuse for these type of procedures. It's absolutely outrageous. I know the ACLU and many civil rights groups would call me racist, but racial profiling of terrorists is the answer when it comes to airport security. It's foolish to be profiling people that aren't likely terrorists such as a 90-year old white woman, for example. Political correctness is killing us. I am not advocating the abuse of racial profiling. I believe racial profiling should be used for a purpose. I covered that issue in a previous post in August 2009. When it comes to making our airplanes safe, we need to profile Arab people from the Middle East. The terrorists that hijacked the jetliners on 9/11 were Arab Muslims. Most of the terrorism that takes place around the world are from Arab Muslims. No, all Muslims aren't terrorists. But the terrorists that attacked us were Arab Muslims. Therefore we should be profiling men of Arab descent.
We have the most incompetent, politcally correct administration I've ever seen. When I say incompetent, actually, I believe they're incompetent purposely. All these foolish screening procedures at airports is the government's way to become more intrusive in the lives of the American people. They're targeting the wrong people. The government is targeting people who pose no terrorist threat. They don't want to be accused of "racial insensitivity." Israel has tight airport security. They even suggested that we (the U.S.) use profiling when screening passengers. That's how Israel screens their passengers. It's not that difficult, but we must lay aside all this politically correct jargon. Janet Napolitano and John Pistole can defend this patdown procedure from dawn to dusk, but until they do the things that need to be done such as closing our borders except at checkpoints, building a border fence, and racial profiling of airline passengers, then they're wasting their time talking about keeping our airplanes safe.
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