Tag security theater
TSA: The Tickle-and-Slap Authority
Personally, I am very pleased that there has been so much noise this week about the outrageous “scope-or-grope” policy that the TSA has unloaded on the public, and I reallyreallyreallyreally hope it doesn’t simply lapse into the Internet Joke Meme of the Week. There is a genuine opportunity at pushback on a scale so large that the federal government might actually have to rescind their paranoid delusional policies and reconsider exactly how much the price of airport security is really worth.
My blog-buddy Jack Cluth has a great round-up post today featuring many of the stories that have emerged this week. Some of the stories, like the one about the TSA agent frisking a screeching three-year-old, are not new (that particular incident occurred in 2008), but I think that only reinforces the point that this shit has gone on more than long enough, and the recent insistence on even more intrusive pat-downs for people who refuse to be exposed to the “pornoscan” is only the latest outrage, not the first.
Next Wednesday, November 24th, is National Opt-Out Day. Organizers are trying to convince as many air travelers as possible to refuse to scanned by the new “naked picture” scanners and insist on being given a physical pat-down by a TSA agent on what happens to be the single busiest air travel day of the year in the United States. Needless to say, if they are at all successful, the organizers will bring airport passenger processing to its knees while people are groped and manhandled over and over again. Americans are not at all used to this sort of political action, which is only a mere shadow of actions like the recent strikes in France over pension “reforms”, but it is about time that these things start to happen.
If you are flying somewhere next Wednesday, please consider doing your part to try to stop the crumbling of civil rights in this country and tell the TSA “you gotta touch my junk”.
Meanwhile, I find this factoid extremely illuminating: A British risk-assessment consultancy has ranked all the countries of the world by their immediate risk for terrorist action and the United States is ranked 33rd. In fact, none of the Western “democracies” fell into the high-risk category, with Greece being the European country at greatest risk at #24. We are all being played for enormous suckers by very dark and dangerous forces in our own country, and this pushback may be the last chance we have to stop them.
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Invasion Of The Body Scanners
The initial rollout of full-body scanners for airport “security” which began in March has now been expanded from the original 11 to an additional 28, and they are eventually expected to be required at every airport in the United States, despite a variety of arguments against them ranging from privacy to radiation exposures to child pornography. Nevertheless, in this post-freedom world, they’re almost certainly here to stay, and nothing we can say or do will change that.
But you knew there had to be a money-making opportunity in there SOMEWHERE…so step right up and buy yourself a set of Flying Pasties. These 2mm-thick rubber pads, in both male and female versions, cover up your naughty bits so that the TSA agents can’t drool or snicker at them (they already do that to each other during the slow shifts), and even feature cute slogans like “Only My Husband Sees Me Naked”. Your basic male pastie only costs $9.99, but you can get a his-n-hers complete set for an introductory price of just $19.99.
These’ll also come in handy when the TSA decides it’s just easier to make everyone fly naked rather than spend all that time making people take their shoes and belts on and off all day.
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A Bulletin From The TSA
Effective immediatley, snowglobes are hereby designated as Weapons of Mass Destruction. Anyone caught in possession of said WMDs will be detained and forcibly bathed with seized containers of shampoo and shower gel, which are also lethal in sizes larger than 3 ounces.
On the other hand, you are now permitted to flee the country with as much cash as you can stuff into every pocket, crevice, and bodily orifice without being subject to search or seizure.
We remain confident that these random elements of intimidation will serve to delay your smooth and pleasant travel plans for the foreseeable future. Have a nice day.
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To The Dustbin Of History, All Of You!
The changing of the calendar to a new year routinely brings so many “Best Of” lists and “year-in-review” articles that the people who write them simply bang out the verbiage in June or July and fill in the blanks the last week of December when the stories are due. A variation on the theme that I’ve seen a lot of recently is the call to do away with this or that bit of outmoded, outdated, or otherwise obsoleted object. (How’s that for alliteration, eh?)
Here are just a few of the ones I’ve encountered recently:
- The TSA — No argument from me here. The Theatrical Security Agency is a gazillion-dollar waste of taxpayer money that does next to nothing in the way of making air travel more secure, inconveniences tens of thousands of travelers every single day, and only serves the political goal of making body searches, inept authoritarian thuggery, and unnecessary panic-mongering palatable to the breadth and width of American society. Americans should be both shamed and outraged that this is the domestic manifestation of fighting “The War Against Terror”.
