Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent along this link:
A modern Romance novel
He grasped me firmly but gently just above my elbow and guided me into a room, his room. Then he quietly shut the door and we were alone. He approached me soundlessly, from behind, and spoke in a low, reassuring voice close to my ear. “Just relax.”
Read the whole thing.
H/T to Economicrot. Many many more at the link.
Daniel Tencer says that the TSA’s guidelines for calming children are the same things sexual predators use:
An expert in the fight against child sexual abuse is raising the alarm about a technique the TSA is reportedly using to get children to co-operate with airport pat-downs: calling it a “game”.
Ken Wooden, founder of Child Lures Prevention, says the TSA’s recommendation that children be told the pat-down is a “game” is potentially putting children in danger.
Telling a child that they are engaging in a game is “one of the most common ways” that sexual predators use to convince children to engage in inappropriate contact, Wooden told Raw Story.
Children “don’t have the sophistication” to distinguish between a pat-down carried out by an airport security officer and an assault by a sexual predator, he said.
The TSA policy could “desensitize children to inappropriate touch and ultimately make it easier for sexual offenders to prey on our children,” Wooden added.
H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.
Even if the TSA is backing down on requiring pilots to go through the full pornoray scanner or humiliating pat-down, they’ve continued to leave a huge security hole open — apron workers and contract ground support staff:
Although the X-ray and metal detector rigmarole is mandatory for pilots and flight attendants, many other airport workers, including those with regular access to aircraft — to cabins, cockpits, galleys and freight compartments — are exempt. That’s correct. Uniformed pilots cannot carry butter knives onto an airplane, yet apron workers and contract ground support staff — cargo loaders, baggage handlers, fuelers, cabin cleaners, caterers — can, as a matter of routine, bypass TSA inspection entirely.
All workers with airside privileges are subject to fingerprinting, a 10-year criminal background investigation and crosschecking against terror watch lists. Additionally they are subject to random physical checks by TSA. But here’s what one apron worker at New York’s Kennedy airport recently told me:
“All I need is my Port Authority ID, which I swipe through a turnstile. The ‘sterile area’ door is not watched over by any hired security or by TSA. I have worked at JFK for more than three years now and I have yet to be randomly searched. Really the only TSA presence we notice is when the blue-shirts come down to the cafeteria to get food.”
H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.
In addition to their role in defending the homeland, apparently they’re also now copyright enforcers:
The investigative arm of the Homeland Security Department appears to be shutting down websites that facilitate copyright infringement.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has seized dozens of domain names over the past few days, according to TorrentFreak.
ICE appears to be targeting sites that help Internet users download copyrighted music, as well as sites that sell bootleg goods, such as fake designer handbags.
The sites are replaced with a note from the government: “This domain named has been seized by ICE, Homeland Security Investigations.”
H/T to Ace of Spades HQ for the link.
It would be nice to know what part of the act of Congress that set up the Department of Homeland Security permits this kind of action. So that I can know whether to thank George Bush or Barack Obama.
[. . .]
First they were grabbing crotches in airports…
This overrreach by the DHS is breathtaking and clearly violates the spirit of the act of Congress that created it and the public’s understanding of the rationale for the creation of DHS. I’m not saying the domains were not involved in copyright infringement. I’m saying the DHS involvement is odd and the method — seizure of the domains — lacks a certain due process.
It’s ugly and ham-fisted. And it is difficult to see how it could be aimed at drawing the public’s attention away from the travails of the TSA. Rather, it looks like another run-of-the-mill stupid move on the part of Obama and Napolitano. It will be interesting next week to see the reaction of Representatives and Senators.
Justin Raimondo pours scorn on the recent anti-libertarian hit piece in The Nation:
Speaking of implausible fiction, The Nation recently ran a piece by Mark “I spit on libertarians” Ames and Yasha Levine, which determined that the anti-TSA movement — that seems to have sprung up like a last gasp of life from the old America — is really a front for the Koch brothers, two formerly libertarian billionaires who have become the deus ex machina of clueless “progressive” commentators who cannot otherwise explain the explosion of anti-government anti-authoritarian populism currently upending politics. Glenn Greenwald seems to have taken care of the Ames-Levine fantasists, putting them in their proper place as apologists for the Obama regime and all its works, but one more thing needs to be said:
If Ames and Levine are going to become the “go to” team for the dirt on libertarians, such as it is, they ought to learn their subject. Because the very idea of Charles and David Koch leading a national resistance movement involving civil disobedience on a massive scale is laughable: to anyone who knows them, or knows of them in more than a glancing way, this can only provoke gales of unrestrained laughter. It is sheer laziness to believe this. Indeed, if only the Brothers Koch, and the plethora of organizations their money has funded, were that radical! Unfortunately, they are not: a stodgy, boring conservatism marks their both their methods and their politics, and always has.
