Someone needs to sue the TSA

[scubaman]

Full Body Scanners

[BellaBellucci]

Full Body Scanners

Truth.

~BB~

[rockabilly]

"Don't touch my junk."

[lisaparadise]

"don't touch my junk."

nooooooooooooo its please touch my junk lol i just hope i dont forget to not take a cialis before my flight to jamaica

[Johnny O]

I don't see what the big deal is, just go thru the scanner and get on da plane!

[DaveinBoston]

Ok... lets change the word 'privalege' to the phrase "convenience afforded to you".

You are guaranteed the right to unreasonable search and seizure under the 4th Amendment... but what is considered "unreasonable" 10 years ago is far from unreasonable today.

Would you have thought a small box cutter on a plane would have been such a life-altering device 10 years ago? I can list 3000+ people who wish the airlines did.

10 years ago, no one would have dreamed that someone would pack their shoe or underwear with explosives with the intent on blowing themselves and the plane full of passenger to "Allah".

If mandatory cavity searches were the only way to guarantee my flight was safe... show me where to stand to drop my pants.

Where do you draw the line to guarantee I'm safe?

Why should I have to worry that Ahknahd Towel-head in the seat next to me with fantasies of 72 virgins waiting for him, might be wearing C-4 Fruit of the Looms... because your sensitive about a TSA working who looks at thousands of images a day is looking at your an alien-like image on a body scan machine.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HBMBWUZ920...255B1%255D.jpg

Like I said... you dont have to take a plane... and you dont have to every worry about the body scan or someone touching you during a pat down.

Pretty plain and simple logic

Yea, I've heard that argument before. Driving a vehicle isn't a right either under the law, it's a privilege that the government is free to remove from you for any number of reasons. To be quite honest, that argument gets old after a while. If walking to where ever you want to go is the only "right" you have then you're pretty much left to the whims of bureaucrats.

If something is only a privilege then is there a line that you would draw over what the government could demand of you in order to exercise that privilege? Would mandatory cavity searches be OK? Having your biometrics cataloged? DNA samples before being allowed to board? RFID chips being installed in your ID or even in your body?

[BellaBellucci]

Pretty plain and simple logic

From Reason Magazine:

Yesterday, British authorities broke up an alleged terror plot to blow up as many as ten commercial airliners as they flew to the United States. In response, the Department of Homeland Security upped the alert level on commercial flights from Britain to "red" and boosted the alert to "orange" for all other flights. In a completely unscientific poll, AOL asked subscribers: "Are you changing your travel plans because of the raised threat level?" At mid-afternoon about a quarter of the respondents had said yes. Such polls do reflect the kinds of anxieties terrorist attacks, even those that have been stymied, provoke in the public.

But how afraid should Americans be of terrorist attacks? Not very, as some quick comparisons with other risks that we regularly run in our daily lives indicate. Your odds of dying of a specific cause in any year are calculated by dividing that year's population by the number of deaths by that cause in that year. Your lifetime odds of dying of a particular cause are calculated by dividing the one-year odds by the life expectancy of a person born in that year. For example, in 2003 about 45,000 Americans died in motor accidents out of population of 291,000,000. So, according to the National Safety Council this means your one-year odds of dying in a car accident is about one out of 6500. Therefore your lifetime probability (6500 ÷ 78 years life expectancy) of dying in a motor accident are about one in 83.

What about your chances of dying in an airplane crash? A one-year risk of one in 400,000 and one in 5,000 lifetime risk. What about walking across the street? A one-year risk of one in 48,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 625. Drowning? A one-year risk of one in 88,000 and a one in 1100 lifetime risk. In a fire? About the same risk as drowning. Murder? A one-year risk of one in 16,500 and a lifetime risk of one in 210. What about falling? Essentially the same as being murdered. And the proverbial being struck by lightning? A one-year risk of one in 6.2 million and a lifetime risk of one in 80,000. And what is the risk that you will die of a catastrophic asteroid strike? In 1994, astronomers calculated that the chance was one in 20,000. However, as they've gathered more data on the orbits of near earth objects, the lifetime risk has been reduced to one in 200,000 or more.

So how do these common risks compare to your risk of dying in a terrorist attack? To try to calculate those odds realistically, Michael Rothschild, a former business professor at the University of Wisconsin, worked out a couple of plausible scenarios. For example, he figured that if terrorists were to destroy entirely one of America's 40,000 shopping malls per week, your chances of being there at the wrong time would be about one in one million or more. Rothschild also estimated that if terrorists hijacked and crashed one of America's 18,000 commercial flights per week that your chance of being on the crashed plane would be one in 135,000.

Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.

So do these numbers comfort you? If not, that's a problem. Already, security measures—pervasive ID checkpoints, metal detectors, and phalanxes of security guards—increasingly clot the pathways of our public lives. It's easy to overreact when an atrocity takes place—to heed those who promise safety if only we will give the authorities the "tools" they want by surrendering to them some of our liberty. As President Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural speech said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself— nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." However, with risks this low there is no reason for us not to continue to live our lives as though terrorism doesn't matter—because it doesn't really matter. We ultimately vanquish terrorism when we refuse to be terrorized.

There's some logic. The fact is, you're basing your opinion on pure, unadulterated emotion, not logic. It's really just that 'plain and simple.' The real cause of passenger inconvenience is fear, not terrorism. Like I said, the terrorists have won.

~BB~

[BellaBellucci]

Oh, and another thing: this is coming from someone who was two degrees of separation from the 9/11 hijackers. I won't go into specifics, but suffice it to say, I would, to this day, feel safe flying with the level of airport security that existed before 9/11.

~BB~

[lisaparadise]

i don't see what the big deal is, just go thru the scanner and get on da plane!

exactly if ya dont like it take the freakin bus

[BellaBellucci]

exactly if ya dont like it take the freakin bus

Then what's your take on why they go to such lengths to intimidate people into using the scanner? Or why they force them into a pat-down situation even if the decline to get on the plane? How do you account for those policies and the unacceptable behavior of TSA agents towards American citizens?

~BB~