Shame there wasn’t an actual law enforcement person around at the time, you could have easily pointed out that the male rent-a-cop was copping a feel on your daughter and isn’t that a crime.

Yeah, but pilots don’t have an image problem.

I still don’t want some random person with a badge grabbing my breasts in the name of “public security”, especially since by their own reckoning, they’ve not caught a SINGLE terrorist since their inception.

The security is ineffective, the handling of people is offensive, the rules are nonsensical.

Bruce Schneier talks about these things much better than I ever could. Refer to his blog.

I expect that they will soon want random vehicle searches.  Given the right “Fear Event” they might even find a big enough excuse.

I have never had a problem philosophically or politically with the TSA or increasing security/inspections at airports. You’re entering what is potentially an extremely dangerous environment with a bunch of strangers, an environment that’s been taken advantage of over and over again by crazy people

“BUT – BUT I GOT _FELT_ _UP_!!! MY RIGHTS TRAMPLED, MY UTOPIAN INNOCENCE, RIPPED FROM ME!” Grow up. Yes, your man-tits are just that erotic. I’m sure that bored community college grad rushed to the restroom to jerk off after grappling your supple curves. When did we all become such pussies? They’re doing a cursory check for guns and bombs and knives and shit, for crying out loud, and I’m sure 99.99999% of them don’t like it any more than you do. If you genuinely live in fear and contempt of that .00001% of fuckin weirdos who actually can remember one thing about you ten seconds after you’re gone, then I don’t know how you handle the mall, or the public lavatory. “OH GOD A STRANGER NEXT TO ME AT THE URINAL, HIS BEADY EYES FIXATED ON MY GENITALIA!!”

The underlying issue (in my opinion) is that due to population increase (and corresponding decrease in living space, particularly in metro markets), and media encroachment into every corner of our lives, our concepts of personal space are constantly being adjusted downwards, to the point that we’re resentful and hypersensitive of _anyone_ entering said personal space against our wishes. Yeah it sucks, but this mental image some folks seem to have of the TSA squatting serenely over a copy of our Constitution with newspaper in hand, it’s ridiculous. When you get on a plane, you take a (totally passive) role (along with a hundred or more other people) in the launching of a huge 375-ton metal missile that’s going to cruise through the sky at around six hundred miles an hour. There is a small but absolutely undeniable chance for total catastrophe. Perhaps some day in our future we’ll have little individual Jetsonesque private saucers, but until then, it’s called precautions, and it’s really not a big deal unless you have some weird issue with people touching you, which I would classify as a :you: problem, not an :everybody: problem.

P.S. I don’t know anyone who died in 9/11, I didn’t vote for Bush, and I think the color-coded Terror Alerts have been a transparent and laughable scare tactic. I don’t think we’re UNDER RISK EVERY SECOND FROM THE TALIBAN HORDES, I just don’t have a problem with them checking people over. If it’s that horrible and offensive, if the grotesquely Orwellian implications are just too much to stomach, then take a fucking train.