- Second Life — not one, but two articles that come to basically the same conclusion: stick a fork in it, it’s done. It’s not that people won’t join in on virtual worlds, it’s that they need a reason to do so. MMORPGs draw tens of thousands of users who come first for the game and then secondarily for the fuzzier goal of interaction. When there’s no clear “macguffin” to hang on to, people don’t stick around, and meanwhile idle hands become the devil’s workshop in the form of giant flying penises and other “griefer” tricks. It has soured the marketeers, who are still not sure what to do about virtual communities, and that may be the last hurrah. Try again in 2020, kids.
- Consumer-level Recycling — one of the biggest frauds perpetrated on the general public for the last 30 years is that somehow we could save the world by recycling our newspapers, cans and bottles. My blog-buddy GLS had a pretty decent rant about this not too long ago. Part of his argument, and one that I wholehearted agree with, is that consumer-level recycling would be virtually unnecessary if the upstream producers of the waste — that is, virtually every single manufacturer of consumer goods in the world — didn’t create so much packaging in the first place. But instead of Big Business taking a baby step or two towards responsible packaging, they shoved the burden of disposal down to the end-user, which allowed them to continue their merry capitalistic profiteering with as much cardboard, cellophane and styrofoam as they wanted. The market for “post-consumer” recyclable material is next to worthless. In Britain, three out of four communities now simply dump their collected recyclables in the landfills because there’s nothing else to do with them, and the storage of unwanted recyclable newsprint alone is costing the British government millions of pounds.
- Offshored Technical Support Call Centers — Even Stevie Wonder could have seen this coming from a mile away. Yes, first-level tech support is, was, and always will be grunt work that mainly consists of reading answers out of a support manual and/or passing along the phone call to someone who actually knows what the hell they’re talking about, but giving that grunt work to people with a poor command of spoken English and/or an utterly unintelligible accent was inevitably going to backfire. Giving Indian call center employees fake “American” names or trying to hide their accents by making your support only available through a web chat window wasn’t fooling or helping anybody. The typical person calling tech support is already either a) extremely frustrated or 2) unimaginably stupid or iii) both, and making them wait on hold only to speak with a person who can’t really help them in the first place and can’t make themselves understood to the average American is insulting and hostile.
- Platter-and-Head Hard Disk Drives — this post from a techblogger is one of a number I’ve seen lately that makes the argument that the end is in sight for Ye Olde Fashioned Hardde Drive. The Age Of Solid-State Drives is upon us at last. The number of write/erase cycles that flash memory can sustain has been increased by “two orders of magnitude”, which in turn should make it entirely feasible to put vast quantities of flash-based storage into servers, thus further compacting the size and power requirements of data center server hardware, and also rendering the need for SAN devices and other attached storage unnecessary. At the consumer level, flash memory is already available in laptops, but Toshiba’s announcement of a 256GB SSD laptop drive back in September means that mechanical drives are certain to be gone within 18-24 months.
- Movies on VHS — in truth, the end for widespread availability of movies on VHS in the United States ended when Wal-Mart decided to stop selling them in 2006, but the once-and-for-all end apparently came in October, when the last wholesaler of VHS movies shipped their last truckload. I worked in a video store through college, back when home video and video rental stores were the newest, hottest concept in entertainment, and it was a little bittersweet to learn that a part of that time of my life was a part of history. Of course, a lot of people in this country still have VCRs and collections of videotapes, and then there’s the large chunk of the planet which ends up using our castoff toys long after we’ve moved on to newer, shinier ones, so the total extinction is still probably 10 years away, but that’s truly another nail in the coffin.
- Wind Chill Factors — this Slate article tells us what I’ve suspected all along. The whole “feels like minus twenty” thing is crap shoveled up in big scoops to an audience that can’t seem to get enough panic-thrills out of the 11:00 weather report. The original wind chill factor scale was badly miscalculated and based on several erroneous assumptions, and the revised scale developed in 2001, while less extreme in its assertions, is still deceptive and unreliable as a predictor because of variance in wind speeds, humidity levels, and the effects of solar radiation. But, boy oh boy, don’t the weathermonkeys love it when they can scare the bejeesus out of us by telling us it’s going to “feel like” an Antarctic nightmare, when it’s really just plain cold.
