TSA: The reason I will never fly to the US

Reprinted from the Scarlett Fever.

I do not particularly like people being able to see though my clothes, nor do I enjoy being groped during a pat-down. Seeing as these are part of the United States Transport Security Administration’s standard operating procedures, I doubt you’ll find me on a plane to the States any time soon.

This past month has been a banner month for the TSA, with first hand accounts of violations of privacy, unacceptable behaviour by employees and violations of  citizen’s rights rolling in from all over the country to our south.

The main attraction is the use of the TSA’s full-body backscatter x-rays, which let operators see fliers as if they were standing naked in front of the machine. Most people would be rightly concerned about this, and the TSA knows it, so they have sworn that the people viewing the images would not be the same people interacting with the customers, and that the images would never be shown to anyone else, because they would not save them.

The only problem with this is that some TSA employees have been saving the pictures, and have been sharing them, found the tech blog Gizmodo.com as the result of an investigation. 35,000 of them, to be exact. While an investigation into these employees has already been launched, this shows how things turn out when you give powerful tools to underpaid, disgruntled employees.

Problems get worse when fliers decide to opt out of the x-ray screening and are forced to undergo an invasive patdown. This is not just a sweep with a metal detector wand, but a full-handed groping of the entire body. If customers have special needs, however, they are given special attention, such as a breast cancer survivor having to remove her prosthetic breast in public, reports WBTV 3 News, and a TSA employee breaking the connection between a bladder cancer survivor’s urostomy bag and the hole in his abdomen that drains urine out of his body, covering the man in his own urine, says MSNBC.

At least the TSA screeners have a sense of decency when screening fliers, like in the incident reported by the Amarillo Globe-News, where a TSA employee pulled down a woman’s blouse, exposing her to the crowd in the surrounding airport. The story has a happy ending though, since the employees that missed the spectacle gave a chuckle and said they would simply have to make sure to watch it later on the security footage.

All in the name of national security.