Ames and Levine need to do some real research. It was the anti-Koch wing of the libertarian movement, centered around LewRockwell.com, that first gave John Tyner’s act of defiance the publicity and velocity that made it go viral. And if LRC is a front for the Koch brothers, then we have truly entered Bizarro World. In that case, so too is Antiwar.com a Koch front — and so why have we been doing this fundraising campaign for the past two weeks, begging our readers to save us from oblivion?
Gee, it seems like that check from the Kochs got lost in the mail! Charles, could you please look into that? Thanks.
H/T to Matt Welch for the link.
More on your authoritarian media . . .
Earlier today, my colleague Matt Welch ran off a list of newspaper editorial boards who are lining up behind TSA. The headline to this post is the actual headline from the L. A. Times’ editorial. Given such cowardice about defending civil liberties in the face of hysterical hand-wringing about national security, I was going to post a snarky comment about how the L.A. Times would probably have told Japanese-Americans to “shut up and report to your internment camp” back in 1942, too.
Then I did some Googling, and discovered that the paper pretty much did exactly that. As did a number of other papers.
Radley Balko, “Shut Up and Be Scanned”, The Agitator, 2010-11-22
After reading one of the several stories about the TSA considering (or already having) an exemption from the invasive “pat-down” for Muslim women, Wendy McElroy tried to find the truth of the matter:
“Sexual assault” and “child molestation” are just some of the accusations leveled at the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) revealing scanners and full-body pat-down procedures, which were introduced on November 1.
At long, long last, the public is saying no to the savaging of personal liberty.
But a bizarre attack from a different direction should cause concern for at least two reasons. First, the particular accusation against the TSA is almost certainly incorrect and could dilute the credibility of other criticisms. Second, the attack seems rooted in anti-Muslim fears and feeds back into them.
The rumor: The Department of Homeland Security may exempt Orthodox Muslim women from the sexually invasive scanners and physical exams that others must undergo as a prerequisite of air travel.
On what evidence is the rumor based?
A few bumper stickers/luggage tags from Hit and Run:
Reuters has a poll up with current numbers that will send a chill down the spine of airline executives:
Yes, yes . . . self-selected poll . . . non-scientific . . . etc, etc. Even so, it might be a good time to review your stock portfolio in case you’re over-exposed to airline share prices.
Some whackjob so-called “libertarian” thinks that the TSA is out of control. No, really, he actually thinks that the TSA is out of control:
Americans can be murdered by terrorists, but shared values cannot be destroyed by guns and bombs and planes. Yet our adversaries in the “War on Terror” can most certainly win. They can win by frightening us into infidelity to our values, into betraying our best selves. Some would argue that they are already winning by that measure.
I thought that the “if x, then the terrorists have won” meme was dead before the end of the Bush administration.
Of course, if you recruit on pizza boxes, you’re not going to wind up with Elliot Ness. You’re going to get people who use the body scanners to make fun of people’s genitals, pretend to find cocaine in passengers’ luggage as a prank, steal from carry-ons, and generally act like badged choads. Oh, and sex offenders. Don’t forget the sex offenders. A security checkpoint is Walt Disney World for them.
See what I mean? This “libertarian” is objecting to the peaceful re-integration of former sex offenders into steady well-paying government jobs. One of the best success stories of the criminal justice system, and he’s criticizing it just because a few whiners don’t want to be molested as part of their travel routine?
Now, however, the TSA might possibly have found a way to startle the herd into genuine anger and defiance. The TSA has rolled out its program requiring you to submit to either a body-revealing scan or a gropefest patdown. Between revealing full-body scanners and the alternative “enhanced pat-downs,” Americans are as close as they have been since 9/11 to calling bullshit on the ever-increasing Security Theater. Is the TSA managing that anger well? Of course not. Some of them smirk that we like it. Still others are clearly furious that the cows are no longer, well, cowed. There are increasing reports that the enhanced pat downs are being threatened, and used, in an angry and retaliatory fashion by government employees who are upset that we don’t want our practically naked bodies displayed on scanners.
Look, the scanners are a labour-saving device. That’s all. Forcing them to caress your buttocks, squeeze your breasts, and manipulate your genitals is extra work for them. You should be grateful for the extra individual attention they’re providing to you!
Well, okay, the scanners are also a really handy source of humour, but that’s just a fringe benefit. How can you complainers be so unsympathetic to the working TSA folks who just want an occasional laugh while they check out your physical assets (or, more often, lack of).
Of course TSA agents are angry when you don’t herd obligingly through the scanner. They feel entitled to it, as a matter of right, based on what the modern Security State envisions that Americans should be. When the TSA expressed angst that “unquestioning compliance has diminished”, it was tipping its hand.