- The Federal Communications Commission — I don’t see this happening, even with the Second Coming…er, I mean Obama’s inauguration…but legal scholar and occasional Internet superstar Larry Lessig wrote this piece for Newsweek which says it’s time to get rid of the FCC as it currently exists because it has outlived its original mission, and more importantly, because it threatens the innovation space for new and developing communications technologies with its obsolescence. In its place, Lessig says, create an “iEPA”, which he says stands for “Innovation Environment Protection Agency” (eeugh!) to work primarily to keep monopolizing media businesses and meddling politicians equally out of the realm of developing technology. Of course, that’s 180 degrees opposite of the way American government works in the first place, so I’d say the chance of this coming to pass is nil.
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Linkapalooza – Random Bits
- The Milwaukee Airport realizes what an annoying hassle it is to have to remove shoes and belts, empty pockets, submit to pat-downs, and whatever other useless security theater tactics the Gestapo feel like putting you through, and so they offer a “Recombobulation Area” where you can undo the various indignities and be on your way to far-flung destinations looking kempt and heveled once again.
- Speaking of which, this shoulder-holster rig for your electronic gadgets will undoubtedly make you feel fucking cool, but it will probably also keep you off of most major air carriers in the United States for the forseeable future. Plus it will immediately brand you as a total douchebag if you actually wear it. You can, however, pack hand grenades in your check-in bags without any trouble, or even any additional baggage handling fee.
- Mental Floss has a post today that tries to explain the origins of various nicknames people have for their localities. For example: “Nutmeggers” for people from Connecticut, the “Nutmeg State” or “Sooners” for people from Oklahoma because so many Oklahoma settlers jumped the gun on the state’s homesteading law. Conspicuously missing from the list: Massholes and Maine-iacs.
- Fans of Big Band Era music will know the Glenn Miller standard “PEnnsylvania 6-5000″. Futility Closet passes along the trivia factoid that the number was and still is the main telephone number for the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. The hotel has been using that phone number since it first opened in 1919, and is the phone number in longest-continual service in New York, if not the world.
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The Unfriendly Skies
This has been the year of nickel-and-diming airline passengers to death by charging for in-flight amenities that used to be free. Everything from luggage to snacks to beverages. Anything to keep those CEO compensation packages sky-high, eh fellas?
The latest announcement comes from JetBlue, which will start charging $7.00 for a pillow and a blanket. As that story says, the company is trying to put an eco-friendly spin on it by saying it will encourage people to bring their own pillows and blankets and will cut down on spreading germs from shared use, but a fee is a fee.
Also on tap for JetBlue: a surcharge for non-crash landings!
For the time being, the folks from the Gestapo haven’t found too many ways to wring a few extra bucks out of your wallet…except of course for the extortion money that they allow this company to squeeze out of business travelers in exchange for not being hassled by a TSA goon at the security checkpoint. However, they have discovered a potentially lucrative sideline in seizing laptops without reason or cause and then selling them off (they haven’t tried selling them yet, but they will take them if they feel like it).
There are a couple of little victories for the average airline passenger, though. Check this out:
It’s called “paper shampoo”. It’s dried shampoo formed into thin sheets that reconstitute when you get them wet. No more 3-ounce bottles in clear plastic bags to threaten our American freedoms!
Similarly, male travelers might want to invest in one of these:
It’s a belt that does not have a metal buckle or any other metal on it, so you no longer have to try to walk through the metal detector holding up your pants with one hand and carrying your shoes in the other. That web vendor says that this belt is the largest-selling item they carry, so it seems like word is getting out.
I realize that air travel is an unavoidable part of doing business for millions of people in this country, and I do not expect either McCain or Obama to change a single thing about the clusterfuck that our air transportation system has turned into, so you have to take the small gains where you can find them.
UPDATE This just in: Authorites at San Francisco’s airport report that a laptop was stolen from the TSA and that the laptop contains the entire unencrypted database of all the personal information of 33,000 people who signed up for the aforementioned “Clear” extortion service. Poetic irony, is it not?
