TSA Defends Pat Down of 4-Year-Old Girl 1174
cosm writes "With public outcry against the TSA continuing to spread, the TSA is defending a recent episode in which a four-year-old was patted down while kicking and screaming at Wichita Airport in Kansas. From the AP article: 'The grandmother of a 4-year-old girl who became hysterical during a security screening at a Kansas airport said Wednesday that the child was forced to undergo a pat-down after hugging her, with security agents yelling and calling the crying girl an uncooperative suspect.'"
Of course. (Score:5, Interesting)
Otherwise, despite increased cockpit security and civilian awareness, we'd all die from terrorist attacks! That's why you must surrender your privacy in exchange for the all-important security theater like a good citizen would do. Otherwise, you're just a terrorist!
TSA is a 100% failure (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Of course. (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know about Mexico, but my experience driving into Canada for a weekend trip was worse than anything I've been through at the airport. The Canadian immigration and customs searched my car and luggage thoroughly, questioned me for an hour about what I was doing and asked me to provide all kinds of documentation showing I had a job in America and was currently working. They made me show them my badge for my job, then weren't satisfied because the badge doesn't show the city I work at, so they made me get my laptop and show them the weekly reports I write. Then they didn't seem to understand that even though I'm based in Atlanta, I drive all over the Eastern US for my job and was working in Buffalo, NY for a couple of weeks. I don't know why that concept was hard for them to understand, but they just didn't get it. At one point the lady questioning me accused me of having and attitude and threatened to kick me out of the country. Out of all the countries I've been to, Canada was by far the worst to get into.
go ahead and close the airport (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Of course. (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember, you're no good to her dead or in prison.
No, but you're good to everyone if you get sent there for protecting your daughter from TSA molestation. Seriously, we'd see the true colors of this nation and the control the politicians and corporate overlords really hold if someone went berserk at a checkpoint trying to protect their child. It'd be easier for the nation to swallow if it were a mother, but a father might be close enough.
Re:They called her an :uncooperative subject" (Score:3, Interesting)
The very fact that is running to be a candidate for the Republican Party, and not running to be president, shows his lack of seriousness to actually change anything. He could be an independent candidate. He has the popularity, the resources, the name recognition. He, is, however more interested in profiting off the party system and big government rather than making incremental changes that will result in the more prosperous and libertarian society he claims to want.
How does he leverage big government? His district, for instance, is dependent on the government dole. Most people work directly or indirectly for the government. NASA controls everything at a time when it makes a lot of sense to privatize space travel using libertarian ideals. He has the federal government build bus stops and infrastructure so the locals can pay domestic help less, instead of letting the free market work. He has the government pay the shrimp industry huge sums of money to convince people to eat shrimp rather than, again, allowing the free market to work.
If Paul were serious about changing the world, he could do a lot. Unlike Alaska, Arizona, and the like, Texas does not need the government dole. We are fiscally responsible people. Paul could be more local to end the waste that results in million dollar bus stops with contracts given to buddies, government funding that promotes one industry over another, and government control of what should be free enterprise. His continuous affiliation with the republican party proves his unwillingness to truly fight for what he says he believes.
I think a Ron Paul presidential candidate would be cool, but the farce of a Ron Paul republican nomination just indicates the continuation of national office to generate personal profit.
Re:Of course. (Score:4, Interesting)
No shit. I can promise you right now if anyone ever did that to my daughter they wouldn't be breathing for long after. TSA, cop, a judge, The Pope, The Queen, I don't really care who it is they would be dead before they hit the ground. Duress is applicable when it's your child being attacked and molested.
Me too. And then I'd be arrested and disappear into the system and maybe never come out, and that would suck for my daughter.
So when this stuff started become standard operating procedure I decided to never again travel to the USA, and that has worked out pretty well. No conferences, no family holidays, no business trips, no standing in line while a jackbooted rentacop yells "PAPERS!" in my face.
Re:They called her an :uncooperative subject" (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't "poor training." This is "criminal negligence" on the part of those who provided such "poor training" and sexual assault on the part of those that perpetrated it.
Someone should be fired for okaying this. Out of a cannon. Into the sun.
Re:Of course. (Score:5, Interesting)
No shit. I can promise you right now if anyone ever did that to my daughter they wouldn't be breathing for long after. TSA, cop, a judge, The Pope, The Queen, I don't really care who it is they would be dead before they hit the ground. Duress is applicable when it's your child being attacked and molested.
It's going to happen one day. Some TSA goon is going to molest the wrong little girl. It seems few Americans will stand up for their own rights but they might just stand behind someone who stood up for his.
I'm in Europe and can't believe what you people put up with.
Re:Of course. (Score:4, Interesting)
The Milgram experiment was about inflicting pain on strangers. If you setup the same experiment but inflict pain on family members intead the experiment would not last long because the researchers would be dead.
Re:Of course. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not freaky at all. America is, and has always been, a fundamentally fascist country. The Constitution is an aberration, not the cultural norm. Don't believe me? Look at the history of every internal, domestic conflict in this country. Every last one of them are tinged with the constant abuse of state authority by merging it with corporate (in the sense of social collectives that Mussolini meant in his often misinterpreted statement that fascism is the merger of the state and the corporation) interests.