Yes, but you have no right to complain. When you buy an airline ticket, you implicitly give up all of your rights. Flying is a privilege, and you’d better show how grateful you are to be given that privilege or it will be taken away from you. Don’t be disrespectful: avert your eyes and don’t challenge the screeners. Obey orders at all times, and report those who grumble to the proper authorities. Don’t step out of line, or you will face the consequences.
The purpose of Security Theater is to convince us that the government can do something and is doing something, and most importantly to make us accept “unquestioning compliance” with government as an American value. The purpose of Security Theater is to normalize submission.
And you have to admit that it’s done a pretty good job. And, even better, it has had bipartisan support in congress.
In a nation in which we owe fidelity to shared values, accepting unquestioning compliance with government is like sneaking out on the wife and kids and nailing the smeared-lipstick cosmo-addled skank at the sleazy bar in the next town. And don’t come crying back to your wife Liberty and your kids Personal Responsibility and dear little Individuality when you pick up a nasty case of authoritarianism oozing from your — ok, I’m going to have to pull this literary device over and walk.
He references a blog post by “Mom” which I linked to from this post last week.
Now, I’m not saying that Mom is herself a perverted thug, like the people she’s saying we should just obey. I’m saying that she’s a sneering, entitled apologist for perverted thugs — and for the canine, un-American value of slobbery submission to the state. Even though she concedes that the groping is retaliatory bullshit, and even though she has no basis to assert that Security Theater actually increases real security, she’s deeply resentful that people are not putting up with it. Her righteous anger — like the anger of of the TSA thugs groping just a little bit harder to punish you for saying no to the body scanner — is the result we should expect from the small-time thugs whose identity is tied up in their petty authority.
Throughout my career — both as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney — I’ve observed a consistent inverse relationship: the more petty a government officer’s authority, the more that officer will feel a need to swagger and demand that you RESPECT HIS AUTHORITAH. Your average FBI agent might search your house based on a crappy perjured warrant, invade your attorney-client emails, and flush your life down the toilet by lying on the stand at your mail fraud trial. But he doesn’t feel a need to vogue and posture to prove anything in the process. He’s the FBI. But God above help you when you run into the guy with a badge from some obscure and puny government agency with a narrow fiefdom. He and his Napoleon syndrome have got something to prove. And he’s terrified that you’ll not take him very, very seriously. When I call FBI agents on behalf of my clients, they’re cool but professional and nonchalant. When I call a small agency — say, state Fish & Game, or one of the minor agency Inspector Generals — they’re hostile, belligerent, and so comically suspicious that you’d think I was asking for their permission to let my client smuggle heroin into the country in the anuses of handicapped Christian missionary orphans. They are infuriated, OUTRAGED, when a client asserts rights, when a client fails to genuflect and display unquestioning obedience. They are, in short, the TSA.
See? See? Just wait until this guy tries to fly somewhere . . . they’ll subject him to the most degrading procedures they can imagine. No, not to get back at him for all this disrespect . . . they’ll just treat him like the rest of the cattle. Mooo.
Megan McArdle writes a Dear John letter to her long-time airline:
Dear Airline, I’m Leaving You
But don’t feel too bad. It’s not you, it’s me. Or rather, it’s the TSA.
I’m not going to lie. It’s come between us. If I have to let someone else see me naked in order to be with you — well, I’m just not that kinky. And deep down, I don’t think you are either. I think it’s the TSA making you act like this. Frankly, you haven’t been the same since you started running around together.
But I can’t put all the blame on them. I think you went along because you thought I had to have you — that I couldn’t live without you. That no matter what you did, I’d stay. And it’s true, you had a pretty strong hold on me. Took away the food, and I still loved you — who wanted to eat a terrible, fattening meal anyway? Narrowed the distance between the seats, and still I stayed, using my airline miles to upgrade to first class. Charge me for baggage? I’m an economics writer — I love unbundled products. So I can see where you got the idea that I’d stick by you no matter what.
But the kinky stuff is just a bridge too far. I’m not saying I’ll never see you again: we can still meet up for a drink, or even a quick weekend trip to California. But our days are a regular item are through. I’m writing this letter because one of my commenters pointed out that it was only fair to let you know what was going on [. . .]
Mark Hemingway thinks that it would be a salutory lesson to the VIPs, politicians and high mucky-muck bureaucrats if they had to travel the same way everyone else does:
Two weeks ago, my wife flew alone out to Colorado with our two young children. Unaware that the TSA had instituted new and incredibly invasive new security procedures, my wife called me distressed after getting frisked by the TSA. Or as my wife put it, “in some cultures I would be married to my screener by now.” She was joking, but make no mistake — my wife was incredibly disturbed by how intimate a security pat down she received.
So here’s my not-so-modest proposal: If the President’s Homeland Security department is so adamant that this is the absolute best way to prevent terrorism, I think the President and his family should voluntarily submit to one of the new invasive pat down procedures. I know the Obamas don’t fly commercial at all these days, so they should probably get a pretty good idea what the rest of us are putting up with.
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