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE Now the self-same agency charged with protecting Our Beloved Homeland says that they found the laptop…in the same office where it was supposed to be all along! To beef up their efforts in the wake of this embarrassing incident, the TSA will now require ALL airline passengers to strip naked at the security checkpoint. It’s the only way they can ensure our safety.
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Things You Probably Don’t Want To Know…
…But I Am Going To Tell You Anyway
In New York State, as of April 21, 2008, all chain restaurants have to list the caloric value of everything on their menu. (via) So 1 donut = 17% of your total recommended caloric intake for the whole fucking day. If that isn’t the most depressint thing I’ve read in a long time, I don’t know what is. Well, except the infographic on that Gothamist story, which will make you burst into tears, I guarantee.
In somewhat related news, did you know that Burger King has a “gold card”? Oh, yes, they do! THe only good thing that I can say about this is that Burger King apparently only gives them to celebrities and that there are only about a dozen of them who actually have one, including Jay Leno, Robert Downey Jr. (in an attempt to win him back after his story about how a disgusting BK burger scared him off drugs forever), and Hugh Laurie, who wheedled his way into getting one by complaining about it to a gossip mag. Still…a fucking GOLD CARD?!?!?!
Demonstrating that they learned ABSOLUTELY NOTHING from the “Terror Alert Color Code System”, the TSA has rolled out this approach to making sure your airport security experience is as frustrating and infuriating as possible. You can basically choose between being strip-searched and anally probed as a “Black Diamond Traveler” so that you can get to your overpriced, undersized airplane seat 30 seconds faster, standing in line with every dumbfuck who can’t understand why they won’t let them take their machete on the plane AND has a 3.5 ounce bottle of shampoo in their carry-on bag, OR waiting forever with the packs of screeching babies and overwhelmed parents who bring everything in their house to the airport.
Also, now the TSA has decided that if you refuse to show identification, they will not let you on the plane. But…if you tell them you merely forgot your identification, you can get on. Whoa! That ought to confuse the bejeebus out of those danged terrorists! I feel safer already!
I’m sorry, but wouldn’t it be much simpler to just close every airport in the United States and put us all out of this misery once and for all?
And here’s a way to make sure that you alienate all those hip young Internet-addicted people you’re dying to turn into paying customers: NBC has decided that their online streaming coverage of the summer Olympics will only work with Windows Vista. That’s the 2008 equivalent of releasing your hot new movie exclusively in BetaMax. So much for all those people with their too-hot-to-handle portable gadgets ponying up the bucks for your premium service, NBC. Well done!
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Come Fly With Me
Airline pilot Patrick Smith, who is a regular contributor at Salon, also wrote this piece in the latest issue of Readers’ Digest (Huh! Who knew Readers’ Digest had a website. Go figure.) He starts off telling it like it is:
Before we take off, I would like to apologize on behalf of this and every airline for the hassle you just endured at the security checkpoint. As is patently obvious to any reasonable person, the humiliating shoe removals, liquids ban, and pointy-object confiscations do little to make us safer. Unfortunately, the government insists that security theater, and not actual security, is in the nation’s best interest. If it makes you feel any better, our crew had to endure the same screening as the passengers. Never mind that the baggage loaders, cleaners, caterers, and refuelers receive only occasional random screening. You can rest easy knowing that I do not have a pair of scissors or an oversize shampoo bottle anywhere in my carry-on luggage.
But then he turns it around and puts it into perspective:
I am well aware that airlines have become pariahs of the postindustrial economy. But it’s rarely acknowledged that despite recurrent fiscal crises, major staffing and technology problems, and constant criticism from the public, our carriers have managed to maintain a mostly reliable, affordable, and safe transportation system.
Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection isn’t so quick to let the TSA off the hook. Considering that they STILL try to justify such inane policies as the “no liquids” rule, they deserve it.
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Who Strikes Fear In The Hearts Of Men?
In the Western Massachusetts town of Springfield, the local police chief was proud to announce that their Street Crime Unit would be adopting an all-black military-style uniform. Police sergeant John Delaney explained the move to the Springfield City Council, saying that “a sense of fear” had been missing from the special unit for several years.
Benito Mussolini smiles from his own personal corner of Hell.