Respect for the Constitution and a legacy of social independence born from the frontier experience of the 19th century that carried with it a tradition of weak corporatism (again, in Mussolini's sense of the word) has prevented American fascism from devolving into Totalitarianism (like Mussolini's Italy, or Nazi Germany), but that doesn't make the country and the culture any less fascist. Now that the frontier experience (and it's associated attitude of independence from social organization) is a long dead memory, expect that inherent fascism to inexorably head towards totalitarianism.
Re:Of course. (Score:4, Interesting)
I swear to God they are trying to provoke domestic terrorism with the TSA. We don't have a terrorist problem, and this has proven to be a serious joke on us at our own expense of our freedoms and money. They need desperately to justify their jackboot on our necks and the pillaging of our wallets. Perhaps if they manhandle enough women and children someone will react and give them the excuses they want for more draconian measures to protect their oligarchies.
We need to be cool, and just remember this when it comes time for elections. Our Revolution 2.0 needs to be in the form of educated and informed voters sending these villains packing into the annals of our dark histories.
Re:Of course. (Score:5, Interesting)
But the obvious solution in this case is to have the child go through the scanners again. Why the pat down? Either the scanners are good enough to detect anything that could have been passed from an unscreened passenger to a screened passenger, or they're not. Unless they are implicitly acknowledging that latter...
Except the security isn't the real deal... it's the Pavlovian response of "Yes, I will comply" they're looking for. They must escalate any situation where it appears a traveller--any traveller, even a frightened child--isn't in total subservience and compliance to the rules. Seperating the child is about inducing terror, and specifically conditioning that child to ALWAYS conform to authority. It isn't a coincidence that there are so many incidents with young kids that the TSA is involved in--the youngest generation is being conditioned to expect invasions of their private bodies rather than resist them, as our generation does. They want to turn these invasive "screenings" into part of the background noise of American life so they can ease similar invasive "screenings" into other parts of our lives. Why?
TSA finds far more cash and drugs than they do guns and bombs--and that's what they're really looking for. Cash they can seize (the booty funds "overhead," leaving more money from taxpayers to spend on boondoggle body scanner devices) is the name of the game. Some police agencies get vast swath of their funding from such seizure activities.
You say that now .... (Score:5, Interesting)
But I hear the same thing a lot on message forums, where it's easy to hide behind a screen and a broadband connection....
The reality is, people aren't really doing anything about this stuff when it happens. When you're out in public, being ordered around by a bunch of people in govt. issued badges and granted the authority to have you strip searched, arrested, and blacklisted from ever traveling on a commercial airplane again -- it's funny how people tend to lose much of their willingness to fight back.
Every once in a rare while, someone makes a public protest (like the guy in Oregon who recently tried to go through the scanners in the nude). But it's quickly blown off and we're back to govt. control as usual.... (Right after he did that, I saw comments on the news stories to the effect of, "He was a computer programmer and I knew him... He was a nice guy and never did anything wrong. I can't understand what possessed him to do this!")
Nope ... it's all a grand experiment to slowly "boil the frogs". Keep adding regulations and restrictions slowly, and it's amazing how much the American public will tolerate. Most of us wouldn't "jump out of the pot" if we had a chance, right now... Too comfortable in here!
Re:Of course. (Score:5, Interesting)
No one's saying small children should be excluded from screening
Technically, you're right, because people like me are saying that nobody should be subjected to the TSA, that the TSA should be disbanded, and that the screening process is a ridiculous joke that fails to detect knives and guns. So yeah, I am not saying that four year olds should be excluded; I am saying that everyone should be excluded.
Re:Of course. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm. Heavy duffle-bag filled with pellets and explosives...at least 40 people in a line...yeah, that could do it.
Perhaps one of those bags with wheels? I've heard explosives are a tad heavy.
Let's try something different. (Score:2, Interesting)
Publicly document the names of people employed by the TSA. Every single one of them, from their administration (John Pistole) all the way down to the nameless, faceless front-line gropers. It won't take long for a document like that to spread in the wild.
That's step one. It becomes unnecessary once the following step starts to gather momentum because these people wear uniforms, drive to work everyday, and are self-identified. They don't wear masks (yet).
Step 2: Make their lives as TSA agents unbearable. Everything from denying them loans and refusing to do business with them personally to stealing their cars and vandalizing their property. Hurt them, hurt their families, hurt them financially. Humiliate them and make them legitimately afraid for their lives and those of their wives, husbands, and children. Socially ostracize them completely or make them targets, whichever your morals and conscience dictates, but start such a campaign of fear that the TSA will never see another willing job applicant.
Make them ashamed and afraid of doing their job, because they should be.
Re:Of course. (Score:5, Interesting)
The kdi still goes through the metal detector. I'm completely comfprtable with no additional security. No molesting, no pedo-scope, none of that really helps security any. There's just not much of a threat from hijacking using an improvised weapon these days - the better cabin door and the passengers will see to that.
Can we please go back to pre-TSA security in aiports? A metal detector and an X-ray for carry-ons is enough. I don't care if there's an occasional problem as a result, that's enough to keep flying safer than driving, and it's not worth sacrificing my dignity for tiny incremental improvements beyond that.